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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
  2. Research Guides
  3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
  4. Film Studies
  5. Native American & Indigenous peoples diasporas

Film Studies

This guide is an introduction to the resources for Film Studies at Dartmouth. If you are interested in Television, see the separate research guide for Television.
  • Introduction
  • Basic information on film
  • Finding a specific film title
  • Streaming film services
    • Readings on streaming video
  • National cinemas This link opens in a new window
  • Course guides for Film & Media Studies
  • Starting your research ...
  • Researching early films
  • Film history through the decades
    • 1960's film history
    • 1970's film history
  • Books about film
  • Film reviews
  • Journals & magazines about film
  • Film theory
    • Feminist film theory
    • Auteur theory
  • Film criticism
    • Feminist film criticism
  • Box office information
  • Film audiences
  • Mass media Industry
  • Primary sources for historical film research
    • Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections
    • Congressional Hearings & Communism
    • Film Daily
    • Herrick Library Digital Collections
    • Hollywood and the Production Code
    • Media History Digital Library
    • Moving Picture World
  • Themes
  • Acting
  • Racial & ethnic representation on film
    • African American diaspora
    • Asian American diaspora
    • Hispanic American diaspora
    • Native American & Indigenous peoples diasporas
    • Examples on film
  • LGBTQIA+
    • Examples on film
  • Women on/in/creating Film
    • Examples on film
  • Film genres This link opens in a new window
  • Film & society
  • Screenwriting
  • Film adaptations
    • Shakespeare on film
    • Television to Film adaptations
  • Color in film
  • Film music
  • Film festivals
    • A short list of film festivals
  • Film awards
  • Disney
  • Hitchcock
  • Internet resources
  • Future of Media
  • Back to Film & Media
  • Scholarly communication This link opens in a new window
  • Video Help

In the library's collections

Suggested subject headings for searching the online catalog include:

  • indians in motion pictures
    Call number range is PN 1995.9 .I48 on Baker Level 4.
  • indigenous peoples in motion pictures
    Call number range is PN 1995.9 .I49 on Baker Level 4.

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover ArtCelluloid Indians: Native Americans and film by Neva Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .I48 K56 1999
    ISBN: 9780803277908
    Native American characters have been the most malleable of metaphors for filmmakers. The likeable Doc of Stagecoach (1939) had audiences on the edge of their seats with dire warnings about that old butcher, Geronimo. Old Lodgeskins of Little Big Man (1970) had viewers crying out against the demise of the noble, wise chief and his kind and simple people. In 1995 Disney created a beautiful, peace-loving ecologist and called her Pocahontas. Only occasionally have Native Americans been portrayed as complex, modern characters in films like Smoke Signals. ...
  • Cover ArtHollywood's Indian: the portrayal of the Native American in film by Peter C. Rollins; John E. O'Connor, eds.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .I48 H66 2003
    ISBN: 9780813190778
    Publication Date: Expanded ed.
    Offering both in-depth analyses of specific films and overviews of the industry's output, Hollywood's Indian provides insightful characterizations of the depiction of the Native Americans in film. This updated edition includes a new chapter on Smoke Signals, the groundbreaking independent film written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. ...
  • Cover ArtNative Americans in the movies: portrayals from silent films to the present by Michael Hilger
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781442240018
    Since the early days of the silent era, Native Americans have been captured on film, often in unflattering ways. Over the decades, some filmmakers have tried to portray the Native American on screen with more balanced interpretations--to varying degrees of success. More recent films such as The New World, Flags of Our Fathers, and Frozen River have offered depictions of both historical and contemporary Native Americans, providing viewers with a range of representations. In Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present, Michael Hilger surveys more than a century of cinema. ...
  • Cover ArtNative apparitions: critical perspectives on Hollywood's Indians by Steve Pavlik; M. Elise Marubbio; Tom Holm, eds.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .I48 N45 2017
    ISBN: 9780816535477
    In Cherokee, the term for motion picture is a-da-yv-la-ti or a-da-yu-la-ti, meaning "something that appears." In essence, motion pictures are machine-produced apparitions. While the Cherokee language recognizes that movies are not reality, Western audiences may on some level assume that film portrayals offer sincere depictions of imagined possibilities, creating a logic where what is projected must in part be true, stereotype or not. Native Apparitions offers a critical intervention and response to Hollywood's representations of Native peoples in film, from historical works by director John Ford to more contemporary works, such as Apocalypto and Avatar. But more than a critique of stereotypes, this book is a timely call for scholarly activism engaged in Indigenous media sovereignty. ...

Selected book title(s)

  • Cover artEngaged resistance: American Indian art, literature, and film from Alcatraz to the NMAI by Dean Rader
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry E 98 .A73 R23 2011
    ISBN: 9780292726963
    From Sherman Alexie's films to the poetry and fiction of Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko to the paintings of Jaune Quick-To-See Smith and the sculpture of Edgar Heap of Birds, Native American movies, literature, and art have become increasingly influential, garnering critical praise and enjoying mainstream popularity. Recognizing that the time has come for a critical assessment of this exceptional artistic output and its significance to American Indian and American issues, Dean Rader offers the first interdisciplinary examination of how American Indian artists, filmmakers, and writers tell their own stories. Beginning with rarely seen photographs, documents, and paintings from the Alcatraz Occupation in 1969 and closing with an innovative reading of the National Museum of the American Indian, Rader initiates a conversation about how Native Americans have turned to artistic expression as a means of articulating cultural sovereignty, autonomy, and survival. ...
  • Cover ArtPicturing Indians: Native Americans in film, 1941-1960 by Liza Black
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780803296800
    Standing at the intersection of Native history, labor, and representation, Picturing Indians presents a vivid portrait of the complicated experiences of Native actors on the sets of mid-century Hollywood Westerns. This behind-the-scenes look at costuming, makeup, contract negotiations, and union disparities uncovers an all-too-familiar narrative of racism and further complicates filmmakers’ choices to follow mainstream representations of “Indianness.” ...
  • Cover artReservation reelism: redfacing, visual sovereignty, and representations of Native Americans in film by Michelle H. Raheja
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .I48 R34 2010
    ISBN: 9780803211261
    In this deeply engaging account Michelle H. Raheja offers the first book-length study of the Indigenous actors, directors, and spectators who helped shape Hollywood's representation of Indigenous peoples. Since the era of silent films, Hollywood movies and visual culture generally have provided the primary representational field on which Indigenous images have been displayed to non-Native audiences. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of Indigenous peoples as, for example, a dying race or as inherently unable or unwilling to adapt to change. However, films with Indigenous plots and subplots also signify at least some degree of Native presence in a culture that largely defines Native peoples as absent or separate. ...
  • Cover ArtSmoke Signals: Native cinema rising by Joanna Hearne
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1997 .S6115 H43 2012
    ISBN: 9780803219274
    Smoke Signals is a historical milestone in Native American film-making. Released in 1998 and based on a short-story collection by Sherman Alexie, it was the first wide-release feature film written, directed, coproduced, and acted by Native Americans. The most popular Native American film of all time, Smoke Signals is also an innovative work of cinematic storytelling that demands sustained critical attention in its own right. ...
  • Cover artStarring Red Wing! the incredible career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the first Native American film star by Linda M. Waggoner
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9781496215598
    The epic biography Starring Red Wing! brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as "Princess Red Wing," St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States. Today St. Cyr is known for her portrayal of Naturich in Cecile B. DeMille's The Squaw Man (1914); although DeMille claimed to have "discovered the little Indian girl," the viewing public had already long adored her as a petite, daredevil Indian heroine. ...

Other library resource(s)

  • Images of Indians by Phil Lucas & Robert Hagopian
    Call Number: Jones Media Video tape #5522 parts 1-5
    A series of films which examines the Indian stereotype portrayed in movies and questions what the effect this Hollywood image has been on Indians' own self-image.
  • Resource logoIndigenous media from Oxford Bibliographies Online
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    Publication Date: Pamela Wilson, Joanna Hearne, Amalia Córdova, Sabra Thorner
    Indigenous media may be defined as forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication, including cultural preservation, cultural and artistic expression, political self-determination, and cultural sovereignty. Indigenous media overlap with, and are on a spectrum with, other types of minority-produced media, and quite often they share a kinship regarding many philosophical and political motivations. Indigenous media studies allow us access to the micro-processes of what Roland Robertson has famously called “glocalization”—in this case, the interpenetration of global media technologies with hyperlocal needs, creatively adapted to work within and sustain the local culture rather than to replace it or homogenize it, as some globalization theorists have long feared. ...
  • Resource logoNative Americans from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Pamela Wilson
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    What role have fictionalized American “Indians”—and real, living, breathing Native Americans—played in America’s story about itself? Bataille 2001 (cited under Early, Colonial, and Exhibition Images of American Indians) notes that Native Americans have been mythologized by anthropologists, the tourist industry, and popular culture, which have created the “Indian that never was.”
  • Movie poster artReel injun by Neil Diamond
    • DVD
    Call Number: Jones Media DVD #11118
    Travelling through the heartland of America, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond examines how the myth of the movie "Injun" has influenced the world's understanding - and misunderstanding - of Natives. With clips from hundreds of classic and recent films, and candid interviews with celebrated Native and non-Native directors, writers, actors and activists, including Clint Eastwood, Robbie Robertson, Sacheen Littlefeather, John Trudell, Charlie Hill and Russell Means, Reel Injun traces the evolution of cinema's depiction of Native people from the silent film era to the present day.

Internet resource(s)

  • Diverse Representation
    • Link
    Diverse Representation provides a comprehensive database of African-American agents, attorneys, managers and publicists working in the sports and entertainment industry throughout the country. Discussions surrounding diversity in the sports and entertainment industry need to be all-encompassing and include conversations about racial discrepancies when it comes to the representation of talent and professional athletes.
  • Hollywood Diversity Report from UCLA
    • Link
    The reports primarily examine the relationship between diversity and the bottom line in the entertainment industry.
  • The Untold Story of Wes Studi, an Overlooked Native American Icon from GQ
    • Link
    When Wes Studi broke through in Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, he was cast as a terrifying villain. But for many in the Native community, he was a hero channeling decades of righteous anger. Tommy Orange tells the story of an overlooked icon who forever changed the way Indigenous people are depicted onscreen. {Tommy Orange, 07/22/2021}
  • << Previous: Hispanic American diaspora
  • Next: Examples on film >>
  • Last Updated: Apr 25, 2025 12:36 PM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/filmstudies
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies
Tags: Arts, box office, festivals, FILM, film aesthetics, film color, film criticism, film music, film reviews, film studies, future of media, genres, LGBTQIA+, media industry, primary resources, queer cinema, representation in film, screenwriting, streaming film services, themes, women in film

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