This project highlights Native Americans’ contributions to modern cinema and the significance of film in twentieth-century Indigenous life. Native Americans began exhibiting and attending films during the Allotment era (1887–1934), when the U.S. government divided tribal lands and violently pursued a policy of cultural assimilation. During this period, missionaries and government officials associated cinema with Euro-American modernity. Viewing filmgoing as an acculturating alternative to Indigenous cultural practices such as potlatch and dance, they encouraged and often forced Native people to attend film exhibitions on reservations and at government-sponsored boarding schools. Yet Native Americans continued to forge their own cinema cultures. By operating and attending their own theaters, they reinforced their respective investments in economic sovereignty, community bonds, and the survival of valued cultural practices.
Native American Theaters and Moviegoing
Key Findings
Native people attended and exhibited films from the earliest days of motion pictures.
Missionaries and government officials encouraged Native theater ownership and filmgoing because they viewed motion pictures as a tool of assimilation.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives developed unique cinema cultures that reflected their respective social, cultural, and political investments.
Background
Scholars have long studied the preoccupation of the American film industry with the fictionalized figure of the Indian onscreen. While this scholarship contributes to our understanding of how settlers viewed Native Americans, it tells us little about how actual Native people engaged with the medium. This gap in the literature persists despite an abundance of references to filmgoing in Native autobiographies and oral histories, and in the accounts of white settlers, who noted the “mania” of Indians for the moving pictures. As sovereign peoples with distinct sensibilities, histories, and cultural practices, Native Americans held no universal view of the moving pictures, nor did they share a common belief about what constituted “positive” or “authentic” representations of Native people. However, whether they banned moving pictures from their communities or organized their own shows, their responses nearly always expressed a desire for autonomy, community, and the survival of cherished cultural practices. In doing so, their cinema cultures were tied to assertions of Indigenous knowledge and self-determination.
Methods
This project attends closely to infrastructures—material interconnections forged through organizational systems, networks of communication, and economic exchange. Drawing on thousands of archival sources, including court records, Bureau of Indian Affairs files, photographs, boarding school publications, missionary periodicals, oral histories, autobiographies, and Native American newspapers, I consider the specific circumstances, networks, and relationships that contributed to what Duane Champagne calls “patterns of self-directed change within Indigenous communities.” This framework, combined with the methods of social network analysis, helps avoid one-dimensional portrayals of mass culture and oversimplified assessments of Native culture and identity.
Distinct Cinema Practices
The distinctive cinema practices that developed among the Great Lakes Ojibwe, the Cherokee in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma), and the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida communities of Southeast Alaska illustrate the ways Native people integrated the moving pictures into their lives on their own terms. For instance, early Ojibwe film exhibitors in Minnesota scheduled their film exhibitions around the migratory patterns of Ojibwe social life. The operation of a theater in the Cherokee Nation reflected the traditional matrilineal dynamics of the Cherokee household and clan. In Hydaburg, Alaska, the Haida decided to open a motion picture show collectively owned by every Haida resident of the town.
Visual Education
Recognizing the popularity of film among Native audiences, missionaries and government agents attempted to use the motion pictures for their own purposes. These efforts were fueled by a growing interest in visual education—the belief that immigrants and nonwhites learned best through simplistic imagery. In 1909, the United States launched its first federally funded public health campaign to use motion pictures, which intended to combat tuberculosis on Indian reservations. The films placed the responsibility for ending the epidemic on Native people without acknowledging the ways U.S. government policies contributed to the spread of the disease, or providing any of the material resources that they recommended for preventing the disease.
Movies and Assimilation
Although the federal government’s public health campaign did not make any tangible improvement to the soaring rate of tuberculosis on Indian reservations, it was celebrated by missionaries and the Indian Office. During the 1910s, letters and reports circulated promoting the use of motion pictures as a “civilizing” force. Reformers were especially eager to use motion pictures as a means of combating supposedly harmful Indigenous cultural practices. They exhibited motion pictures in order to proselytize, assimilate, and entice Native people into participating in their endeavors. By the late 1920s, most off-reservation boarding schools in the U.S. and many residential schools in Canada had integrated moving pictures into their curricular and extracurricular activities.
Repurposing Settler Resources
Despite the efforts of missionaries and government officials to transform cinema into an instrument of assimilation, Native people continued to assert their own needs, desires, and sensibilities. They repurposed settler resources such as projectors and government-owned buildings for their own purposes. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, for instance, a Cherokee film exhibitor began exhibiting films at the Oglala Boarding School. He became experienced, built his reputation, and earned profits—all of which helped him to open his own theater in Martin, South Dakota. These acts of material reappropriation frequently reinforced existing Indigenous social networks and political organizations. At times, they also contributed to emerging Pan-Indian and intertribal formations.
What Does This Mean?
This history challenges the assumption that in order for Native American culture to be authentic, it must be static and unchanging. Moving pictures and other modern technologies did not simply undermine Native practices and cultures. Indigenous cinema cultures served as means of sustaining identity, reinforcing kinship ties, and expressing sovereignty. In doing so, Native people made important contributions to one of the twentieth century’s most popular forms of amusement.
This brief is based on ongoing research for a future book by Cara Caddoo
Meet the Researcher
Cara Caddoo is associate professor of history and of cinema and media studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of culture and politics. Her recent work considers the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans, examining how film and other emerging media served as tools of cultural expression, resilience, and economic self-determination.
