10 great films about Indigenous American and First Nations experience

It’s generally agreed that the first people to populate North America migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia into Alaska. Mostly nomadic, these ancestral Indigenous Americans and First Nations people would move throughout this New World by following food sources, creating tribes and establishing communities. 

Numbering up to 18 million by some estimates, they lived relatively peacefully until 1492 and the arrival of Christopher Columbus. This would mark the beginning of a sustained colonialist invasion, resulting in the enslavement, assault and slaughter of countless Indigenous peoples across the entire landmass. Those that survived were subject to the removal of their land rights, forced to live on reservations, and their children placed in residential schools. To reinforce these colonialist actions, Indigenous people were consistently negatively stereotyped, initially in news reports and popular literature and then in film, particularly in the hugely popular western genre, which would cement the image of the ‘savage Indian’ in the popular consciousness.

As Indigenous cultural resistance to this mode of treatment and representation has grown from the 1960s period of self-determination, cinema has begun to steadily address history and its own treatment of Indigenous people. From revealing revisionist westerns, such as Broken Arrow (1950), and dramatisations of real-world events, such as Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), to horror films and even sci-fi, Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers and directors are actively addressing and questioning colonist history, revealing the truth of how the West was really won and, more importantly, giving Indigenous Americans and First Nations people a voice to respond with and an agency to act against. 

Director: Delmer Daves

After decades of genre misrepresentation, Broken Arrow was one of the first westerns to attempt a realistic and sympathetic depiction of Indigenous Americans and their culture, to the extent that the film won a Golden Globe for ‘best film promoting international understanding’. Based on the real experiences of US Army scout and Indian agent Tom Jeffords and Apache chief Cochise, the film chronicles the uneven path to a successful peace treaty between certain Apache tribes and the US government.

Daves presents Cochise (Jeff Chandler) and Jeffords (James Stewart) as equals: men of honour and integrity, both desiring peace and an end to violence. The Americans and Apaches are shown to be equally ruthless and brutal, considerate and tolerant in historically grounded events. The romance between Jeffords and Apache girl Sonseeahray (Debra Paget) may be fictional, but that too allows for the dramatisation of ceremonial traditions, rites and behaviours, deepening the film’s rich and relatively realistic representation of Indigenous cultures. 

Director: John Ford

Cheyenne Autumn was the last western to be directed by one of the genre’s most acclaimed auteurs, John Ford, who presented the film as an apology for the poor historic treatment and cinematic representation of Indigenous Americans. Based on the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878 to 1879, the film charts the attempted journey of more than 300 Cheyenne from their reservation in Oklahoma to their ancestral land in Wyoming in a direct, defiant act against government orders. As the exodus begins, US Army troops, led by Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark), are sent to stop them. 

Ford presents Archer as sympathetic to the Indigenous people, willing to risk his career in order to save them while allowing Ford the opportunity to sustain his preoccupation and respect for those few good men in the cavalry. Deliberately paced, the film offers a clear account of the disregard and treatment of Indigenous peoples, proposing a greater need for unity and community now more than ever. 

Director: Jonathan Wacks

Featuring a cast of Indigenous performers (including Wes Studi, Graham Greene and Gary Farmer), filmed on contemporary reservations and based on David Seals’ novel of the same name, Powwow Highway is an Indigenous reworking of the road/buddy movie. Cheyenne activist Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez) journeys from the Northern Cheyenne reservation to Santa Fe, New Mexico to bail his sister out of jail. Partnering with a childhood friend, Philbert Bono (Farmer), the pair begin a journey of adventure and discovery. 

Bow and Bono are a mismatched pair, with Bow looking to the future through his angry activism (particularly preventing a strip-mining contract on Indigenous land) and contributions to sustaining his tribe, while Bono looks back, gathering ‘good medicine’ and tokens for the spirits. As the journey continues, a mutual respect for both perspectives on Indigenous life emerges between them, with the men attending a powwow, visiting sacred sites and singing to their ancestors, all culminating in the humanity of the past dissipating some of the anger of the present.

Director: Walter Hill

An accurate biographical account through film, particularly in relation to known Indigenous American figures, is always going to be complex, due to the sheer diversity of accounts but also, more importantly, whose perspective those accounts are written from. Despite this, in Walter Hill’s Geronimo: An American Legend, writers John Milius and Larry Gross work hard to create an ambitious recounting of the later life of famed Apache leader Geronimo, which involves his aggressive resistance to US Army and government policy, all leading up to his eventual surrender. The results are unexpectedly nuanced biography, imbued with a commentary on how the West was won through a form of cultural genocide.

Oscar-winning Indigenous American actor Wes Studi plays Geronimo with consideration and dignity, deftly balancing Geronimo’s strategic insight and skill with fierce action. Studi’s consummate performance presents Geronimo as a fighter and a killer but also a man driven to such actions in order to protect what little is left of his people, their land and culture as, little by little, more and more of it is violently taken away. 

Director: Chris Eyre

Like Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals uses the road trip as a means to explore the friendship between two young men from the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. Victor’s (Adam Beach) father, Arnold (Gary Farmer), rescues Thomas (Evan Adams) from a house fire which kills his parents. As he grows up, Thomas idolises Arnold while Victor experiences domestic abuse and eventual abandonment through Arnold’s alcoholism. When Arnold dies, the pair travel to Phoenix to retrieve his ashes. 

Their journey is, unsurprisingly, one of self-discovery, of connecting with the past but also experiencing past prejudices sustained into the present. Arnold’s ghost lingers through flashbacks, a man both loving and violent, filled with pride but also a barely repressed anger and guilt for the truth about the fire. Widely recognised as being one of the first productions to be written, directed and produced by Indigenous Americans as well as featuring an Indigenous cast and location filming, in 2018 Signals was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry for its cultural significance. 

Director: Zacharias Kunuk

Directed by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a retelling of an Inuit legend and the first film to be written and performed entirely in Inuit. An evil spirit spreads malicious intent among a tribe of nomadic Inuit, leading to jealousy, violence, vengeance and eventually healing as Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) attempts to escape the men who murdered his brother.

Writer Paul Apak Angilirq developed the script over five years by interviewing tribal elders in relation to their understanding of the legend, then combined these various elements into one unified narrative. Dialogue, customs and costumes were also based on accounts from the elders as well as the journals of European explorers. Upon release, the film was praised for its writing, direction and portrayal of Inuit life, making it a significant critical and commercial success at the box office. It also won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.

Director: Jeff Barnaby

Written and directed by Mi’kmaq/Canadian Jeff Barnaby, Blood Quantum deftly relocates the narratives and political dimensions of George A. Romero’s Dead trilogy on to the reservation. A viral outbreak transforms white Americans into ravaging zombies while the Indigenous people, due to their ancestral blood, remain immune. The reservation becomes a safe haven in a national pandemic, but its security and integrity is soon threatened by white Americans who, either dead or alive, once again seek to invade and take the land back as their own. 

Barnaby’s film replays colonist history through the zombie apocalypse, with past events, such as the possibility of infected blankets being brought on to the ‘rez’, merging with more recent events, particularly the violent police raid on Barnaby’s childhood reservation, Restigouche. But, amid the brutality of reservation life – and the gore-soaked, flesh-eating moments – are characters who represent heritage and hope, offering solutions to generational trauma through Indigenous voice and agency.   

Created by Taika Waititi and Indigenous American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, Reservation Dogs is a watershed moment in streamed drama as it’s the first production of its kind to be made by Indigenous American writers and directors with an almost entirely Indigenous American cast and crew. Set in a rundown town in the Muscogee Nation, the series explores the lives of four Indigenous teenagers as they navigate life growing up on the reservation and their struggle to find a place in a community they desperately want to leave. 

Alongside the recollections of their elders and advice from spirit guides, the colonial past, cultural traditions and folklore are subtly woven into the lives of the teenagers, providing them with guidance and security when their lives are at their most turbulent. Heritage guides them and their parents through generational trauma and recent family deaths, allowing them to embrace what has happened, and more importantly what they can now become. It’s an honest, humorous and often poignant portrait of contemporary life on the rez. 

Director: Nyla Innuksuk

The feature debut of Inuit co-writer and director Nyla Innuksuk is a coming-of-age story for a group of four Indigenous teenage girls, all wrapped up in a sci-fi horror narrative. After an attack by a mutated polar bear, the girls slowly realise their isolated Arctic hamlet of Pangnirtung, Nunavut is becoming ground zero for an alien invasion. With no adults to help them, the girls take it upon themselves to defend their community and repel the threat.

To cast the film, Innuksuk ran acting workshops in Nunavut, finding her four protagonists from among the untrained Indigenous locals and working alongside them to develop the characters and script. These authentic performances and voices address the idea of the Final Girl(s), while the film’s distinctive use of practical effects recalls the gruesome horror and intense claustrophobia of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). It all combines to demonstrate what it really means to fight for your community and heritage.   

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

The seventh instalment in the Predator franchise, Prey marks a significant shift in direction for the series by relocating it to a historical setting: the Northern Great Plains in 1719. A young Comanche, Naru (Amber Midthunder), strives to prove herself a hunter by attempting to protect her tribe from a marauding lion, but inadvertently encounters the titular extraterrestrial.

Featuring a largely Indigenous American cast and produced by Jhane Myers (Comanche/Blackfeet) with Indigenous consultant Professor Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche), Prey makes significant efforts to authentically depict Comanche life, rituals, roles, clothing and weaponry. It’s the first film to have a full Comanche dub. This strong focus on positive Indigenous representation and historic accuracy is balanced with the franchise’s essential need for violent action, creating a unique high-octane cinematic moment in which Indigenous women and culture are foregrounded as strong and capable, with voice and agency over both their narrative destiny and representation.