Reel Injun explores the various stereotypes about Natives in film, from the noble savage to the drunken Indian.[3] It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on screen.[4] The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.[5]
The film was inspired, in part, by Diamond's own experiences as a child in Waskaganish, Quebec, where he and other Native children would play cowboys and Indians after local screenings of Westerns in their remote community. Diamond remembers that although the children were Indians, they all wanted to be cowboys.[6][7] When Diamond was older, he would be questioned by non-Native people about whether his people lived in teepees and rode horses, causing him to realize that their preconceptions about Native people were also derived from movies.[3]
In the United States, the film premiered at the SXSW festival in March 2009.[10] It aired on November 2, 2010 on the PBS series Independent Lens.[5] It was screened at the Museum of Modern Art from June 14 to 20, 2010.[11]
Also featuring Angela Aleiss (author/film historian), Effie and James Atene (Navajo elders who were extras in John Ford films), Andre Dudemaine (Innu film historian), David Kiehn (silent film historian), Zacharias Kunuk, Richard Lamotte ("one of Hollywood's biggest costume designers"), Melinda Micco (Seminole film historian), Robbie Robertson (Mohawk recording artist), Rod Rondeaux (Crow stuntman), Wes Studi (Cherokee actor), and Jesse Wente (Ojibwe film critic).
The documentary mentions the following movies as being part of the "Renaissance of Native cinema"—that is, movies by Native peoples about Native experiences, that "portray Native people as human beings" and depict Native cultures in an authentic way:
Also worth mentioning is a silent film from 1930, The Silent Enemy (a reference to starvation), which this documentary calls "one of the most authentic films of its time, featuring real Native actors" (discussed 19 minutes into this documentary). In this documentary, silent film historian David Kiehn explains that, during the era of silent films, there was a great number of "Native American people directing and acting in films, and they were bringing their viewpoints to the table too. And those were being listened to". But then, according to this documentary, "[I]n the 1930s, [the Hollywood portrayal of] the Indian was transformed into a brutal savage". Film historian Angela Aleiss explains that "[T]here were a number of films that came out in the early 1930s that followed in the steps of The Silent Enemy, and the Indians were the stars of these movies, but... they just bombed at the box office. Americans [were] not that interested in them". The documentary asserts that "America, struggling through the Great Depression, [needed] a new brand of hero". Movies like Stagecoach, which pitted cowboys against Indians and portrayed Native Americans as "vicious and bloodthirsty", became the Hollywood image of Indians until the 1970s.
In addition to members of the cast (mentioned above), this documentary mentions the following Native actors and performers who helped to change the way Native peoples are portrayed:
Graham Greene—an Oneida actor who played "Kicking Bird" in Dances With Wolves (1990) and "Mogie Yellow Lodge" in Skins (2002), as well as other roles in many other films
Iron Eyes Cody—an Italian-American actor cast as Native American in many films and was the iconic American Indian shedding a tear in the famous "Keep America Beautiful" anti-litter public service advertisement on television in the late 1960s and 1970s.
