“I always say [The Fastest Runner] is the most Indian movie ever made. It’s much more Indian than Smoke Signals.“
Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals
“We picked up a camera and started recording our own history. Stories that we used to hear when we were children. What we really belive and why we are here.”
Zacharias Kunuk, director The Fast Runner (Atanrjunt)
Nanook of the North is one of oldest & most popular films showing indigenous people. The documentary released in 1922 was produced, directed and written by Robert J. Flaherty and was shot in the Canadian Arctic. Nanook and his family are Inuit (in the United States they would be called Eskimo). The movie is available through The Criterion Collection.
In the documentary Reel Injun, it was basically stated that American Indians in particular were a part of early film history—Thomas Edison filmed Indians. But as the Great Depression set-in films with Indians did not find a wild audience, until the narrative that began to appear in the movies was the Indian as savage—the bad guys as America expanded westward. It wasn’t until the Billy Jack character in Born Losers (1967)—featuring the character Billy Jack—and Little Big Man (1970 (and starring Dustin Hoffman and Chief Dan George) that the American Indian began to find their positive voice again in cinema.
In 1989 there was an indie film called Powwow Highway that Roger Ebert called “Unforgettable” followed the next year by the success with Dances with Wolves in 1990 giving a kickstart to a wave of films featuring not only American Indians—but indeginous groups around the world. And film not only made about Native Indians but by Native Indians.
Thunderheart (1992)
Once We Where Warriors (1994)
Wagons East (1994)
Legends of the Fall (1994)
Dead Man (1995)
Dance Me Outside (1995)
Smoke Signals (1998)
Grey Owl (1999)
Whale Rider (2002)
Skins (2002)
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Perhaps the most celebrated film in this new era is Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) winner of the Camera d’or award for Best First Feature at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in 2001 and was Canada’s top grossing film in 2002. The script was written by Paul Apak Angilirq, Norman Cohn, Zacarias Kunuk, Heve Paniaq, and Pauloose Qulitalik.
“The movies made in the north [Arctic] are incredibly special. They are progress. There’s finally an aboriginal cinema that isn’t someone elses. The gaze is ours. But at the same time you have a whole aboriginal cinematic movement springing up all over the world, where you have New Zealand filmmakers, filmmakers in Australia, and filmmakers in North America and South America, making truly aboriginal movies.”
Jesse Wente
Ojibway Film Critic
“You don’t have to go out and make great representatives of native people, we’re not asking for that. We’re not asking to be nobles, or righteous, or good all the time—we’re asking to be human.”
Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals
P.S. According to Wikipedia “the Arctic region includes parts of Canada, Russia, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the United States (Alaska), Sweden, Finland, and Iceland.” Think cold and remote. The population of Point Barrow, Alaska (the northernmost point in the USA) is just over 4,000, and the average winter climate is right around -20 degrees. (And I thought Iowa was a fairly remote with long cold winters when I moved here in 2003. It’s all relative I guess.)