Smoke Signals (1998 Film)

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

For most of film history, when Hollywood told a story set on a reservation, the people who actually lived there had no hand in writing, directing, or producing it. Smoke Signals broke that pattern in 1998. Sherman Alexie, a Spokane Indian raised on the Spokane Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, adapted his own 1993 short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, into a screenplay. Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne and Arapaho filmmaker, directed it, in his feature debut. The film follows Victor and Thomas, two young men from the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho, on a road trip to collect the ashes of Victor's estranged father, shot on location in Plummer, Worley, DeSmet and Tensed on the reservation itself and across Eastern Washington.

It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy, and it became, by the description Hollywood itself had never applied to a Native story before, the first feature film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians to reach commercial distribution. Twenty years later, on December 12, 2018, the Library of Congress named it to the National Film Registry, praising its witty, droll script and calling it a funny, unpretentious look at Native Americans in the nation's cinema and culture, an honor reserved for works judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant enough to preserve.

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.