The Reel Red Power: Native Activism, Visual Sovereignty, and the Film Industry

The last thirty years of Indigenous-led cinema and media have deep seated roots in Native activism from the 1970s. Television shows like Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), and films like Fancy Dance (2023), Drunktown’s Finest (2014), Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), and Smoke Signals (1998) are in part products of Red Power activism and resistance. This dissertation is an exanimation of the relationship between the historical Red Power movement and the film industry from about 1960 to 1978. It seeks to show that Red Power activists and creatives were actively involved within Hollywood and the film industry, resisting harmful stereotypes, challenging poor representation, and demanding more opportunities to tell their own stories. This dissertation follows the timeline of the Red Power movement to explore how activism shifted and influenced the film industry, and how it failed to influence that industry to the extent activists desired, leading Native filmmakers to opt for independent film production. This work adds cultural dimensions to events like the Occupation of Alcatraz, while placing cultural moments like Sacheen Littlefeather’s 1973 Oscar Protest to the movement. By addressing the [pop] cultural politics of Red Power, this dissertation argues that Indigenous activists and creatives eventually turned toward independent cinema, creating cinematic genealogies that eventually began to flourish in the 1990s and into the 21st century.