This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Film scholar Joanna Hearne devoted a full length study, Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012 as part of its Indigenous Films series, to what this one film changed. Built partly on her own interviews with Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre, Hearne's book argues that Smoke Signals functions as a form of Indigenous activism, using the very tools of mainstream American popular culture, road movie structure, buddy comedy, flashback, to tell a story that refuses the old Hollywood shorthand. Where decades of Westerns had relied on the vanishing Indian and the silent, stoic Indian to stand in for entire nations, Alexie and Eyre gave their characters humor, grief, sarcasm and interiority, drawn from a specific reservation rather than from a generic backlot idea of what a reservation was supposed to look like.
That specificity is the point this atlas most wants recorded. Smoke Signals never claims to speak for Native American religion as a whole, and it should not be read that way. It speaks for a story rooted in the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, written by a Spokane author and directed by a Cheyenne and Arapaho filmmaker, each naming their own nation rather than standing in for a folded, undifferentiated idea of Native identity that a century of film had already done enough damage with.