22 Essential Works of Indigenous Cinema

Olivia B. Waxman

8 November 2024 at 12:09 pm·13-min read

Clockwise from top left: Fancy Dance (2023); Smoke Signals (1998); The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019); Boy (2010) Credit - Apple TV+; Miramax/Everett; Array Releasing/Everett; Paladin Films/Everett

Indigenous people have been telling stories for centuries longer than the film industry has existed. Yet historically, Hollywood has ignored them. Throughout the 20th century, American movies largely portrayed indigenous people in limited, often non-speaking roles, and mostly confined them to narratives about the 19th century period of frontier expansion. In 1998, Smoke Signals—the first film with a national theatrical release written, directed, co-produced, and acted by Native Americans—inspired a wave of indigenous filmmakers to produce films about their communities set in the present day. About 25 years later, more indigenous filmmakers than ever before are getting the greenlight to make TV shows and movies.

The current golden age of indigenous films is the result of activism, including the viral Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline from 2016 to 2017 and a push to make more films that represent the diversity of American life after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. This golden age has also been bolstered by the success of shows like Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, comedies that closely observed contemporary Native American life, that debuted in 2021.

TIME asked indigenous filmmakers and film historians from around the world about the essential films that reflect upon and give insight into indigenous life. The list includes thrillers, documentaries, horror movies, and love stories.

“So many films are getting made, and so many voices are being heard,” says Sterlin Harjo, a Seminole and Muscogee filmmaker and the creator of the Emmy-nominated Reservation Dogs. “I've seen short films recently that are going to blow people away. We finally have the freedom to be ourselves and tell our stories.”

The Exiles (1961)

Director: Kent Mackenzie

In 1952, the federal government created the Urban Relocation Program to enable Native Americans to move off reservations and into urban areas like Los Angeles, but it didn’t necessarily give Native Americans the resources they needed to make such a big move. The Exiles is about three Native American youths who struggle to find their way in Los Angeles, but also don’t feel like they fit in on their reservation anymore. The issue of relocation became more widely known when the film finally got its first theatrical release in 2008, says filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation). It’s a film that deals with the “complicated ideas of assimilation.”

Where to watch: Criterion, Amazon Prime

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993)

Director: Alanis Obomsawin

In 1990, there was an armed standoff between the Canadian military and indigenous protesters over plans to build a golf course on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec. Filmmakers went behind the barricades to profile the people fighting for the indigenous people, the Quebec police, and the Canadian army. In the end, the Canadian government took over the land to prevent further private development. It led to a 1991 government commission on improving relationships with indigenous communities. “It forced Canada to start taking indigenous concerns seriously,” says Karrmen Crey, (Stó:lō, Cheam First Nation), an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. At the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival, Kanehsatake became the first documentary to win the award for best Canadian feature.

Where to watch: National Film Board of Canada’s website

Smoke Signals (1998)

Director: Chris Eyre

The first film written, directed, co-produced and acted by Native American people to get a national theatrical release has a somber premise, focusing on two men from the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation in Idaho who are road-tripping to Phoenix to retrieve the ashes of a father figure who has passed away. But it tells the story by cracking a lot of jokes along the way. Smoke Signals is a buddy comedy featuring contemporary Native Americans playing basketball and dressed in blue jeans and t-shirts. “Showing that Native people are funny is a very significant contribution to Native representation,” says Jacob Floyd (Muscogee [Creek]/Cherokee), an assistant professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Fandango, Google Play

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Director: Zacharias Kunuk

The film is in the Inuktitut language, and the cast is all from the Inuit community in Igloolik, Nunavut, in the Canadian arctic. At the center is a complicated polygamous love story. Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq), also known as Fast Runner, takes a wife, Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), and a second wife, Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk). Drama ensues when Puja is caught making love to Atanarjuat’s brother Amaqjuaq (Pakak Innuksuk). The winner of the 2001 Caméra D’Or award for best debut feature at the Cannes Film Festival, it showed that a film in an indigenous language could have broad appeal. “It put indigenous filmmaking on the map,” says Joanna Hearne, a scholar of indigenous films and professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Four Sheets to the Wind (2007)

Director: Sterlin Harjo

Harjo’s debut film raises awareness about the high rates of suicide on reservations. The film starts out with Cufe (Cody Lightning) mourning his father, as a friend recalls how his father heeded a tornado warning by dancing and singing in his front yard—and the tornado never came. Cufe leaves his reservation in the hopes of starting over in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his sister Miri (Tamara Podemski) lives. He ends up hitting it off with her neighbor Francie (Laura Bailey), and sparks fly.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Sling, Tubi

Older Than America (2008)

Director: Georgina Lightning

Between 1819 and 1969, thousands of Native American children were abducted from their communities and sent to more than 400 government-funded, church-run residential boarding schools. Students endured physical abuse, and were not allowed to speak their Native languages. Filmed around the Fond du Lac reservation in Minnesota, the drama focuses on the lasting effects of the abusive residential boarding schools on one Native American family. Bradley Cooper plays a geologist who helps Native Americans preserve their past.

Where to watch: AMC+

Reel Injun (2009)

Director: Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, Jeremiah Hayes

The documentary is the definitive overview of depictions of Native Americans in 20th century Hollywood films and how these movies perpetuated negative myths about Native Americans. The directors road-trip to sites of significance to Native American tribes, and in one painful scene, the camera films grade-school students at the Crow Agency as they watch the scenes of Indians being slaughtered in Little Big Man. Diamond interviews Clint Eastwood about evolution of Native Americans in Westerns and as well as various indigenous activists, filmmakers, and Navajo elders who worked as extras.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Tubi

Samson & Delilah (2009)

Director: Warwick Thornton

Samson & Delilah stands out for the way it tells a love story with almost no dialogue. Samson and Delilah are teenagers who met in an aboriginal community in the Central Australian desert and are attempting to start a new life in a city. Samson is dealing with a huffing addiction while Delilah tries to sell her paintings to get by. To Harjo, it’s a film about “the strength of love in a really, really, really dark situation” and how aboriginal people who endure obstacles like addiction and homelessness manage to “sustain their love and their beauty.”

Where to watch: IndiePix Unlimited

Boy (2010)

Director: Taika Waititi

This coming of age story filmed in a Maori village in New Zealand centers around a Michael Jackson-obsessed boy (James Rolleston)—who simply goes by “Boy”—reuniting with his father Alamein (Taika Waititi), who left their home years ago. The father mainly came back to look for a stash of money he hid, and the film follows the guys as they get to know each other after years apart.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Fandango

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013)

Director: Jeff Barnaby

Inspired by the true stories of children who were kidnapped from their communities and forced to attend North American boarding schools, this story focuses on an indigenous teenager who is seized from her reservation and sent away to an abusive Canadian boarding school. Her parents, who suffer from drug and alcohol abuse from their own traumatizing experiences at the school, had paid off an agent, but the money was stolen.

Where to watch: Fandango, Fandor, Google Play, Tubi

Drunktown’s Finest (2014)

Director: Sydney Freeland

The title is a reference to an ABC 20/20 episode that referred to Freeland’s hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, as Drunktown USA because of its alcohol epidemic. Set on the Navajo reservation, it focuses on three characters whose lives intersect in surprising ways. A father-to-be who goes by “Sick Boy” (Jeremiah Bitsui) finds solace in drinking, which threatens to jeopardize his job in the military. Adopted by white parents, Nizhoni (Morningstar Angeline) is yearning to learn more about her birth family and culture. And Felixia (Carmen Moore) is a transgender woman who makes a living engaging in prostitution and is auditioning to be a model for a calendar. It’s a rare example of a film directed by an openly transgender indigenous filmmaker and features an openly queer indigenous main character.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Fandango, Google Play, YouTube

Mekko (2015)

Director: Sterlin Harjo

In this drama, Mekko (Rod Rondeaux) is living on the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, after serving a prison sentence for killing his cousin in a drunken bar brawl. Creek tribe chiefs won’t forgive him for the killing, so he befriends a group of vagrants who call themselves “street chiefs.” One street chief kills another homeless man, and Mekko is haunted by visions of his own death. The film is about how he tries to survive.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Roku, Tubi

Sami Blood (2016)

Director: Amanda Kernell

The film is inspired by Scandinavia’s indigenous Sami people and examines the discrimination that they endured in the 1930s. The film opens with an elderly woman Christina (Maj-Doris Rimpi) who travels from the city to her hometown of Lapland to attend her sister’s funeral and disparages the Sami culture the whole time. In fact, she grew up in a Sami household, and the film flashes back to her fourteen-year-old self, born Elle-Marja (Lene Cecilia Sparrok), who grew up herding reindeer. The film tracks Elle-Marja’s attempts to run away from an abusive boarding school for Sami children, where scientists measure their heads and take photos of the children naked.

Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Peacock, Viaplay, YouTube

Blood Quantum (2019)

Director: Jeff Barnaby

Blood quantum is a term that refers to how much Native American blood one has, and different tribal nations require different measurements for citizenship. In this horror film, the characters who are indigenous fare better in a zombie invasion than white people do. Floyd says Blood Quantum “wasn’t the first Indigenous horror or even the first zombie movie, but it was the one that broke through and brought attention to Indigenous horror.”

Where to watch: AMC+

N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear (2019)

Director: Jeffrey Palmer

The documentary is a biography of one of the most influential Native American writers of all time, N. Scott Momaday—the first Native American winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn. That was the same year that Native American protesters took over Alcatraz Island, so the Native American rights movement was especially visible at that time. The director Palmer, like Momaday, is a member of the Kiowa tribe, and the film profiles how his childhood on several reservations in New Mexico shaped his writing. As Floyd describes Momaday’s significance, “he made non-native people aware of what Native writers were doing [and]...indigenous people in general.”

Where to watch: Apple TV+, PBS

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019)

Directors: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn

Aila (Tailfeathers) is a well-off indigenous woman in Vancouver who meets on a bus a struggling pregnant woman named Rosie (Violet Nelson) who is also indigenous and fleeing an abusive boyfriend. While Aila isn’t ready to have kids—she’s featured getting fitted for an IUD contraceptive device— she instantly takes Rosie under her wing and escorts her to a safe house. The two women are from different worlds, but bond through their shared heritage.

Where to watch: Kanopy

Beans (2020)

Director: Tracey Deer

The plot is a dramatization of the director’s experience growing up during the 78-day standoff in Oka, Quebec, in 1990, over the building of a golf course on lands meaningful to the Mohawk community. In this coming-of-age story, middle schooler Tekehentahkhwa (Kiawentiio), nicknamed Beans, is applying to enroll at a predominantly white private school amid the turmoil. She has to deal with both immature Mohawk preteen bullies flinging insults and white mobs flinging rocks while she and her mom stand tall behind the barricades.

Where to watch: Hulu

Malni: Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore (2020)

Director: Sky Hopinka

This documentary explores the Native American experience in the Pacific northwest, featuring the Chinuk wawa language. As Adam Piron, director of The Sundance Institute Indigenous Program, explains the significance of the film, “Some of the work being made from indigenous folks filmmakers is very Hollywood, mainstream-facing…Sky's films are very much for an indigenous audience—where a film can just be a film. It doesn’t have to be in reaction to Westerns.”

Where to watch: Kanopy

Night Raiders (2021)

Director: Danis Goulet

A prime example of a sci-fi indigenous film, told in both the Cree language and English. The plotline of a mother trying to rescue her daughter from a government-run, militaristic institution “has many allusions to the historical boarding school experience,” says Renae Watchman (Diné and Tsalagi), a scholar of indigenous film and literature at McMaster University.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Fandango, Google Play, Hulu, Netflix, Pluto TV, Tubi

Frybread Face and Me (2023)

Director: Billy Luther

Parents send their young son Benny (Keir Tallman), who has grown up in San Diego, to live with his grandmother on the Navajo reservation for the summer. His cousin, nicknamed Frybread Face (Charley Hogan), shows him around and acts as a translator with the grandmother who does not speak English. In this charming coming-of-age story, Benny gets a crash course in rug weaving, sheep herding, bull riding, and even a driving lesson.

Where to watch: Netflix

Fancy Dance (2023)

Director: Erica Tremblay

Playing an indigenous woman named Jax, Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) becomes her niece Roki’s guardian in the wake of her sister’s disappearance. She tries to balance raising her niece on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma and driving around searching for her sister in the backcountry. As Jeffrey Palmer, associate professor of performing and media arts at Cornell University, (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma) explains, “thousands of people just disappear off of the planet and nobody talks about them…Fancy Dance highlights that particular issue in a really, really smart way.”