Reel Injun (2009 Documentary)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 2009, the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, from Waskaganish in northern Quebec, released Reel Injun, a documentary tracing how a century of Hollywood cinema had depicted Native peoples, and, just as pointedly, how little those depictions had to do with any actual nation. Working with co-directors Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes, Diamond gathered archival footage stretching from the silent era to contemporary releases and set it beside interviews with directors, actors and activists, among them the Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means, the Santee Dakota activist John Trudell, and Sacheen Littlefeather, of Apache and Yaqui descent, best known for declining an Academy Award on Marlon Brando's behalf in 1973 in protest of the film industry's treatment of Native Americans.

The film names its recurring inventions plainly: the noble savage, the drunken Indian, the Indian princess, and what Reel Injun calls the mystic warrior, a Hollywood invention that treated whole traditions of belief and ceremony as a costume for anyone to put on, rather than as the specific practice of a specific nation. Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals, appears among Diamond's interview subjects, one Native filmmaker's documented account of the pattern another Native filmmaker's own work had already tried to break.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Reel Injun premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009 and reached American audiences the following year on PBS's Independent Lens, broadcast November 2, 2010. Distributed by Domino Film, a Canadian production, it went on to win three Gemini Awards in 2010, for best multicultural program, best direction in a documentary program and best visual research, and it received a Peabody Award in 2011, one of American broadcasting's most selective honors, for excellence in electronic media. In 2021 the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures selected it for inclusion in its core exhibition, placing a Native made critique of Hollywood's own century of Indian pictures inside the institution most responsible for making them.

None of that recognition came from within the industry Reel Injun examines. It came from documentary juries, a public broadcaster, and a museum built to house film history rather than from the studios whose westerns and adventure pictures the film holds up for scrutiny. This atlas records that pattern as its own kind of evidence: a documented, awarded account of how Native American religion and identity were flattened into costume and caricature for most of a century, made and recognized largely outside the system that did the flattening.