PLANET MAGAZINE.
The past decade has seen a rise in films with indigenous themes, made by indigenous filmmakers. After being portrayed – or excluded – by whites since the birth of film, native filmmakers now reclaim the right to tell their own stories from their own perspective.
American director Chris Eyre (Smoke Signals, Skins) once said that film is one of the worst things that ever happened to Native Americans. For almost a century, Hollywood movies portrayed American Indians as hostile savages, ”the enemy”. From the 1960s, the image of ”the wild Indian” was occasionally replaced by romanticized depictions of the noble and stoic Native. Slightly more positive, no less harmful.
These stereotypes made their way into many people’s views on Native Americans and the film industry has played a sizable part in reproducing, mostly negative, prejudice about American Indians.
While Dances with Wolves (1990) was made with the ambition to right the wrongs of the past and offer a more positive image of Native Americans, Kevin Costner’s Academy Award-winning epic was just another movie made by white filmmakers, with Native Americans still portrayed through the eyes of a white hero. The stereotypes were still the same: the savage and the noble Indian.
In Australia, the Aborigines were long the ”Indians” of the outback westerns and added an exotic element to white stories about white characters. Other indigenous peoples, such as the New Zealand Maori and the Canadian Inuits, were usually left out of movies altogether, as if they did not even exist.
Until recently, white filmmakers possessed the power and opportunity to define – or exclude – indigenous peoples in film, leaving Native stories to be told from a white perspective – and one that has been comfortable for white society. In the Australian Aboriginal film Beneath Clouds (2002), Vaughn tells Lena not to believe everything she reads because ”it’s all written by whitefellas”. The same goes for film. Indigenous filmmakers have had scarce opportunities to put their stories on the big screen and only 15 years ago, a major release indigenous film seemed unlikely.
The situation for indigenous communities around the world received international attention when the United Nations General Assembly declared 1993 the International Year for Indigenous Peoples, and later 1995–2004 the International Decade for Indigenous Peoples. In the early 1990s, countries like Canada and New Zealand passed legislation to give indigenous populations land rights and numerous land claims were settled. As these issues came into focus, a general interest in the culture, history and lives of native peoples grew among the non-indigenous. So did the desire to hear their stories.
Around the same time, efforts were made to encourage native filmmakers. An Aboriginal Branch was formed within the Australian Film Commission, Native American filmmakers united in various organizations, the Sundance Film Festival established a Native American program category and a handful of indigenous film festivals were born. A major indigenous film did not seem so unlikely anymore.
In 1994, the Maori film Once Were Warriors was voted Best Film at festivals around the world, the Native American movie Smoke Signals won the Filmmaker’s Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, the Inuit film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner won the 2001 Camera d’Or in Cannes, the Aboriginal Rabbit-proof Fence was the most successful Australian film in 2002 and in 2004 the Maori film Whale Rider was nominated for an Oscar.
Today, indigenous communities – especially in North America, Australia and New Zealand – reclaim the opportunity to tell their own stories and challenge the white perspective on their culture and their past. Although the native theme is not a new one, the indigenous perspective certainly is.
The Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre’s debut, Smoke Signals (1998), was the first feature film ever written, directed, acted and produced exclusively by Native Americans. It was also one of the first films to tell a story about indigenous Americans today, about life ”on the rez”. Thomas and Victor live on the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho and travel to Arizona, where Victor’s father just died. Throughout the film, Eyre plays with stereotypes and employ charm and humor to provide a fresh depiction of Native American life.
Indigenous stories told from a native perspective inevitably raise social and political issues, and film holds the capacity be a powerful tool for social change. This was evident when Rabbit-proof Fence (2002) put the Aboriginal issue on the table in Australia a few years ago.
The film tells the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who, under the racist White Australia policy in the 1920s, were abducted from their families and placed in a mission to assimilate to white culture. It received substantial media attention and the debate it generated went all the way to the Australian government. The powerful story made Rabbit-proof Fence the first film with an Aboriginal theme to reach a wide audience in Australia.
Aboriginal film has done particularly well in the past few years. One of the most talked-about Australian filmmakers is the upcoming Aboriginal director Ivan Sen. His feature debut Beneath Clouds (2002) tells the story of two young Aborigines and their search for identity. Vaughn and Lena end up on the road to Sydney together and along the way they try to figure out where they belong. They are both mixed, with one Aboriginal and one European parent, leaving them not quite dark enough to be considered indigenous and not fair enough to be seen as European.
The search for identity and belonging is a recurrent theme in indigenous film, not only on an individual level. The pressures of modern society on traditional culture is visible especially in Maori film. In Whale Rider (2003) a small Maori community is grappling to find their place in modern New Zealand, to find balance between the old ways and the new. It is also the story of a young girl and her struggle to be accepted by her grandfather. Audiences all over the world were moved by the story and Whale Rider was the biggest Maori success since the first Maori feature Once Were Warriors in 1994.
Apart from the great classic Nanook of the North (1922), Canadian Inuits have been more or less invisible in film. When Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner came out in 2000, it was the first feature film ever made in the Inuit language, by Inuit people. The dramatic story about love and revenge was based on a traditional Inuit tale that has been passed down by elders for generations. Film is increasingly considered an important tool to preserve traditional indigenous stories and share them with the world. After millenia of oral storytelling, there are a plenty of stories out there, waiting to be told again.
The indigenous film industry is still young, but with filmmaking technology becoming increasingly accessible, more native filmmakers get the opportunity to put out their work. The recent success of indigenous films from Western countries could also pave the way for native filmmakers from other parts of the world. Indigenous filmmaking is now on the rise in places such as the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Palestine and Brazil. Through these films, audiences are presented with the opportunity to learn about the past and the present from an indigenous point of view, which will likely challenge the way native people are perceived around the world. Major release indigenous films are still relatively few and far between, but at least not all stories are told by whitefellas now.
Publicerad i Planet Magazine (USA).