Library Research Guides: Native American &amp; Indigenous Studies: Subject & Collection Spotlights

Indigenous Heritage & History Month

In recognition of this month's celebration of indigenous history and culture, we present this curated playlist of Indigenous artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Collected here are artists representing their heritage and identity in musical stylings varying from traditional to contemporary, spanning a spectrum of hip hop, metal, country, and experimental. Listen and explore a sampling of the vast contributions to modern American music by Indigenous peoples.

This list only serves as a diving point into the vast contributions to American and international popular music made by Indigenous artists. Join us in celebrating and exploring these genre defining (and defying) artists. Below the playlist, you'll find a comprehensive discussion of the context and history of the music we've highlighted, as well as a selection of resources for further reading on Indigenous music.

Beyond the Playlist

If you'd like to engage more deeply with the experience of Indigenous people within the context of Turtle Island, we've also curated a list of books, movies, databases, and podcasts to support further curiosity and learning. You can also find that list by clicking on the Indigenous Heritage & History Month box on the left-hand side of this page, in the navigation menu.

Additionally, as part of this celebration and remembering, there is also a series of features related to Indigenous identity, from across IU Libraries:

Spotlight on Two-Spirit identity and the LGBTQIA Indigenous Experience (Gender Studies)
Overview of Indigenous Philosophy (Philosophy)
First Nations / Native American Heritage Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
Indigenous Art & Architecture (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
Indigenous Design (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
Youth Materials on American Indian & Indigenous Identity (Education Library)
Read Native Challenge (Education Library)

Next Steps

For more information about the Indigenous communities with ongoing and traditional ties to this land, and how to support Indigenous groups and movements, take a look at our Land Acknowledgment and Local Indigenous Resources guide.

Our playlist moves throughout various points in North American musical history, with artists dating back to the early 20th century. In the early decades of jazz, Mildred Bailey (Cour de’Alene) emerged as a household name. Bailey started her singing career at 17 and went on to perform genre staples of the jazz giants of her time. In the late 1920s, blues music was being recorded and released to great popularity, and among the artists of this blues explosion was Charlie Patton (Choctaw). Hailed as the father of Delta Blues, Patton, of mixed (Black, white, and Indigenous) ancestry, pioneered the driving rhythms and impassioned vocals that became representative of blues music in the delta region and would lay the foundational groundwork for rock n roll musicians to come.

Moving into the 1960s, Indigenous artists had an undeniable impact on popular music despite a lack of commercial success. Buffy Sainte-Marie, born on the Piapot 75 reserve and adopted by a Mi’kmaq family as an infant, gained notoriety in the New York folk scene for her impassioned and fiercely political compositions and performances. She penned hit anthems of the 1960s counterculture scene, including “Unknown Soldier” and “Cod’ine,” though she is seldom given credit where it is due. Further south along the east coast, rock n roll pioneer Link Wray (Cherokee and Shawnee) emerged with the single “Rumble” in 1958. Wray, born in North Carolina,, would change rock n roll forever with his signature heavy and distorted guitar tones, paving the way for punk and metal musicians to follow. Collected here is an example of Wray’s country and Americana roots from his self-titled 1971 album, a pioneering work of the home-recording movement that would carry into the 21st century.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Indigenous artists had a profound influence on popular American genres. Often forgotten in the shadow of his contemporaries like Eric Clapton and George Harrison, Jesse Ed Davis (Comanche, Seminole, Muskogee, and Kiowa) was a highly acclaimed guitar player. Born in Oklahoma, Davis played with hugely popular artists of his time, featuring alongside names like John Lennon, Taj Mahal, Jackson Browne, and Leonard Cohen. On the west coast, brothers Pat and Candido Vasquez-Vegas (Yaqui, Shoshone, and Mexican) formed the all Native American rock group Redbone. The brothers penned radio-rock staples for the 1970s with hits like “The Witch Queen of New Orleans” and the ever-lasting “Come and Get Your Love.” Across the nation at this time, acts were popping up on reservations and in indigenous communities, exemplified here by the band Sugluk with their song “Ajuinnarasuarsunga,” a fusion of rock n roll song structure and first nations language.

Moving into the 1980s, singer-songwriter Archie James Cavanaugh (Tlingit) released his yacht rock classic “Black and White Raven.” Born in Alaska, Cavanaugh traveled the west coast assembling a band that included members of Redbone to release his often overlooked album, its fusion of disco and soft rock represented here on “Take it Easy.” In country music, First Nations culture is frequently referenced but seldom represented justly. This was not the case in the music of Buddy Red Bow (Lakota). Red Bow dedicated his career to singing of the plight of Indigenous peoples and the injustices wrought by white colonists. The music of Indigenous artists was also significant in rising genres of the decade like new age. Joanne Shenandoah (Oneida and Onondaga) would become an influential figure in this genre and would go on to set the record for Native American Music Awards won by a single artist.

Moving into the 21st century to the present, Indigenous artists still hold an influential place in modern American genres, driving them forward with ingenuity and expert artistry. Artist Martha Redbone continues in the tradition of rhythm n blues and soul music, fusing these sounds with traditional indigenous music drawn from her heritage of Choctaw, Cherokee, and African American. Artist Samantha Crain melds folk rock, indie rock, and americana with indigenous influence reflective of her Choctaw heritage. Inuk artist Beatrice Deer makes indie rock that is consistently inventive and exciting, earning her the Best Inut/Cultural Album award for her 2005 effort “Just Bea.” In the vein of indie rock, Silver Jackson makes music in numerous groups, performing under this name as well as his Tlingit name. Groups like Cemican and Nechochwen fuse First Nations history and political outcry over unjust treatment of Indigenous peoples with the harsh and aggressive sounds of metal, driving the genre forward still in the 21st century. Doom metal group Divide and Dissolve (Black, Tsalagi, Maori) fuse classical music with doom metal and lyrical outcry over injustices wrought against indigenous peoples to create uniquely political music for the 21st century. Artist Black Belt Eagle Scout furthers the mix of traditional indigenous influence with alternative rock, creating post rock informed by her Swinomish heritage. Artist Tanya Tagaq (Inuk) create music unlike anything heard before, fusing traditional throat singing with ambient soundscapes derived from noise and drone music. In hip hop, First Nations artists bring exciting changes and new voices to the cultural forefront, as is the case with Angel Haze (Cherokee), who raps of their experiences as an individual identifying as pansexual and agender in the hip hop world, as well as celebrating their mixed Indigenous heritage. Groups like A Tribe Called Red fuse electronic genres like dubstep and house with hip hop and traditional First Nations music to create a sound wholly their own in the massive EDM music market.

Library & Scholarly Sources

Indigenous pop: Native American music from jazz to hip hop (IUCAT - Book)
Rumble: the Indians who rocked the world (IUCAT - Documentary)
"The Nammys Versus the Grammys: Celebrity, Technology, and the Creation of an Indigenous Music Recording Industry in North America" (The World of Music Journal)
"A Tribe Called Red’s Halluci Nation: Sonifying embodied global allegiances, decolonization, and indigenous activism" (Intersections)

Popular Sources

Rumble On: Native American Musicians You Should Know (PBS)
8 Artists Exploding the Concept of Native American Music (Paste Magazine)
Review of 'Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985' (Pitchfork)
"Taking it Easy": On Archie James Cavanaugh (Numero Group)
The Evolution Of Angel Haze (BuzzFeed)
Remembering Buddy Red Bow (Indianz)
6 Indigenous Metal Bands You Need To Know About (Metal Injection)

Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples

This page provides suggested resources (books, video & film, articles & databases) relevant to Two-Spirit Identity and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) Indigenous Identity.

The term Two-Spirit (2S, 2Spirit, Two Spirit, Twospirited) was coined in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg. The term is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by a number of Indigenous Native Americans to describe Native Peoples who fulfill traditional third-gender or variant-gender roles in their communities and cultures. The term is generally accepted but faces controversy from critics who consider it as reinforcing western notions of binary gender or attempting to erase terms that already exist in traditional communities for gender-variant members.

Acceptance, treatment, status, and rights of LGBTQIA Indigenous peoples and Two-Spirit individuals have varied historically. Contemporary understandings of Two-Spirit identity and what it means to be Indigenous and LGBTQIA vary greatly from tribe to tribe. We hope the resources collected in these pages will help readers gain a nuanced understanding of Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA Indigenous Identity.

Video: Why we need gender fluidity | Nicholas Metcalf | TEDxUMN (2015).

About the Playlist

This mix features two-spirit and other Indigenous LGBTQIA and nonbinary/transgender artists from across Turtle Island, as well as other parts of the world. A work in progress, we welcome suggestions for artists from these groups for inclusion.

Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.

To learn more about the artists and communities represented in this playlist, check out some of the resources we consulted:

Great Videos and Music from 8 Indigenous LGBTIA and/or Two Spirit Musicians (Indian Country Today)
Decolonial love: These Indigenous artists are taking back the self-love that colonialism stole (CBC)
Pride Concert: A Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit Indigenous Showcase (video, University of Toronto SGDO)

Next Steps

If you'd like to learn more about this month-long celebration of Indigenous communities and identity, we've created a guide with list of resources, as well as a playlist featuring Indigenous musicians, on the Media Studies Research Guide. There is also an overview of Indigenous Philosophy on the Philosophy Research Guide.

Fiction

Love after the End: an anthology of two-spirit and indigiqueer speculative fiction by Joshua Whitehead (Editor)
ISBN: 9781551528113

Publication Date: 2020-10-20

This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781551527253

Publication Date: 2018-05-15

'You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine' is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishises himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the 'rez,' and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages—and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Food and Spirits by Beth Brant
ISBN: 0932379923

Publication Date: 1991-04-01

Eight stories deal with homecoming, endurance, loss, grief, tradition, and survival.
Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway
ISBN: 0806132361

Publication Date: 2000-05-01

One of Canada’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, Highway mixes humor with difficult subjects in his work ranging from Kiss of the Fur Queen, a coming-of-age novel that follows two Cree boys through residential school to adulthood, to The Rez Sisters, which is full of laughter as well as revelations about life. His essays have also featured in the collections Me Funny and Me Sexy, where he argues that his native language, Cree, is both the funniest and sexiest of all languages. (-Kai Minosh, BGDBlog)
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time by Hope Nicholson (Editor); Erin Cossar (Editor); S.M. Beiko (Editor)
ISBN: 0993997074

Publication Date: 2016-09-30

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.
Drowning in Fire by Craig S. Womack
ISBN: 0816521670

Publication Date: 2001-09-01

Josh Henneha has always been a traveler, drowning in dreams, burning with desires. As a young boy growing up within the Muskogee Creek Nation in rural Oklahoma, Josh experiences a yearning for something he cannot tame. Quiet and skinny and shy, he feels out of place, at once inflamed and ashamed by his attraction to other boys. Driven by a need to understand himself and his history, Josh struggles to reconcile the conflicting voices he hears -- from the messages of sin and scorn of the non-Indian Christian churches his parents attend in order to assimilate, to the powerful stories of his older Creek relatives, which have been the center of his upbringing, memory, and ongoing experience. In his fevered and passionate dreams, Josh catches a glimpse of something that makes the Muskogee Creek world come alive. Lifted by his great-aunt Lucille's tales of her own wild girlhood, Josh learns to fly back through time, to relive his people's history, and uncover a hidden legacy of triumphs and betrayals, ceremonies and secrets he can forge into a new sense of himself. When as a man, Josh rediscovers the boyhood friend who first stirred his desires, he realizes a transcendent love that helps take him even deeper into the Creek world he has explored all along in his imagination. Interweaving past and present, history and story, explicit realism and dreamlike visions, Craig Womack's Drowning in Fire explores a young man's journey to understand his cultural and sexual identity within a framework drawn from the community of his origins.
Rough Paradise by Alec Butler
ISBN: 9781927443620

Publication Date: 2014-05-31

Born with an Intersex condition in a rough, working-class city, the harassment and hate Terry Tomey experiences for being bi-gendered and Two-Spirit drives them to the brink of suicide -- yet they are saved by the love and acceptance of Darla. The two incur the wrath of their families and their community as they fall in love and graphically explore their queer sexuality. Forcefully separated, they spend the next twenty years trying to find each other and to uncover the real truth as to why they were kept apart.

Poetry

Feed by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9781947793576

Publication Date: 2019-11-05

Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.
Fire Power by Chrystos
ISBN: 088974047X

Publication Date: 1995-09-01

Telling the truth is powerful medicine. It is a fire that lights the way for others. When we speak our "Fire Power", we join a long & honored line of warriors against injustice. Each of us is born with innate power & purpose, a sacred direction for which we have been created. Our task is to find the place where we belong & do our work there.
This Wound Is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781452962238

Publication Date: 2019-09-03

"i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. "By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for." Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
My Woman Card Is Anti-Native, and Other Two-Spirit Truths by Xemiyulu Tapepechul
ISBN: 9781729873472

Publication Date: 2018-12-02

"My Woman Card is anti-Native & Other Two-Spirit Truths" is a book of free verse poems, haikus and sonnets inspired by a conversation with the Legendary Venus Selenite, by the author's love for classical theatre, by her connection to her community, and by her experiences navigating eurocentrism in medicine & social life.
Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
ISBN: 9781771664394

Publication Date: 2018-09-01

In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.
Witness, I Am by Gregory Scofield
ISBN: 9780889713239

Publication Date: 2016-10-01

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, "Ghost Dance," raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield's poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From "Killer," Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: "I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you."
Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by Amir Rabiyah
ISBN: 9781943977420

Publication Date: 2017-11-14

"Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story's sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening." - Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd's Son and The Taxidermist's Cut
Full-Metal Indigiqueer by Joshua Whitehead
ISBN: 9781772011876

Publication Date: 2017-11-28

This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time - they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. "Do not read me as a vanished ndn," they ask, "read me as a ghastly one." It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story - the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms - if reconciliation is a means of "burying the hatchet," Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a séance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space - they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization - a world where making love is akin to making live.
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
ISBN: 9781941040638

Publication Date: 2017-05-09

Nature Poem follows Teebs--a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet--who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he's adamant -- bratty, even -- about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Drama

Two-Spirit Acts by Jean O'Hara (Editor); Waawaate Fobister; Muriel Miguel; Kent Monkman
ISBN: 9781770911840

Publication Date: 2014-04-15

With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.

Essays

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
ISBN: 9781937512934

Publication Date: 2020-07-14

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
Living the Spirit: a gay American Indian anthology by Will Roscoe (Editor)
ISBN: 0312018991

Publication Date: 1988-08-01

A groundbreaking collection of essays and stories by, about, and selected by gay American Indians from over twenty North American tribes.
she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) by Sharron Proulx-Turner
ISBN: 9780888013262

Publication Date: 2008

In she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two spirit story), Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion. She walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two-spirit woman that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re-appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries.
Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature by Qwo-Li Driskill (Editor); Daniel Heath Justice (Editor); Deborah Miranda (Editor); Lisa Tatonetti (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816502424

Publication Date: 2011-10-01

Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.

Memoirs

Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda
ISBN: 9781597142014

Publication Date: 2013-01-01

This beautiful and devastating book -- part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir -- should be required reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
Forty-Three Septembers by Jewelle Gomez
ISBN: 1563410370

Publication Date: 1993-12-01

A collection of autobiographical essays about identity, the author's family, growing up and growing older, and related topics.
One Bead at a Time by Beverly Little Thunder; Sharron Proulx-Turner
ISBN: 9781771332651

Publication Date: 2016-06-25

One Bead at a Time is the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder's narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humour almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, "I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs. I said, 'I want to go there because there's lots of lily pads but no frogs and I like creating community.'" And create community she does. Little Thunder established the first and today, the only all-women's Sundance in the world, securing a land base in the Green Mountains of Vermont for future generations of Indigenous women's ceremony. She was active in the A.I.M. movement and she continues to practice and promote political and spiritual awareness for Indigenous women around the world. A truly remarkable visionary.
Thunder Through My Veins by Gregory Scofield
ISBN: 9780385692748

Publication Date: 2019-09-10

Born into a Metis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent but never told of his heritage, Gregory Scofield knew he was different. His father disappeared after he was born, and at five he was separated from his mother and sent to live with strangers and extended family. Only his love for his sensitive but battered mother and his Aunty Georgina, a neighbor who befriended him, kept him alive. This is Gregory's traumatic, tender and hopeful story of his fight to rediscover and accept himself in the face of a heritage with diametrically opposed backgrounds.
A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby; Mary Louisa Plummer (As told to)
ISBN: 9780887558122

Publication Date: 2016-04-22

From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community, Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social and economic legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual violence, and in her teen years became an alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby took her children and, fleeing an abusive marriage, moved to Thunder Bay. Despite the abuse, racism, and indifference she often found there, Chacaby marshalled the strength and supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety, trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor, raised her children and fostered many others, learned to live with visual impairment, and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, and humour. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

Featured Videos

Video: Author and Indigenous elder Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities | Out Saskatoon (2018)

Documentaries

2 Spirits: Native Lesbians and Gay Men by Teresa Osa Hidalgo de la Riva
Call Number: Streaming

Publication Date: 1994

2-Spirited people (Native lesbians and Gay men) from the Bay Area share their experience of overlapping gender, ethnic and cultural identities as they explore and define their visions of utopia.
Two Spirits by Lydia Nibley
Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDs

Publication Date: 2009

Examines the role of two-spirit people in the Navajo culture in the context of the story of a gay youth named Fred Martinez. Martinez was a nádleehí or a male-bodied person with a feminine essence, who was murdered in a hate crime at the age of sixteen. Discusses the traditional Native American perspective on gender and sexuality and the need for a balanced interrelationship between the feminine and masculine.
Two Spirits by Ruth Fertig
Call Number: Streaming

Publication Date: 2007

Joey Criddle, a Native American gay man, recounts the story of how he underwent a transformation from a closeted Pentecostalist in Mississippi to the co-director of the Two Spirit Society of Denver.
Byron Chief-Moon: Grey Horse Rider by Philip Szporer & Marlene Millar
Call Number: Streaming

Publication Date: 2007

Byron Chief-Moon, Grey Horse Rider: Father of three, successful TV actor and artist and proud member of the First Nations two-spirited gay community, Byron Chief-Moon is a fascinating mesh of dynamic personae. But when he dances alone in the forest, the complexity of the real world washes away, and we can see his spiritual self take hold. Interviews combine with mesmerizing footage of his performances to capture the essence of this cutting-edge artist who founded the Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association. By melding the history and art of his Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy tribe with issues of contemporary life, Chief-Moon's work makes profound statements about identity and tradition.
Water Flowing Together by Gwendolen Cates
Call Number: Streaming

Publication Date: 2008

Offers an intimate portrait of a remarkable dancer, Jock Soto, who retired from the New York City Ballet at age forty, after a twenty-four-year career. Soto's journey as an openly gay man of Navajo Indian and Puerto Rican descent provides a rare glimpse into the life of a dancer and the disparate worlds which shaped this important artist. Soto was asked to join the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine at sixteen after first studying at the affiliated School of American Ballet on a full scholarship.
Kumu Hina by Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson
Call Number: Streaming

Publication Date: 2013

Imagine a world where a little boy can grow up to be the woman of his dreams, and a young girl can rise to become a leader among men. Welcome to Kumu Hina's Hawai'i. During a momentous year in her life in modern Honolulu, Hina Wong-Kalu, a native Hawaiian māhū, or transgender, teacher uses traditional culture to inspire a student to claim her place as leader of the school's all-male hula troupe. But despite her success as a teacher, Hina longs for love and a committed relationship. Will her marriage to a headstrong Tongan man fulfill her dreams? An incredible docu-drama that unfolds like a narrative film, KUMU HINA reveals a side of Hawai'i rarely seen on screen.
Being Thunder by (directed by) Stéphanie Lamorré
Publication Date: 2021

Sherenté, a Two Spirit Genderqueer teenager from Rhode Island's Narragansett tribe performs in dance competitions at annual regional powwows of New England tribes. There is no formal rule which prohibits Two Spirit Genderqueer people from competing in a category different from their birth gender. Wearing female fancy shawl regalia, Sherenté dances with joy and beauty. Behind the scenes, tribal leaders manipulate Sherenté's scores or disqualify them outright because of their belief in traditional binary gender roles. Blindsided by ongoing dishonesty and deception, Sherenté continues to perform in spite of insensitive behavior by tribal leaders and others in their community. Sherenté's enduring courage and self-respect are met with an outpouring of support from family, powwow attendees, and fellow competitors.

Feature Films

The business of fancydancing by Sherman Alexie
Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDs

Publication Date: 2002

Former Spokane Reservation best friends, Seymour and Aristotle have taken different paths when they are brought together for the funeral of an old friend. Both went off to college; one is now a successful poet, the other returned home embittered. Tensions and resentments flare as they meet again.
Johnny Greyeyes by Jorge Manuel Manzano
Call Number: Auxiliary Library Facility - Media Item

Publication Date: 2000

Johnny Greyeyes is a powerful story of a Native American woman struggling to maintain strength, love and spirit. Since the shooting death of her father, Johnny has spent most of her life in prison. There, she forms a new family and falls in love with her cellmate Lana.
Drunktown's Finest by Sydney Freeland (directed by)
Publication Date: 2015

Three young Native Americans -- an adopted Christian girl, a rebellious father-to-be, and a promiscuous transsexual -- strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation.
Wildhood by Bretten Hannam
Publication Date: 2021

In a rural east-coast trailer park, Link lives with his toxic father and younger half-brother Travis. When Link discovers his Mi’kmaw mother could still be alive, it lights a flame and they make a run for a better life. On the road they meet Pasmay, a pow wow dancer drawn to Link. As the boys journey across Mi’kma’ki, Link finds community, identity, and love in the land where he belongs.

Short Films

"It's Not Your Fault" - Short movie by Raven Davis about the violence of online comments made towards Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous Women, children and 2 Spirit people. Bringing attention to the negligence of online/social media outlets allowing hate speech in Canada.
Kent Monkman Studios - compilation of short films on YouTube from Kent Monkman (also known as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle), a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry working in a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance and installation.
"Mars-Womb-Man" - short film by James Diamond. Man from Venus (super 8, 4 min, 1998) meets Mars Womb-Man. She's an answer without a question and he a question without answer. A sustainable foreground emerges only when they forge paths. A motion portrait where opposites distract and the peripheral rule is born.
"Meskanahk (My Path)" - 'Meskanahk' is a video narrative of a young 'half-breed' man's journey off a Cree reserve. This video highlights the motivations that progressed his journey and the questions, regrets and fears raised on his path from childhood to adulthood. 'Meskanahk' chronicles the plight of this young man's fears of being in situations where he was always labeled as an: 'other', and how this had propelled him to run from situation to situation. In the end, when this young man stops running, he wonders if his parents hate him for having run away.
The Misadventures of Pussy Boy - series of animated shorts by Alec Butler, featuring Alick, a trans/2spirit/intersex teen, going on various misadventures.
TJ Cuthand Videos - collection of short films by queer transgender Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand.
Two-Spirit & Queer (NFB) - Collection of films by Indigenous two-spirit and queer filmmakers, from the National Film Board of Canada.
Tits on a Bull - short film by Tim Worrall. Set in a Maori women's rugby team, Tits on a Bull follows Phoenix, the young star player, as she struggles to choose between her longtime friendship with aging coach Rusty or her new relationship with lesbian team-captain, Mel.

Streaming Resources

Ethnographic Video Online
Access to classic and contemporary documentaries, previously unpublished footage from anthropologists and ethnographers working in the field, and some feature films. Includes searchable transcripts.

Access is for Volumes 1-4.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vols. I and II: Foundational Films
Includes classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices
Includes films by indigenous filmmakers. Emphasis is on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.

Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives
Includes titles by contemporary visual anthropologists. Also contains the full catalog of anthropology films from Berkeley Media, formerly known as the University of California’s Extension Center for Media.
Kanopy Streaming Video
Kanopy Streaming Video gathers streaming videos from a variety of producers and makes them available to students. Faculty and instructors may request titles for purchase by the Libraries via the Kanopy Streaming Video site. Priority access will be given to faculty and instructors for class use.
One Mail instructions:
If you chose to setup a Kanopy user account to access additional features and used your indiana.edu email address, you will need to update it to your iu.edu email address before December 31, 2025.
1. Log in to your Kanopy account in a web browser.
2. Select the menu button menu button in the top-right corner, then select My Account.
3. On the My Information tab, select Edit.
4. Enter your new email address or current and new passwords. (You can also edit your name, if needed.)
5. Select Save.
These instructions are also available with screenshots on Kanopy's support site.

Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Drag Artists

Lady Shug
Lady Shug, also known as Ky Victor is a 30-something nonbinary queer who uses the pronouns she, her, they, and them. A “proud three-quarters indigenous person of the Diné — Navajo — tribe,” Victor says they were born into the Kinłichii’nii (Red House) and Bit’ahnii (Folded Arms) clans and grew up int he four corners area of New Mexico.
Landa Lakes
Originally from Oklahoma but based in San Francisco, Landa Lake’s career spans decades and platforms, although her name is mostly linked to the two-spirit drag community. Between participating in both American Indian and Gay and Lesbian student organizations in college as a youth and acting as a mentor to younger drag performers, two-spirit Chickasaw drag queen and community organizer Landa always played a massive part in the LGBTQ2S+ community and continues to. In addition to serving as a board member of Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS), a community-based volunteer organization offering culturally relevant activities for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex Native Americans of the Bay Area, she’s been a judge on drag pageants. She has utilized drag to raise funds and awareness for communities. Currently, she and her drag troupe Brush Arbor Gurlz perform nationwide to educate others about Native politics and issues.
Sage Chanell
Sage Channell (Shawnee) is the co-founder of the Oklahoma City Two Spirit Society, former Ms. International Two Spirit, and one hell of a shell shaker who has done a lot of work to build acceptance of two spirits at ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma.
Buffalo Barbie
Travis ‘Buffalo Barbie’ Goldtooth switches gender depending on the context. She has typically identified as male when working in construction jobs and as female in her life outside of work. After Buffalo Barbie’s coming out was met with severe community backlash, her grandmother gave her the confidence to continue life as a transgender individual: “Don’t let anyone else tell you how to be!” Buffalo Barbie’s experiences are mirrored by those of Michelle Sherman. “When I came out to my family, they kicked me out,” she tells me, “but my grandma told them that this was a normal part of Navajo culture.”
Ilona Verley
Ilona Verley is a drag artist and one of the Season 1 contestants of Canada's Drag Race. She is the first Indigenous, Two-Spirit and LA-Based queen to appear on Canada's Drag Race.
Ella Lamoureax
Lamoureux has been doing drag for more than a decade and is a fixture — and trailblazer — in Kelowna’s vibrant drag scene. Recently, she was propelled into the national spotlight by appearing on the OutTV drag competition show Call Me Mother. Without drag, Lamoureux said she can’t imagine life being nearly as colourful.
Riel Deadly
Riel Deadly is a tastawiyiniwak (two-spirit) mixed otipemisiwak (Cree-Metis person). He started doing drag after his Elder encouraged him to find ways to celebrate his masculinity. Riel is an active bi/pansexual recruiter, enticing everyone to fall in love with him by dual-wielding his masculine and feminine wiles.

Academic Texts

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill
ISBN: 9780816533640

Publication Date: 2016-04-01

In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which translates as "strange," is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to "queer." For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered "strange" by colonial heteropatriarchy. As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future. The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as "dissent lines" by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.
Erotics of Sovereignty: queer native writing in the era of self-determination by Mark Rifkin
ISBN: 9780816677825

Publication Date: 2012-04-18

In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote "the Indian's sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community." In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. Rifkin focuses on four Native writers -- Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rachería), and Chrystos (Menominee) -- approaching their fiction and poetry as forms of political theory. Rifkin shows how the work of these queer or two-spirit Native writers affirms the significance of the erotic as an exercise of individual and community sovereignty. In this way, we come to see how their work contests the homophobic, sexist, and exclusivist policies and attitudes of tribal communities as well as those of the nation-state.
Queer Indigenous Studies: critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature by Qwo-Li Driskill (Editor); Chris Finley (Editor); Scott Lauria Morgensen (Editor); Brian Joseph Gilley (Editor)
ISBN: 9780816529070

Publication Date: 2011-03-15

"This book is an imagining." So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue -- a "writing in conversation" -- among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few.
Spaces Between Us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization by Scott Lauria Morgensen
ISBN: 9780816656325

Publication Date: 2011-11-17

We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of "Native" and "settler" define the status of being "queer," Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. Morgensen's analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a "biopolitics of settler colonialism" -- in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers -- Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
Becoming Two-Spirit: gay identity and social acceptance in Indian country by Brian Joseph Gilley
ISBN: 0803271263

Publication Date: 2006-10-01

The Two-Spirit man occupies a singular place in Native American culture, balancing the male and the female spirit even as he tries to blend gay and Native identity. The accompanying ambiguities of gender and culture come into vivid relief in the powerful and poignant Becoming Two-Spirit, the first book to take an in-depth look at contemporary American Indian gender diversity. Drawing on a wealth of observations from interviews, oral histories, and meetings and ceremonies, Brian Joseph Gilley provides an intimate view of how Two-Spirit men in Colorado and Oklahoma struggle to redefine themselves and their communities. The Two-Spirit men who appear in Gilley's book speak frankly of homophobia within their communities, a persistent prejudice that is largely misunderstood or misrepresented by outsiders. Gilley gives detailed accounts of the ways in which these men modify gay and Native identity as a means of dealing with their alienation from tribal communities and families. With these compromises, he suggests, they construct an identity that challenges their alienation while at the same time situating themselves within contemporary notions of American Indian identity. He also shows how their creativity is reflected in the communities they build with one another, the development of their own social practices, and a national network of individuals linked in their search for self and social acceptance.
Identities and Place: changing labels and intersectional communities of LGBTQ and two-spirit people in the United States by Katherine Crawford-Lackey (Editor); Megan E. Springate (Editor)
ISBN: 9781789204797

Publication Date: 2019-11-01

With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non-heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather, socialize, protest, mourn, and celebrate. The focus is deeper look at how sexually variant and gender non-conforming Americans constructed identity, created communities, and fought to have rights recognized by the government. Each chapter is accompanied by prompts and activities that invite readers to think critically and immerse themselves in the subject matter while working collaboratively with others.
Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community by Andrew J. Jolivétte
ISBN: 9780295998503

Publication Date: 2016-06-01

The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.
Reclaiming Two-Spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal, & sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers; Raven E. Heavy Runner (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780807003466

Publication Date: 2022-04-26

A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism's written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed--and Indigenous resistance is core to this story.
The Spirit and the Flesh: sexual diversity in American Indian culture by Walter L. Williams
ISBN: 0807046159

Publication Date: 1992-04-01

Walter L. Williams's excellent research has produced one of the most extensive studies of the berdache culture among Native Americans. Unlike the larger American society, Native Americans historically have respected, and in many tribal nations venerated, homosexuals. Williams explains the berdache as a custom, its social roles, and the berdache history, including its introduction to the European concept of sin and intolerance of sexual diversity. The word berdache applies almost exclusively to males, mainly because historical records only relate dealings with aboriginal males, but Williams also includes a chapter on female sexual diversity, using the word amazon to describe these often warrior-like women.

Selected Scholarly Articles

Driskill, Q-L. (2011). Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1), 69-92.
Hames-García, M. (2013). What's After Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies. Feminist Studies 39(2), 384-404.
Robinson, M. (2020). Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity. Journal of Homosexuality, 67(12), 1675–1690.
Robinson, M. (2017). Two-Spirit and Bisexual People: Different Umbrella, Same Rain. Journal of Bisexuality, 17(1), 7–29.
Morgensen, S. L. (2011). Unsettling Queer Politics: What Can Non-Natives Learn from Two-Spirit Organizing? In Q.-L. Driskill, C. Finley, B. J. Gilley, & S. L. Morgensen (Eds.), Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, 132–152.
Lang, S. (2016). Native American men-women, lesbians, two-spirits: Contemporary and historical perspectives. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 20(3/4), 299–323.
Kongerslev, M. (2018). Dance to the Two-Spirit. Mythologizations of the Queer Native. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 27(4).
Greensmith, C., & Giwa, S. (2013). Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, 37(2), 129–148.

**Suggested Keywords for database searches relating to Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous* identity:**

*while there is some overlap and commonalities in understandings of gender and sexuality across groups, when doing research relevant to Indigenous identities, it is always best practice to search using the names of individual tribes, nations, and communities when possible

Indigenous

Aboriginal

Native

First Nations

Race

POC (people of color)

BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color)

Queer

Gay

Lesbian

Bisexual

Transgender

Identity

Sexuality

Sexual Orientation

Two-spirit (sometimes "two spirit", "two spirited" or "two-spirited")

LGBT

LGBTQ

LGBTQ2S

Gender Studies

Gender

Colonial(ism)

Decolonial(ism)

Decolonizing

Relevant Databases

Academic Search (EBSCO)
Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
This multi-disciplinary database provides full-text for more than 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,700 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.
One Mail instructions:
If you created your MyEBSCO account using your @indiana.edu email address, you will need to update the address to your @iu.edu email address before December 31, 2025.
1. Sign in to your MyEBSCO account
2. From MyEBSCO dropdown menu, select Manage Your Account
  1. You may be asked to sign in again
3. Update your email address to use @iu.edu and press the Save button
Alternative Press Index
Bibliographic database of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from international alternative, radical, and leftist periodicals.

Focus is on the practice and theory of socialism, national liberation, labor, Indigenous Peoples, LGBT, feminism, ecology, democracy, and anarchism.
Archives of Sexuality and Gender
Provides access to materials exploring important aspects of LGBTQ life. Includes periodicals, newsletters, manuscripts, government records, organizational papers, correspondence, an international selection of posters, and other primary source materials.
Access to module 6: Community and Identity in North America available through June 12, 2026 via the Gale Accelerate Program, an evidence based acquisition model.

Includes access to six modules: LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 1; LGBTQ History Since 1940, part 2 ; Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century ; International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture ; L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale de France Digital Archive ; Community and Identity in North America.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
Bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. Includes more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia.

This resource covers a wide range of topics including acculturation, archaeology, education, Ethnohistory, and economic development, folklore, the gaming industry, missions, mythology, religion, and tribal governments.
Gender: Identity and Social Change
Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Includes sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

Material has been sourced from across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Key areas represented in the material include: employment and labor, education, government and legislation, the body, domesticity and the family. Includes records from men’s and women’s organisations and pressure groups, detailing twentieth-century lobbying and activism on a wide array of issues to reveal developing gender relations and prevalent challenges.
Gender Studies Database
Citations to articles, books, conference papers, pamphlets, dissertations and other publications about gender inequality, masculinity, post-feminism, and gender identity.

Gender Studies Database provides indexing and abstracts covering the full spectrum of gender-related scholarship. It offers over a million records from scholarly and popular publications, including journals, books, conference papers and theses.
GenderWatch
Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.

GenderWatch is a full text database of nearly 400 periodicals and other publications that focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas. Publications include academic and scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, booklets and pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government, and special reports.
Indigenous Peoples of North America
Covers the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. The archive includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs. Includes access to Part I and Part II: The Indian Rights Association, 1882-1986.
LGBTQ+ Library Catalog
The LGBTQ+ Library Catalog contains materials pertaining to asexual, bisexual, gay, intersex, lesbian, transgender, and queer issues. These resources include books, videos, CDs, and periodicals. This collection is intended to be a resource for both research and entertainment.

The LGBTQ+ Library provides lending services to the entire community; anyone can register to become a patron with a photo ID.
LGBTQ+ Source
Index citations and selected full-text literature in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies

Includes a variety of scholarly, popular and regional resources, journals, books, magazines and more.
LGBT Thought and Culture
LGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.

Online Resources

Selection of resources freely available online

Queer Indigenous Poetics (ANMLY)

Lists of Resources & Readings

Lists of recommended titles from online sources

Queer Native Pride 2022 (Letterboxd)

Indigenous Representation in Media

Welcome, we're glad you're here! In this feature, we will explore the representation of Indigenous people, specifically Native Americans, in media. Though recent years have seen an increase in media by and featuring Indigenous creators and actors, there is still much work to be done—a recent study found that less than one-quarter of one percent of all speaking characters in 1,600 top films of the past 16 years were Native American. In this guide, we will explore the history of Indigenous representation, beginning with early depictions in Hollywood and Wild West shows before moving into contemporary topics such as sports mascots, art, literature, and film.

Click through the tabs at the top of this box to find a variety of resources on each of these topics. We hope that this guide will be useful to students, researchers, and anyone interested in learning more about Native representation in society. Check out this video for an introduction on the topic:

Video: What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Native America. PBS Origins (2024). Tai Leclaire and experts track the past, present and future of Indigenous entertainment– and how the media and bias prevents Native people from telling their own stories.

For more resources, explore the following libguides:

Recommended Resources for Native & Indigenous Studies
Race, Migration, & Indigeneity
Indigenous Heritage & History Month (Media Studies)
Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (Pasifika) Heritage Month (Media Studies)
Indigenous Philosophies (Philosophy)
Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples (Gender Studies)

And check out these articles, poems, stories, and clips:

Native American characters are nearly invisible in top films (Report by USC Annenberg)
How to Write the Great American Indian Novel (Poem by Sherman Alexie)
"Indian Humor" (Short Story by Vine DeLoria, Jr)
Indigenous Representation Is Still Scarce in Hollywood: ‘We Need More Native Stories’ (Crystal Echo Hawk)
Native American imagery is everywhere but understanding lags behind (PBS NewsHour)
Reclaiming Representations & Interrupting the Cycle of Bias Against Native Americans (Arianne E. Eason, Laura M. Brady, and Stephanie A. Fryberg)

American Indians and the Mass Media by Meta G. Carstarphen, John P. Sanchez (Editors)
ISBN: 9780806142340

Publication Date: 2012-04-06

Mention "American Indian," and the first image that comes to most people's minds is likely to be a figment of the American mass media: A war-bonneted chief. The Land O' Lakes maiden. Most American Indians in the twenty-first century live in urban areas, so why do the mass media still rely on Indian imagery stuck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How can more accurate views of contemporary Indian cultures replace such stereotypes? These and similar questions ground the essays collected in American Indians and the Mass Media, which explores Native experience and the mainstream media's impact on American Indian histories, cultures, and communities. Including discussion questions for each essay and an extensive bibliography, American Indians and the Mass Media is a unique educational resource.
American Indians and Popular Culture by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman (Editor)
ISBN: 9780313379901

Publication Date: 2012-02-22

Americans are still fascinated by the romantic notion of the "noble savage," yet know little about the real Native peoples of North America. The two-volume American Indians and Popular Culture seeks to help readers understand American Indians by analyzing their relationships with the popular culture of the United States and Canada. This work offers a comprehensive guide to the important issues facing Native peoples today. Analyses draw from many disciplines and include many voices, ranging from surveys of movies and discussions of Native authors to first-person accounts from Native perspectives.
Native Acts: Indian performance, 1603-1832 by Joshua David Bellin, Laura L. Mielke (Editors)
ISBN: 9780803226326

Publication Date: 2012-01-01

Long before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be "American." And for just as long, observers have largely overlooked the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. It is precisely this neglected notion of Native Americans "playing Indian" that Native Acts explores. These essays—by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists—provide the first broadly based chronicle of the performance of "Indianness" by Natives in North America from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century.
Mediating Indianness by Cathy Covell Waegner (Editor)
ISBN: 9781611861518

Publication Date: 2015-02-01

Mediating Indianness investigates a wide range of media--including print, film, theater, ritual dance, music, recorded interviews, photography, and treaty rhetoric--that have been used in exploitative, informative, educative, sustaining, protesting, or entertaining ways to negotiate Native American identities and images. The selection of the term Indianness is deliberate. It points to the intricate construction of ethnicity as filtered through media, despite frequent assertions of "authenticity." From William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's claim, extravagantly advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was staging "true-to-life" scenes from Indian life in his Wild West shows to contemporary Native hip-hop artist Quese IMC's announcement that his songs tell his people's "own history" and draw on their "true" culture, media of all types has served to promote disparate agendas claiming legitimacy.
Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria
ISBN: 9780300080674

Publication Date: 1999-09-10

This provocative book explores how white Americans have used their ideas about Native Americans to shape national identity in different eras--and how Indian people have reacted to these imitations of their native dress, language, and ritual. At the Boston Tea Party, colonial rebels played Indian in order to claim an aboriginal American identity. In the nineteenth century, Indian fraternal orders allowed men to rethink the idea of revolution, consolidate national power, and write nationalist literary epics. By the twentieth century, playing Indian helped nervous city dwellers deal with modernist concerns about nature, authenticity, Cold War anxiety, and various forms of relativism. Deloria suggests that imagining Indians has helped generations of white Americans define, mask, and evade paradoxes stemming from simultaneous construction and destruction of these native peoples.
Fellow tribesmen: the image of Native Americans, national identity, and Nazi ideology in Germany by Frank Usbeck
ISBN: 9781782386544

Publication Date: 2015-05-01

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around "Indianthusiasm." Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis' racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.
American Indians and the American Imaginary: cultural representation across the centuries by Pauline Turner Strong
ISBN: 9781612050478

Publication Date: 2012-11-30

American Indians and the American Imaginary considers the power of representations of Native Americans in American public culture. The book's wide-ranging case studies move from colonial captivity narratives to modern film, from the camp fire to the sports arena, from legal and scholarly texts to tribally-controlled museums and cultural centres. The author's ethnographic approach to what she calls "representational practices" focus on the emergence, use, and transformation of representations in the course of social life. Central themes include identity and otherness, indigenous cultural politics, and cultural memory, property, performance, citizenship and transformation.
Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European imaginary, 1900-2010 by James Mackay, David Stirrup (Editors)
ISBN: 9781137288813

Publication Date: 2012-12-28

This transnational collection discusses the use of Native American imagery in twentieth and twenty-first-century European culture. With examples ranging from Irish oral myth, through the pop image of Indians promulgated in pornography, to the philosophical appropriations of Ernst Bloch or the European far right, contributors illustrate the legend of "the Indian." Drawing on American Indian literary nationalism, postcolonialism, and transnational theories, essays demonstrate a complex nexus of power relations that seemingly allows European culture to build its own Native images, and ask what effect this has on the current treatment of indigenous peoples.
Messianic Fulfillments: staging indigenous salvation in America by Hayes Peter Mauro
ISBN: 9781496216267

Publication Date: 2019-08-01

In Messianic Fulfillments Hayes Peter Mauro examines the role of Christian evangelical movements in shaping American identity in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Christianity's fervent pursuit of Native American salvation, Mauro discusses Anglo American artists influenced by Christian millenarianism, natural history, and racial science in America. Messianic Fulfillments explores how Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and members of other Christian millenarian movements viewed Native peoples as childlike, primitive, and in desperate need of Christianization lest they fall into perpetual sin and oblivion and slip into eternal damnation. Mauro takes a critical look at a variety of visual mediums to illustrate how evangelical imagery influenced definitions of "Americaness," and how such images reinforced or challenged historically prevailing conceptions of what it means (and looks like) to be American.
(Un)Following in Winnetou's Footsteps by Sanja Runtić (Editor); Jana Maresová, Klára Kolinská (Editors)
ISBN: 9789819974207

Publication Date: 2024-01-04

This book examines the ways in which North American Indigenous identity has been (re)imagined, represented, and negotiated in German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, and Czech culture. Employing a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach and drawing on a range of media—from literature, comics, and film to photography, painting, and the performative arts—across different historical and cultural backgrounds, it aims to both contribute innovative scholarship on Indigenous studies in Europe and open a new avenue in the field by focusing on Central European settings that have received little or no critical attention to date. It seeks to provide a sound reference and lay the groundwork for future scholarship by opening up a conversation on how Indigenous identities have been portrayed in Central European literature and media texts.
Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, making Americans, 1880-1930 by Alan Trachtenberg
ISBN: 0374299757

Publication Date: 2004-11-03

A century ago, U.S. policy aimed to sever the tribal allegiances of Native Americans, limit their ancient liberties, and coercively prepare them for citizenship. At the same time millions of arriving immigrants sought their freedom by means of that same citizenship. In this subtle, eye-opening new work, Alan Trachtenberg argues that the two developments were, inevitably, juxtaposed: Indians and immigrants together preoccupied the public imagination, and together changed the idea of what it meant to be American. To begin with, programs of "Americanization" were organized for both groups, yet Indians were at the same time celebrated as noble "First Americans" and role models. Trachtenberg traces the peculiar effect of this implicit contradiction, with Indians themselves staging "The Song of Hiawatha" (which was also translated into Yiddish); Edward Curtis's poignant photographs memorializing vanishing heroism; and the Wanamaker department store making a fortune from commercialized versions of their once reviled cultures. In Shades of Hiawatha, Trachtenberg eloquently suggests that we must re-create America's tribal creation story in new ways if we are to reaffirm its beckoning promise of universal liberty.

Specific Figures

Re-Collecting Black Hawk: landscape, memory, and power in the American Midwest by Nicholas A. Brown; Sarah E. Kanouse
ISBN: 9780822944379

Publication Date: 2015-05-22

The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to "Black Hawk," surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre. Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.
Imagining Geronimo: an Apache icon in popular culture by William M. Clements
ISBN: 9780826353221

Publication Date: 2013-04-30

His face has appeared on T-shirts, postage stamps, jigsaw puzzles, posters, and an Andy Warhol print. A celebrity and a tourist attraction who attended three World's Fairs and rode in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade, he is a character in such classic westerns as Stagecoach and Broken Arrow. His name was used in the daring military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, and rumors about the location of his skull at a Yale University club have circulated for a century. These are just a few of the ways that the Apache shaman and war leader known to Anglo-Americans as Geronimo has remained alive in the mainstream American imagination and beyond. Clements's study samples the repertoire of Geronimo stories and examines Americans' changing sense of Geronimo in terms of traditional patterns--trickster, social bandit, patriot chief, sage elder, and culture hero. He looks at the ways in which Geronimo tried with mixed results to maintain control of his own image during more than twenty years in which he was a prisoner of war. Also examined are Geronimo's ostensible conversion to Christianity and his image in photography and literature.

Databases

North American Indian Thought and Culture
Brings together primary source resources related to the history and culture of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples, with the goal of creating a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them. Includes autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files.
Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
Bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. Includes more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia.

This resource covers a wide range of topics including acculturation, archaeology, education, Ethnohistory, and economic development, folklore, the gaming industry, missions, mythology, religion, and tribal governments.
Indigenous Peoples of North America
Covers the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. The archive includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs. Includes access to Part I and Part II: The Indian Rights Association, 1882-1986.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America
Collection of print journalism from Indigenous peoples of the US and Canada. Includes 9,000 individual editions from 1828-2016.

The bulk of the titles were founded in the 1970s, documenting the proliferation of Indigenous journalism that grew out of the occupation of Wounded Knee, meeting the demand for objective reporting from within Indian Country. Subjects covered include: self-determination era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation from an Indigenous perspective.
North American Indian Drama
256 full-text plays by 49 American Indian and First Nation playwrights of the 20th century.

Also includes information about the plays and their production, and biographical data, as well issues of the Native playwrights' newsletter. The collection represents groups across the United States and Canada , including Cherokee, Métis, Creek, Choctaw, Pembina Chippewa, Ojibway, Hawaiian/Samoan, Comanche, Cree, Navajo, Rappahannock, and others. newsletter.

Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature
The Collection of Native American Literature represents some of the earliest published writing by Native authors from the 18th century up to literature published today. As of 2022, an additional 1,700 books and other published works have been added to the collection, expanding both the chronological and intellectual scope of Native writing represented at Amherst.

Reference Sources

Native Americans in the Movies: portrayals from silent films to the present by Michael Hilger
ISBN: 9781442240018

Publication Date: 2015-10-16

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. Now organized alphabetically, the entries on individual films cover all relevant works made over the past century, and each entry contains much more information than those in the earlier book. Supplemented by appendixes of image portrayals, representations of nations, and a list of made-for-television movies, this volumeoffers readers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of hundreds of films in which Native American characters have appeared on the big screen.
Images of American Indians on Film by Gretchen M. Bataille; Charles L. Silet
ISBN: 0824087372

Publication Date: 1986-01-01

Filmography
Native American Literatures: an encyclopedia of works, characters, authors, and themes by Kathy J. Whitson
ISBN: 1576074811

Publication Date: 2002-08-18

From the earliest times, Native Americans developed a strong oral tradition. In the shift towards literacy, they began telling their stories through the medium of the written word. This text provides coverage of literature written by Native Americans from the 18th century to 1998. Kathy Whitson provides summaries of the stories and an analysis of the literature from the earliest writings of Samson Occum and George Copway to the latest works of contemporary quthors Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie. Entries cover authors, works, characters, and topics of historical or cultural interest.
Encyclopedia of Native American Artists by Deborah Everett; Elayne L. Zorn
Call Number: Wells Library - Research Coll. - Reference Reading Room

ISBN: 9780313337628

Publication Date: 2008-09-30

Indigenous North Americans have continuously made important contributions to the field of art in the U.S. and Canada, yet have been severely under-recognized and under-represented. Native artists work in diverse media, some of which are considered art (sculpture, painting, photography), while others have been considered craft (works on cloth, basketry, ceramics).Some artists feel strongly about working from a position as a Native artist, while others prefer to produce art not connected to a particular cultural tradition. This volume examines the lives and works of approximately 70 Native American artists, demonstrating the range of media, themes, and experiences of Native artists, and their influences on and by western culture. Eight pages of color plates, and black and white images throughout, display the diversity of work by these artists.
Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance by Jaye T. Darby; Courtney Elkin Mohler; Christy Stanlake
ISBN: 9781350035416

Publication Date: 2020-02-06

This foundational study offers an accessible introduction to Native American and First Nations theatre by drawing on critical Indigenous and dramaturgical frameworks. It is the first major survey book to introduce Native artists, plays, and theatres within their cultural, aesthetic, spiritual, and socio-political contexts. Native American and First Nations theatre weaves the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Native cultures into diverse, dynamic, contemporary plays that enact Indigenous human rights through the plays' visionary styles of dramaturgy and performance. The book begins by introducing readers to historical and cultural contexts helpful for reading Native American and First Nations drama, followed by an overview of Indigenous plays and theatre artists from across the century. Finally, it points forward to the ways in which Native American and First Nations theatre artists are continuing to create works that advocate for human rights through transformative Native performance practices. Addressing the complexities of this dynamic field, this volume offers critical grounding in the historical development of Indigenous theatre in North America, while analysing key Native plays and performance traditions from the mainland United States and Canada. In surveying Native theatre from the late 19th century until today, the authors explore the cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual concerns, as well as the political and revitalization efforts of Indigenous peoples. This book frames the major themes of the genre and identifies how such themes are present in the dramaturgy, rehearsal practices, and performance histories of key Native scripts.

Wild West shows were widely-popular traveling vaudeville performances that existed in the United States and Europe from around 1870-1920. The shows depicted sensationalized events with romanticized stereotypes of cowboys, Plains Native Americans, outlaws, and animals in the American West. Native Americans, specifically, were often portrayed in a sensationalized and exploitative manner. Indigenous performers, primarily from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, were often hired by Wild West shows. During a time when the Office of Indian Affairs was intent on promoting forced assimilation, these shows, paradoxically, offered an opportunity for some Indigenous traditions to be documented and preserved. Additionally, many Native performers, especially in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, went on to act in silent films of the time.

For more, see the following:

Wahl, Mariah and Yon, Angela, "Native Performance and Agency in the Wild West Show" (2021). Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library. 188. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpml/188
Bold, C. (2021). Indigenous Presence in Vaudeville and Early Cinema. JCMS: Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, 60(2), 157–162. https://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1353/cj.2021.0008
Scarangella Mcnenly, L. (2014). Foe, Friend, or Critic: Native Performers with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and Discourses of Conquest and Friendship in Newspaper Reports. American Indian Quarterly, 38(2), 143–176. https://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.5250/amerindiquar.38.2.0143
How American West Reenactments Restore and Rewrite History (Kealey Boyd, Hyperallergic)
Wikipedia, "Wild West Shows"

"Vaudeville Indians" on Global Circuits: 1880s-1930s by Christine Bold
ISBN: 9780300257052

Publication Date: 2022-06-30

Drawing from little-known archives, Christine Bold brings to light forgotten histories of Indigenous performers in vaudeville and, by extension, popular culture and modernity. Vaudeville was both a forerunner of modern mass entertainment and a rich site of popular Indigenous performance and notions of Indianness at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the stories of artists Native to Turtle Island (North America) performing across the continent and around the world, Bold illustrates a network of more than 300 Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying entertainers, from Will Rogers to Go-won-go Mohawk to Princess Chinquilla, who upend vaudeville's received history. These fascinating stories cumulatively reveal vaudeville as a space in which the making of western modernity both denied and relied on living Indigenous presence, and in which Indigenous artists negotiated agency and stereotypes through vaudeville performance.
Playing Ourselves: interpreting Native histories at historic reconstructions by Laura Peers
ISBN: 9780759110618

Publication Date: 2007-03-15

Playing Ourselves explores the ongoing trend for reconstructed historic sites to broaden their interpretation of early America by adding Native American interpreters to staffs that formerly presented from a primarily European perspective, examining the reasons behind this shift and the effects it has on visitors and performers. Peers uses her detailed observations of five historic reconstructions to both examine the theoretical aspects of their cultural performance and advise interpreters and their managers on how to more effectively present the inclusive history to which they aspire.
Crafting 'the Indian': knowledge, desire and play in Indianist reenactment by Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
ISBN: 9780857453440

Publication Date: 2012-04-01

In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. "Indian hobbyists" dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.
Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 by L. G. Moses
ISBN: 0826316859

Publication Date: 1996-04-01

Between the 1880s and the 1930s Show Indians depicted their warfare with whites and portrayed scenes from their culture in productions that traveled throughout the United States and Europe and drew huge audiences--well over a million people in 1885 alone. The view that they were tipi-and-war-bonnet Indians exploited by entrepreneurs like Buffalo Bill was commonly held by reformers of the 1890s, and has been uncritically accepted ever since. This book is the first to examine the lives and experiences of Show Indians from their own point of view. Their dances, re-enactments of battles, and village encampments, the author demonstrates, helped preserve the Indians' cultural heritage through decades of forced assimilation. L. G. Moses reveals the complexity of the enterprise and the numerous--and often contradictory--meanings the shows had for Indians, entrepreneurs, audiences, and government officials.
Native Performers in Wild West Shows: from Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney by Linda Scarangella McNenly
ISBN: 9780806142814

Publication Date: 2012-10-04

Now that the West is no longer so wild, it's easy to dismiss Buffalo Bill Cody's world-famous Wild West shows as promoters of stereotypes and clichés. But looking at this unique American genre from the Native American point of view provides thought-provoking new perspectives. Focusing on the experiences of Native performers and performances, Linda Scarangella McNenly begins her examination of these spectacles with Buffalo Bill's 1880s pageants. Drawing on interviews with contemporary performers and descendants of twentieth-century performers, McNenly elicits insider perspectives to suggest new interpretations of their performances and experiences; she also uses these insights to analyze archival materials, especially photographs. Some Native performers saw Wild West shows not necessarily as demeaning, but rather as opportunities--for travel, for employment, for recognition, and for the preservation and expression of important cultural traditions. Today, Native performers at Buffalo Bill Days in Sheridan, Wyoming, wear their own regalia and choreograph their own performances. McNenly's study reveals how Native peoples have adapted and re-created Wild West shows to express their own identities and to advance their own goals.
Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the tragedy of show business by Eric Vuillard; Ann Jefferson (Translator)
ISBN: 9781782272212

Publication Date: 2017-10-31

Buffalo Bill was the prince of show business. His spectacular Wild West shows were performed to packed houses across the world, holding audiences spellbound with their grand re-enactments of tales from the American frontier. For Bill gave the crowds something they'd never seen before: real-life Indians. This astonishing work of historical re-imagining tells the story of the Native Americans swallowed up by Buffalo Bill's great entertainment machine. Told with beauty, compassion and anger, Sorrow of the Earth shows us tragedy turned into a circus act, history into sham, truth into a spectacle more powerful than reality itself. Could any of us turn away?
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Warriors: a photographic history by Gertrude Käsebier by Michelle Anne Delaney
ISBN: 9780061129773

Publication Date: 2007-09-25

For the first time ever, here is renowned photographer Gertrude KÄsebier's collection of photographs of Native American performers from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the turn of the century. One hundred years later, KÄsebier's portraits remain significant visual records into the lives of these Sioux performers and their nation. Her striking photographs capture the strength and character of each individual, documenting the complexity of true warriors playing a staged version of themselves. In 1898, KÄsebier wrote to William F. Cody requesting to photograph Indians performing in his Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. Her photographs proved poignant. KÄsebier developed long relationships with several of the Indians, corresponding with a few for many years. Examples of these letters appear in the volume, as well as drawings done by Indians waiting in her studio, photographs of Dakota Sioux on their reservation, little-known historical background, and Wild West show memorabilia, including rare pages from Buffalo Bill's original route book.
Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: performing the Wild West in German festivals by A. Dana Weber
ISBN: 9780299323509

Publication Date: 2019-10-29

"Nineteenth-century writer Karl May wrote novels about a fictionalized American Wild West that count among the most popular books of German literature to this day. His stories left an imprint on German culture, resulting in a variety of Wild West festivals featuring Native Americans and frontier settlers. These Karl May festivals are hosted widely throughout German-speaking countries today. This book, based on years of fieldwork observing and studying the festivals, plays, events, and groups that comprise this subculture, addresses a larger, timely issue: cultural transfer and appropriations. Are Germans dressing up in American Indian costumes paying tribute or offending the cultures they are representing? Avoiding simplistic answers, A. Dana Weber considers the complexity of cultural enactments as they relate both to the distinctly German phenomenon as well as to larger questions of cultural representations in American and European live performance traditions."

The history of Native representation in film goes back to the beginning of Hollywood itself. This page contains articles and scholarly books on the topic of Native Americans in film. In the next tab, you will find academic books on specific stereotypes present in Native representation across mediums. In the "Film" tab, you will find cinema created by Indigenous artists featuring Indigenous actors. For an introduction to indigenous cinema, see the video below:

Video: Indigenous Cinema: A Brief History of Native American representation on film (Ray Loyd, Alamo Drafthouse, 2023).

Articles

Portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood: Analyzing Representation and Impact (Muwekma Ohlone Tribe)
Just One Protagonist in the Top 1,600 Theatrical Films From the Last 16 Years Was Native American, Study Finds (Rebecca Sun, The Hollywood Reporter)
The Movement Creating Better Native American Representation in Film (Angie Jaime, TeenVogue)
From Wild West Shows to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Revisit the History of Native Americans on the Silver Screen (Sandra Hale Schulman, Smithsonian Magazine)
From ‘Reservation Dogs’ to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Indigenous Creatives Feel ‘Hopeful’ About Improved Native Representation in Hollywood (Kristen Lopez, Variety)
Why 2023 Was the Year Indigenous Stories Finally Broke Through in Hollywood (Kate Nelson, W Magazine)

Reports

Native American Representation Across 1,600 Popular Films: The Lily Gladstone Effect
Dr. Stacy L. Smith & The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (2023)
The Time is Now: The Power of Native Representation in Entertainment
A Guide for Industry Professionals by Illuminative

Books

Native Americans on Film: conversations, teaching, and theory by M. Elise Marubbio, Eric L. Buffalohead (Editors)
ISBN: 9780813136653

Publication Date: 2013-02-22

The film industry and mainstream popular culture are notorious for promoting stereotypical images of Native Americans: the noble and ignoble savage, the pronoun-challenged sidekick, the ruthless warrior, the female drudge, the princess, the sexualized maiden, the drunk, and others. Over the years, Indigenous filmmakers have both challenged these representations and moved past them, offering their own distinct forms of cinematic expression. Native Americans on Film draws inspiration from the Indigenous film movement, bringing filmmakers into an intertextual conversation with academics from a variety of disciplines. The resulting dialogue opens a myriad of possibilities for engaging students with ongoing debates: What is Indigenous film? Who is an Indigenous filmmaker? What are Native filmmakers saying about Indigenous film and their own work? This thought-provoking text offers theoretical approaches to understanding Native cinema, includes pedagogical strategies for teaching particular films, and validates the different voices, approaches, and worldviews that emerge across the movement.
Decolonizing the Lens of Power: indigenous films in North America by Kerstin Knopf
ISBN: 9789042025431

Publication Date: 2008-01-01

This is the first book that comprehensively examines Indigenous filmmaking in North America, as it analyzes in detail a variety of representative films by Canadian and US-American Indigenous filmmakers: two films that contextualize the oral tradition, three short films, and four dramatic films. The book explores how members of colonized groups use the medium of film as a means for cultural and political expression and thus enter the dominant colonial film discourse and create an answering discourse. The theoretical framework is developed as an interdisciplinary approach, combining postcolonialism, Indigenous studies, and film studies. As Indigenous people are gradually taking control over the imagemaking process in the area of film and video, they cease being studied and described objects and become subjects who create self-controlled images of Indigenous cultures.
Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American film and video by Beverly R. Singer
ISBN: 0816631603

Publication Date: 2001-10-01

Native Americans have thrown themselves into filmmaking since the mid-1970s, producing hundreds of films. This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of Native American filmmaking and video production.
Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film by Neva Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
ISBN: 0803277903

Publication Date: 1999-09-01

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. Celluloid Indians is an accessible, insightful overview of Native American representation in film over the past century. Beginning with the birth of the movie industry, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick carefully traces changes in the cinematic depictions of Native peoples and identifies cultural and historical reasons for those changes. In the late twentieth century, Native Americans have been increasingly involved with writing and directing movies about themselves, and Kilpatrick places appropriate emphasis on the impact that Native American screenwriters and filmmakers have had on the industry.
Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, visual sovereignty, and representations of Native Americans in film by Michelle H. Raheja
ISBN: 9780803211261

Publication Date: 2011-01-01

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. Native actors, directors, and spectators have had a part in creating these cinematic representations and have thus complicated the dominant, and usually negative, messages about Native peoples that films portray. In Reservation Reelism, Raheja examines the history of these Native actors, directors, and spectators, reveals their contributions, and attempts to create positive representations in film that reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.
Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American film by Lee Schweninger
ISBN: 9780820345147

Publication Date: 2013-05-01

In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera.
Hollywood's Native Americans: stories of identity and resistance by Angela Aleiss; Jan-Christopher Horak (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781440871566

Publication Date: 2022-04-06

This book highlights the contributions and careers of Native Americans who have carved impressive careers in Hollywood, from the silent film era of the early 1900s to the present, becoming advocates for their heritage. Native artists have impacted movies for more than a century, but until recently their presence had passed largely unrecognized. From the silent era to contemporary movies, this book features leading Native American actors whose voices have reached a broad audience and are part of the larger conversation about the exploitation of underrepresented people in Hollywood. The text explores how a "pan-Indian heritage" that applies to all tribes in terms of spirituality, historical trauma, and a version of ceremony and storytelling have shaped these performers' movie identities.
American Indian Image Makers of Hollywood by Frank Javier Garcia
ISBN: 9781476678139

Publication Date: 2020-01-01

Images from movies and film have had a powerful influence in how Native Americans are seen. In many cases, they have been represented as violent, uncivilized, and an impediment to progress and civilization. This book analyzes the representation of Native Americans in cinematic images from the 1890s to the present day, deconstructing key films in each decade. This book also addresses efforts by Native Americans to improve and have a part in their filmic representations, including mini-biographies of important indigenous filmmakers and performers.
Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies by Angela Aleiss
ISBN: 9780275983963

Publication Date: 2005-05-30

The image in Hollywood movies of savage Indians attacking white settlers represents only one side of a very complicated picture. In fact sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans stood alongside those of hostile Indians in the silent films of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, and flourished during the early 1930s with Hollywood's cycle of pro-Indian adventures. Decades later, the stereotype became even more complicated, as films depicted the savagery of whites (The Searchers) in contrast to the more peaceful Indian (Broken Arrow). By 1990 the release of Dances with Wolves appeared to have recycled the romantic and savage portrayals embedded in early cinema. In this new study, author Angela Aleiss traces the history of Native Americans on the silver screen, and breaks new ground by drawing on primary sources such as studio correspondence, script treatments, trade newspapers, industry censorship files, and filmmakers' interviews to reveal how and why Hollywood created its Indian characters.
We Never Hunted Buffalo: the emergence of Native American cinema by Johanna Feier
ISBN: 9783643109545

Publication Date: 2011-02-17

This study deals with the filmic self-representation of Native Americans. It focuses on five contemporary features directed by indigenes, and it deconstructs the ways in which they respond to the legacy of the Hollywood Indian. By telling their own cinematic stories, Native Americans have taken up the battle against the century-old one-dimensional characterizations of America's original peoples in the mainstream culture. These indigenous filmmakers highlight the variety and complexity of modern Native America.
'Injuns!': Native Americans in the movies by Edward Buscombe
ISBN: 9781861892799

Publication Date: 2006-10-02

The indispensable sage, fierce enemy, silent sidekick: the role of Native Americans in film has been largely confined to identities defined by the "white" perspective. Many studies have analyzed these simplistic stereotypes of Native American cultures in film, but few have looked beyond the Hollywood Western for further examples. Buscombe opens with a historical survey of American Westerns and their controversial portrayals of Native Americans: the wild redmen of nineteenth-century Wild West shows, the more sympathetic depictions of Native Americans in early Westerns, and the shift in the American film industry in the 1920s to hostile characterizations of Indians. Questioning the implicit assumptions of prevailing critiques, Buscombe looks abroad to reveal a distinctly different portrait of Native Americans. He focuses on the lesser known Westerns made in Germany--such as East Germany's Indianerfilme, in which Native Americans were Third World freedom fighters battling against Yankee imperialists--as well as the films based on the novels of nineteenth-century German writer Karl May. Buscombe offers nothing less than a wholly original and readable account of the cultural images of Native Americans through history and around the globe, revealing new and complex issues in our understanding of how oppressed peoples have been represented in mass culture.
Smoke Signals: native cinema rising by Joanna Hearne
ISBN: 9780803219274

Publication Date: 2012-12-01

Smoke Signals is a historical milestone in Native American filmmaking. 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. Embedded in Smoke Signals's universal story of familial loss and renewal are uniquely Indigenous perspectives about political sovereignty, Hollywood's long history of misrepresentation, and the rise of Indigenous cinema across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Joanna Hearne's work foregrounds the voices of the filmmakers and performers--in interviews with Alexie and director Chris Eyre, among others--to explore the film's audiovisual and narrative strategies for speaking to multiple audiences. Focusing on the production and reception of the film and issues of performance, authenticity, and environmental history within the film's text and context, this in-depth introduction and analysis expands our understanding and deepens our enjoyment of a Native cinema landmark.
Native Recognition: indigenous cinema and the western by Joanna Hearne
ISBN: 9781438443973

Publication Date: 2012-12-30

In Native Recognition, Joanna Hearne persuasively argues for the central role of Indigenous image-making in the history of American cinema. Across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences, yet both the specificity and range of this Native participation have often been obscured by the on-screen, larger-than-life images of Indians in the Western. Not only have Indigenous images mattered to the Western, but Westerns have also mattered to Indigenous filmmakers as they subvert mass culture images of supposedly "vanishing" Indians, repurposing the commodity forms of Hollywood films to envision Native intergenerational continuity. Native Recognition brings together a wide range of little-known productions, from the silent films of James Young Deer, to recovered prints of the 1928 Ramona and the 1972 House Made of Dawn, to the experimental and feature films of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre. Using international archival research and close visual analysis, Hearne expands our understanding of the complexity of Native presence in cinema both on screen and through the circuits of film production and consumption.
Invisible Natives: myth and identity in the American western by Armando José Prats
ISBN: 0801439612

Publication Date: 2002-05-06

This incisive, provocative, and wide-ranging book casts a critical eye on the representation of Native Americans in the Western film since the genre's beginnings. Armando José Prats shows the ways in which film reflects cultural transformations in the course of America's historical encounter with "the Indian." He also explores the relation between the myth of conquest and American history. Among the films he discusses at length are Northwest Passage, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Hombre, Hondo, Ulzana's Raid, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dances With Wolves. Throughout, Prats emphasizes the irony that the Western seems to be able to represent Native Americans only by rendering them absent. In addition, he points out that Native Americans who appear in Westerns are almost always male; Native women rarely figure into the plot, and are often portrayed by white women rendered "Indian" by narrative necessity. Invisible Natives offers an intriguing view of the possibilities and consequences--as well as the historical sources and cultural origins--of the Western's strategies for evading the actual portrayal of Native Americans.
Picturing Indians: Native Americans in film, 1941-1960 by Liza Black
ISBN: 9780803296800

Publication Date: 2020-10-01

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 midcentury 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." Liza Black offers a rare and overlooked perspective on American cinema history by giving voice to creators of movie Indians--the stylists, public relations workers, and the actors themselves. In exploring the inherent racism in sensationalizing Native culture for profit, Black also chronicles the little-known attempts of studios to generate cultural authenticity and historical accuracy in their films. Consulting new primary sources, Black has crafted an interdisciplinary experience showcasing what it meant to "play Indian" in post-World War II Hollywood.
Reverse Shots: indigenous film and media in an international context by Wendy Gay Pearson, Susan Knabe (Editors)
ISBN: 9781554583355

Publication Date: 2014-12-09

From the dawn of cinema, images of Indigenous peoples have been dominated by Hollywood stereotypes and often negative depictions from elsewhere around the world. With the advent of digital technologies, however, many Indigenous peoples are working to redress the imbalance in numbers and counter the negativity. The contributors to Reverse Shots offer a unique scholarly perspective on current work in the world of Indigenous film and media. Chapters focus primarily on Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and cover areas as diverse as the use of digital technology in the creation of Aboriginal art, the healing effects of Native humour in First Nations documentaries, and the representation of the pre-colonial in films from Australia, Canada, and Norway.
Indianizing Film: decolonization, the Andes, and the question of technology by Freya Schiwy
ISBN: 9780813545394

Publication Date: 2009-04-22

Latin American indigenous media production has recently experienced a noticeable boom, specifically in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Indianizing Film zooms in on a selection of award-winning and widely influential fiction and docudrama shorts, analyzing them in the wider context of indigenous media practices and debates over decolonizing knowledge. Within this framework, Freya Schiwy approaches questions of gender, power, and representation. Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.

Articles on Native American stereotypes in entertainment:

5 Common Native American Stereotypes in Film and Television (Nadra Kareem Nittle, ThoughtCo.)
What's up, Tiger Lily? Peter Pan and the Native American stereotype that has certainly grown old (Alan Yuhas, The Guardian)
These costumes objectify Native American women. Retailers won’t stop selling them (Nadra Nittle, Vox)
Why the Myth of the “Savage Indian” Persists (Virginia McLaurin, Sapiens)
Melton, Jennifer K., "This Ain't Dances with Salmon: Native American Tropes in Dime Novels and Western Film Referencing Dances with Wolves" (2021). Communication Theses. Paper 4. http://hdl.handle.net/10950/3771

Fighting Colonialism with Hegemonic Culture: native American appropriation of Indian stereotypes by Maureen Trudelle Schwarz
ISBN: 9781438445939

Publication Date: 2013-01-01

How and why do American Indians appropriate images of Indianness for their own purposes? How do these representatives promote and sometimes challenge sovereignty for indigenous people locally and nationally? American Indians have recently taken on a new relationship with the hegemonic culture designed to oppress them. Rather than protesting it, they are currently earmarking images from it and using them for their own ends. This provocative book adds and interesting twist and nuance to our understanding of the five-hundred year interchange between American Indians and others. A host of examples of how American Indians use the so-called "White Man's Indian" reveal the key images and issues selected most frequently by the representatives of Native organizations or Native-owned businesses in the late twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first century to appropriate Indianness.
American Indians at the Margins: racist stereotypes and their impacts on native peoples by H. Roy Kaplan
ISBN: 9781476684901

Publication Date: 2022-05-30

Since the earliest days of America, racist imagery has been used to create harmful stereotypes of the indigenous people. In this book, the conflict between invading European white settlers and the indigenous groups who occupied the land that became the United States is described through the context of race and racism. Using depictions from art, literature, radio, cinema and television, the origin and persistence of such stereotypes are explained, and their debilitating effects on the well-being of Indians are presented. This text also explores their accomplishments in attempts to maintain their sovereignty, dignity and respect.
Born for the Shade: stereotypes of the Native American in United States literature and the visual arts, 1776-1894 by Klaus Lubbers
ISBN: 9051836287

Publication Date: 1994-01-01

This volume examines the ways in which attempts to define and delimit American nationhood effected imaginative and documentary conceptualizations of the Native American population. Far-reaching in its scope, both in terms of the period covered - roughly the period from the Declaration of Independence to the closing of the frontier - and in terms of the variety and kinds of documents examined, this study calls attention to the cultural and generic restraints that prevented visual and literary artists, as well as statesmen and community leaders, from adopting any position toward Native Americans other than a prejudicial one.
Native American Identities: from stereotype to archetype in art and literature by Scott B. Vickers
ISBN: 0826319319

Publication Date: 1998-01-01

Issues of identity and authenticity present perennial challenges to both Native Americans and critics of their art. Vickers examines the long history of dehumanizing depictions of Native Americans while discussing such purveyors of stereotypes as the Puritans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Hollywood. These stereotypes abetted a national policy robbing Indians of their cultural identity. As a contrast to these, he examines the work of white authors and artists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Oliver La Farge, the Taos Society of Artists, and Frank Waters, who created more archetypal fictional Indian characters.
#NotYourPrincess: voices of Native American women by Lisa Charleyboy, Mary Beth Leatherdale (Editors)
ISBN: 9781554519576

Publication Date: 2017-09-12

Whether looking back to a troubled past or welcoming a hopeful future, the powerful voices of Indigenous women across North America resound in this book. In the same style as the best-selling Dreaming in Indian, #NotYourPrincess presents an eclectic collection of poems, essays, interviews, and art that combine to express the experience of being a Native woman. Stories of abuse, humiliation, and stereotyping are countered by the voices of passionate women making themselves heard and demanding change. Sometimes angry, often reflective, but always strong, the women in this book will give teen readers insight into the lives of women who, for so long, have been virtually invisible.
Our Indian Princess: subverting the stereotype by Nancy Marie Mithlo
ISBN: 9781930618978

Publication Date: 2009-06-10

Are images and representations central to understanding Native Americans? How do Native artists, as producers of visual culture, respond to what art critic Lucy Lippard has called "the overwhelming burdens" of Indian art? In this path breaking study, anthropologist Nancy Marie Mithlo examines the power of stereotypes, the utility of pan-Indianism, the significance of realist ideologies, and the employment of alterity in Native American arts. Addressing the question of how visual referents communicate across cultural divides, she aims to deconstruct the common understanding of stereotypes and suggest that they may play a role in conveying otherness. By using concepts such as "strategic essentialism" and "conventional representations," she analyzes the ways in which disparate groups employ damaged knowledges in trying to communicate their own values and those of contrasting groups, especially when other conceptual tools are unavailable.
American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children by Arlene B. Hirschfelder; Paulette Fairbanks Molin; Yvonne Wakim; Michael Dorris (Foreword by)
ISBN: 0810836122

Publication Date: 1999-07-01

The world of contemporary American infants and young children is saturated with inappropriate images of American Indians. American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children reveals and discusses these images and cultural stereotypes through writings like Kathy Kerner's previously unpublished essay on Thanksgiving and an essay by Dr. Cornell Pewewardy on Disney's Pocahontas film. This edition incorporates new writings and recent developments, such as a chronology documenting changes associated with the mascot issue, along with information on state legislation. Other new material incorporates powerful commentary by Native American veterans, who speak to the issue of stereotyping against their people in the military. Also includes a new expanded annotated bibliography.
Gambling on Authenticity: gaming, the noble savage, and the not-so-new Indian by Becca Gercken, Julie Pelletier (Editors)
ISBN: 9781611862560

Publication Date: 2017-11-01

In the decades since the passing of the Pamajewon ruling in Canada and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in the United States, gaming has come to play a crucial role in how Indigenous peoples are represented and read by both Indians and non-Indians alike. This collection presents a transnational examination of North American gaming and considers the role Indigenous artists and scholars play in producing depictions of Indigenous gambling. In an effort to offer a more complete and nuanced picture of Indigenous gaming in terms of sign and strategy than currently exists in academia or the general public, Gambling on Authenticity crosses both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. The case studies presented offer a historically and politically nuanced analysis of gaming that collectively creates an interdisciplinary reading of gaming informed by both the social sciences and the humanities.

Video: Not Your Mascot: Native Americans and Team Mascots. Twin Cities PBS (2019). Professor of Ojibwe and Native American author Dr. Anton Treuer gives the history of the word "Redskin" and why humans shouldn't be sports mascots in general.

Congressional Hearings

Stolen identities : the impact of racist stereotypes on indigenous people : hearing before the Committee on Indian Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session (May 5, 2011)
Civil rights and the impact of Native American names, symbols, and imagery in school mascots: A briefing report of the Nebraska Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2021)
More than mascots: a resource guide for ensuring native youth experience safe and welcoming school environments
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education, 2016.

Documentaries

Imagining the Indian by Ben West, Aviva Kempner
Publication Date: 2022

Exploring the exploitation of Native American culture in sports, including the use of names and logos that have been adopted by teams and franchises with no apparent connection to the tribes and peoples whose cultures they are appropriating. Available to stream on Apple TV.
Fighting Indians by Mark Cooley, Derek Ellis, Ryan Griffis (directors)
Publication Date: 2021

On May 16th, 2019, The State of Maine made history by passing LD 944 An Act to Ban Native American Mascots in All Public Schools, the first legislation of its kind in the country. For Tribal Nations in Maine, the landmark legislation marked an end to a decades long struggle to educate the public on the harms of Native American mascotry. Fighting Indians chronicles the last and most contentious holdout in that struggle, the homogeneously white Skowhegan High School, known for decades as “The Home of the Indians.” This is the story of a small New England community forced to reckon with its identity, its sordid history, and future relationship with its indigenous neighbors. It is a story of a small town divided against the backdrop of a nation divided where the “mascot debate” exposes centuries old abuses while asking if reconciliation is possible.
In Whose Honor? by Jay Rosenstein
Publication Date: 1997

The Cleveland Indians. Washington Redskins. Atlanta Braves. What's wrong with American Indian sports mascots? This moving, award-winning film is the first of its kind to address that subject. In Whose Honor? takes a critical look at the long-running practice of "honoring" American Indians as mascots and nicknames in sports. It follows the story of Native American mother Charlene Teters, and her transformation into the leader some are calling the "Rosa Parks of American Indians" as she struggles to protect her cultural symbols and identity. In Whose Honor? looks at the issues of racism, stereotypes, minority representation and the powerful effects of mass-media imagery, and the extent to which one university will go to defend and justify its mascot.

Books

Mascot Nation: the controversy over Native American representations in sports by Andrew C. Billings; Jason Edward Black
ISBN: 9780252042096

Publication Date: 2018-10-08

The issue of Native American mascots in sports raises passions but also a raft of often-unasked questions. Which voices get a hearing in an argument? What meanings do we ascribe to mascots? Who do these Indians and warriors really represent? Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black go beyond the media bluster to reassess the mascot controversy. Their multi-dimensional study delves into the textual, visual, and ritualistic and performative aspects of sports mascots. Their original research, meanwhile, surveys sports fans themselves on their thoughts when a specific mascot faces censure. The result is a book that merges critical-cultural analysis with qualitative data to offer an innovative approach to understanding the camps and fault lines on each side of the issue, the stakes in mascot debates, whether common ground can exist and, if so, how we might find it.
The Native American Mascot Controversy by C. Richard King (Editor)
ISBN: 9780810867314

Publication Date: 2010-10-11

Sports mascots have been a tradition for decades. Along with the usual lions and tigers, many schools are represented by Native American images. Once considered a benign practice, numerous studies have proved just the opposite: that the use of Native American mascots in educational institutions has perpetuated a shameful history of racial insensitivity. The Native American Mascot Controversy provides an overview of the issues that have been associated with this topic for the past 40 years. The book provides a comprehensive and critical account of the issues surrounding the controversy, explicating the importance of anti-Indian racism in education and how it might be challenged.
Contesting Constructed Indian-Ness: the intersection of the frontier, masculinity, and whiteness in native American mascot representations by Michael Taylor
ISBN: 9780739178645

Publication Date: 2013-05-16

Native American sports team mascots represent a contemporary problem for modern Native American people. The ideas embedded in the mascot representations, however, are as old as the ideas constructed about the Indian since contact between the peoples of Western and the Eastern hemispheres. Such ideas conceived about Native Americans go hand-in-hand with the machinations of colonialism and conquest of these people. This research looks at how such ideas inform the construction of identity of white males from historic experiences with Native Americans. Notions of "playing Indian" and of "going Native" are precipitated from these historic contexts such that in the contemporary sense of considering Native Americans, popular culture ideas dress Native Americans in feathers and buckskin in order to satisfy stereotypic expectations of Indian-ness.
Team Spirits: the Native American mascots controversy by C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood (Editors); Vine Deloria Jr. (Foreword by)
ISBN: 0803277989

Publication Date: 2001-02-01

The Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, Washington Redskins, Kansas City Chiefs, Florida State Seminoles, and so forth--these are just a few of the images and names popularly associated with Native Americans that are still used as mascots by professional sports teams, dozens of universities, and countless high schools. This practice, a troubling legacy of Native-Euro-American relations in the United States, has sparked heated debates and intense protests that continue to escalate. Team Spirits is the first comprehensive look at the Native American mascots controversy. In this work activists and academics explore the origins of Native American mascots, the messages they convey, and the reasons for their persistence into the twenty-first century. Also showcased are examples of successful opposition, including an end to Native American mascots at Springfield College and in Los Angeles public schools.
Indian Spectacle: college mascots and the anxiety of modern America by Jennifer Guiliano
ISBN: 9780813565552

Publication Date: 2015-04-02

Amid controversies surrounding the team mascot and brand of the Washington Redskins in the National Football League and the use of mascots by K-12 schools, Americans demonstrate an expanding sensitivity to the pejorative use of references to Native Americans by sports organizations at all levels. In Indian Spectacle, Jennifer Guiliano exposes the anxiety of American middle-class masculinity in relation to the growing commercialization of collegiate sports and the indiscriminate use of Indian identity as mascots. Indian Spectacle explores the ways in which white, middle-class Americans have consumed narratives of masculinity, race, and collegiate athletics through the lens of Indian-themed athletic identities, mascots, and music. Against a backdrop of the current level of the commercialization of collegiate sports, Guiliano recounts the history of the creation and spread of mascots and university identities and how athletes, coaches, band members, spectators, university alumni, faculty, and administrators, artists, writers, and members of local communities all have contributed to the dissemination of ideas of Indianness that is rarely rooted in native people's actual lives.
Redskins: Insult and brand by C. Richard King
ISBN: 9780803278646

Publication Date: 2016-03-01

The Washington Redskins franchise remains one of the most valuable in professional sports, in part because of its easily recognizable, popular, and profitable brand. And yet "redskins" is a derogatory name for American Indians. The number of grassroots campaigns to change the name has risen in recent years despite the current team owner's assertion that the team will never do so. Franchise owners counter criticism by arguing that the team name is positive and a term of respect and honor that many American Indians embrace. The NFL, for its part, actively defends the name and supports it in court. C. Richard King examines the history of the team's name, the evolution of the term "redskin," and the various ways in which people both support and oppose its use today. King's hard-hitting approach to the team's logo and mascot exposes the disturbing history of a moniker's association with the NFL--a multibillion-dollar entity that accepts public funds--as well as popular attitudes toward Native Americans today.
Beyond the Cheers by C. Richard King; Charles Fruehling Springwood
ISBN: 9780791450055

Publication Date: 2001-06-07

Focusing on half-time performances, commercialized stagings, media coverage, public panics, and political protests, Beyond the Cheers offers an ethnography, history, and social critique of racial spectacles in college sport. King and Springwood argue that collegiate revenue producing sports are created as a spectacle, driven by a range of contradictory meanings and exploitative practices. While Native Americans are viewed largely as empty or distorted images and African Americans are seen as both shining stars and 'troubled delinquents,' White Americans remain constant as spectators, coaches, administrators, journalists, and athletes, producing and consuming college sport, performing and policing, but seemingly unmarked as racial subjects. In consuming these spectacles, American sports fans learn to embrace inflated, contradictory, and distorted renderings of racial difference and the history of race relations in America.

This tab contains articles on Indigenous art, books on the history of Indigenous representation in art, academic books on Native American art and practices, and a small collection of exhibition catalogs and books highlighting Native American artists. We have also included a few videos featuring Native American artists and their practices:

Video: How A Native American Artisan Keeps The 4,500-Year-Old Practice Of Wampum Alive (Insider, 2021)

Articles

For This Indigenous Beadworker, Every Stitch ‘Is an Act of Resistance’ (Julia Carmel and Teri Greeves, New York Times)
That’s not Native American art. Or is it? (Sandra Knispel, University of Rochester)
Putting Interiors on Exteriors: Chip Thomas (Amelia Rina & Chip Thomas, Bomb)
An Indigenous Present: A Conversation with Jeffrey Gibson, Dyani White Hawk, and Jenelle Porter (Video, Whitney Museum of American Art)
Wendy Red Star on the Power of Indigenous Art (Josh T. France, aperture)
Interview with Indigenous artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Marcus Civin, Bomb)

Books: Histories of Native American Representation

The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: museums and native cultures by W. Richard West
ISBN: 9780295984599

Publication Date: 2004-07-01

Museums--along with books, newspapers, and Wild West shows in the 19th century, movies and television in the 20th--have shaped our perceptions of American Indians. This book brings together six prominent museum professionals--Native and non-Native--to examine the ways in which Indians and their cultures have been represented by museums in North America and to present new directions museums are already taking. Traditional museum exhibitions of Native American art and culture often represented only the past, ignoring the living Native voice. Today, museums have begun to incorporate Native perspectives in their displays. These essays explore the relationships being forged between museums and Native communities to create new techniques for presenting Native American culture.
Decolonizing Museums: representing native America in national and tribal museums by Amy Lonetree
ISBN: 9780807837146

Publication Date: 2012-11-19

Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. In Decolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities. Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan.
Indians on Display: global commodification of native America in performance, art, and museums by Norman K. Denzin
ISBN: 9781611320886

Publication Date: 2013-05-15

Even as their nations and cultures were being destroyed by colonial expansion across the continent, American Indians became a form of entertainment, sometimes dangerous and violent, sometimes primitive and noble. Creating a fictional wild west, entrepreneurs then exported it around the world. Exhibitions by George Catlin, paintings by Charles King, and Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody were viewed by millions worldwide. Norman Denzin uses a series of performance pieces with historical, contemporary, and fictitious characters to provide a cultural critique of how this version of Indians, one that existed only in the western imagination, was commodified and sold to a global audience. He then calls for a rewriting of the history of the American west, one devoid of minstrelsy and racist pageantry, and honoring the contemporary cultural and artistic visions of people whose ancestors were shattered by American expansionism.
Indians in Color: Native art, identity, and performance in the new West by Norman K. Denzin
ISBN: 9781629582788

Publication Date: 2015-09-30

In Indians in Color, noted cultural critic Norman K. Denzin addresses the acute differences in the treatment of artwork about Native America created by European-trained artists compared to those by Native artists. In his fourth volume exploring race and culture in the New West, Denzin zeroes in on painting movements in Taos, New Mexico over the past century. Part performance text, part art history, part cultural criticism, part autoethnography, he once again demonstrates the power of visual media to reify or resist racial and cultural stereotypes, moving us toward a more nuanced view of contemporary Native American life.
Indians Illustrated: the image of Native Americans in the pictorial press by John M. Coward
ISBN: 9780252040269

Publication Date: 2016-06-30

After 1850, Americans swarmed to take in a raft of new illustrated journals and papers. Engravings and drawings of "buckskinned braves" and "Indian princesses" proved an immensely popular attraction for consumers of publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. In Indians Illustrated, John M. Coward charts a social and cultural history of Native American illustrations--romantic, violent, racist, peaceful, and otherwise--in the heyday of the American pictorial press. These woodblock engravings and ink drawings placed Native Americans into categories that drew from venerable "good" Indian and "bad" Indian stereotypes already threaded through the culture. Coward's powerful analysis of themes and visual tropes unlocks the racial codes and visual cues that whites used to represent--and marginalize--native cultures already engaged in a twilight struggle against inexorable westward expansion.
Custer on Canvas: representing Indians, memory, and violence in the new west by Norman K. Denzin
ISBN: 9781598745986

Publication Date: 2011-05-31

The 1876 events known as Custer's Last Stand, Battle of Little Big Horn, or Battle of Greasy Grass have been represented over 1000 times in various artistic media, from paintings to sculpture to fast food giveaways. Norman Denzin shows how these representations demonstrate the changing perceptions--often racist--of Native America by the majority culture, juxtaposed against very different readings shown in works composed by Native American artists. Consisting of autobiographical reminiscences, historical description, artistic representations, staged readings, and snippets of documents, this multilayered performance ethnography examines questions of memory, race, and violence against Native America, as symbolized by the changing interpretations of General Custer and his final battle.
Officially Indian: symbols that define the United States by Cécile Ganteaume
ISBN: 9781517903305

Publication Date: 2017-10-03

From maps, monuments, and architectural features to stamps and currency, images of Native Americans have been used again and again on visual expressions of American national identity since before the country's founding. In the first in-depth study of this extraordinary archive, Cécile R. Ganteaume argues that these representations are not empty symbols but reflect how official and semi-official government institutions--from the U.S. Army and the Department of the Treasury to the patriotic fraternal society Sons of Liberty--have attempted to define what the country stands for. Seen collectively and studied in detail, American Indian imagery on a wide range of emblems--almost invariably distorted and bearing little relation to the reality of Native American-U.S. government relations--sheds light on the United States' evolving sense of itself as a democratic nation. Such images as a Plains Indian buffalo hunter on the 1898 four-cent stamp and Sequoyah's likeness etched into glass doors at the Library of Congress in 2013 reveal how deeply rooted American Indians are in U.S. national identity. While the meanings embedded in these artifacts can be paradoxical, counterintuitive, and contradictory to their eras' prevailing attitudes toward actual American Indians, Ganteaume shows how the imagery has been crucial to the ongoing national debate over what it means to be an American.
Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710-1840 by William H. Truettner
ISBN: 9780520266315

Publication Date: 2010-09-15

The Europeans who first settled North America were endlessly intrigued by the indigenous people they found there; even before the colonials began to record the landscape, they drew and painted Indians. This study offers a new visual perspective on westward expansion through a survey of the major Indian images painted by Euro-American artists before and after the American Revolution. William H. Truettner's accessible readings of paintings by artists such as Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bird King, and George Catlin relate these images to social and political events of the time and tell us much about how North American tribes would fare as they fought to survive during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study by Michael A. Sheyahshe
ISBN: 9780786435654

Publication Date: 2008-06-23

This work takes an in-depth look at the world of comic books through the eyes of a Native American reader and offers frank commentary on the medium's cultural representation of the Native American people. It addresses a range of portrayals, from the bloodthirsty barbarians and noble savages of dime novels, to formulaic secondary characters and sidekicks, and, occasionally, protagonists sans paternal white hero, examining how and why Native Americans have been consistently marginalized and misrepresented in comics. Chapters cover early representations of Native Americans in popular culture and newspaper comic strips, the Fenimore Cooper legacy, the "white" Indian, the shaman, revisionist portrayals, and Native American comics from small publishers, among other topics.

On Indigenous Art

Art in Motion: Native American explorations of time, place, and thought by John P. Lukavic, Laura Caruso (Editors)
ISBN: 9780914738633

Publication Date: 2016-07-01

In the summer of 2012, the Denver Art Museum hosted a symposium titled Art in Motion: Native American Explorations of Time, Place, and Thought, which brought artists Charlene Holy Bear, Leena Minifie, and Kent Monkman together with scholars Kristin Dowell, Aldona Jonaitis, and Daniel C. Swan to discuss American Indian art, using the idea of motion as a unifying theme. The perspectives explored in this volume reveal how scholars and artists with different backgrounds can employ overarching themes, such as motion, to investigate topics in arts and culture. The authors explore wide-ranging subjects, including film and video, figurative sculpture, issues of representation and stereotypes, Native American Church art, and Tlingit dancing.
An Indigenous Present by Jeffrey Gibson (Editor)
ISBN: 9781636811024

Publication Date: 2023-08-22

This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice. It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.
Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa expressive culture in the progressive era by Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
ISBN: 9781469643656

Publication Date: 2019-02-18

In this in-depth interdisciplinary study, Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote reveals how Kiowa people drew on the tribe's rich history of expressive culture to assert its identity at a time of profound challenge. Examining traditional forms such as beadwork, metalwork, painting, and dance, Tone-Pah-Hote argues that their creation and exchange were as significant to the expression of Indigenous identity and sovereignty as formal political engagement and policymaking. These cultural forms, she argues, were sites of contestation as well as affirmation, as Kiowa people used them to confront external pressures, express national identity, and wrestle with changing gender roles and representations. Combatting a tendency to view Indigenous cultural production primarily in terms of resistance to settler-colonialism, Tone-Pah-Hote expands existing work on Kiowa culture by focusing on acts of creation and material objects that mattered as much for the nation's internal and familial relationships as for relations with those outside the tribe. In the end, she finds that during a time of political struggle and cultural dislocation at the turn of the twentieth century, the community's performative and expressive acts had much to do with the persistence, survival, and adaptation of the Kiowa nation.
No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement by David Martine
ISBN: 9780989856546

Publication Date: 2017-08-22

No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement presents the first history of this unknown, organic, highly diverse Native American art movement, based in New York City, a movement that encompasses the founding of contemporary Native American film and theater in the United States as well as the strongest contemporary Native visual arts movement outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Painful Beauty: Tlingit women, beadwork, and the art of resilience by Megan A. Smetzer
ISBN: 9780295748955

Publication Date: 2021-07-27

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively being repressed, beading supported cultural continuity, demonstrating Tlingit women's resilience, strength, and power. Beadwork served many uses, from the ceremonial to the economic, as women created beaded pieces for community use and to sell to tourists. Like other Tlingit art, beadwork reflects rich artistic visions with deep connections to the environment, clan histories, and Tlingit worldviews. Contemporary Tlingit artists Alison Bremner, Chloe French, Shgen Doo Tan George, Lily Hudson Hope, Tanis S'eiltin, and Larry McNeil foreground the significance of historical beading practices in their diverse, boundary-pushing artworks.
Bead Talk: Indigenous knowledge and aesthetics from the Flatlands by Carmen L. Robertson, Judy Anderson, Katherine Boyer (Editors)
ISBN: 9781772840650

Publication Date: 2024-05-03

Indigenous beadwork has taken the art world by storm, but it is still sometimes misunderstood as static, anthropological artifact. Today's prairie artists defy this categorization, demonstrating how beads tell stories and reclaim cultural identity. Whether artists seek out and share techniques through YouTube videos or in-person gatherings, beading fosters traditional methods of teaching and learning and enables intergenerational transmissions of pattern and skill. In Bead Talk, editors Carmen Robertson, Judy Anderson, and Katherine Boyer gather conversations, interviews, essays, and full-colour reproductions of beadwork from expert and emerging artists, academics, and curators to illustrate the importance of beading in contemporary Indigenous arts. Taken together, the book poses and responds to philosophical questions about beading on the prairies: How do the practices and processes of beading embody reciprocity, respect, and storytelling? How is beading related to Indigenous ways of knowing? How does beading help individuals reconnect with the land?

On Indigenous Artists

Video: How A Native American Potter Uses The Tradition Of Horsehair Pottery (Insider, 2021)

Wendy Red Star: Delegation by Wendy Red Star (Artist); Jordan Amirkhani, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Josh T. Franco, Annika K. Johnson, Layli Long Soldier, Tiffany Midge (Contributions by)
ISBN: 9781597115193

Publication Date: 2022-06-14

Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star's lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist's singular vision.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: The Seriousness of Play by Nicola Levell
ISBN: 9781910433119

Publication Date: 2016-05-17

Yahgulanaas has been exhibited internationally and his books and graphic novels including RED, Flight of the Hummingbird, A Tale of Two Shamans and Hachidori'have been published in the United States, Canada, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Abu Dhabi, Serbia and Spain. The Seriousness of Play coincides with an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum and is supported by a number of other exhibition fixtures in Japan and Europe.
Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967-1980 by John Lukavic; Jessica Horton; Eric Berkemeyer; Kent Logan; David Bradley (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9783791354552

Publication Date: 2015-05-12

This book explores Fritz Scholder's at times controversial depictions of contemporary Native Americans including rarely seen monumental canvases and lithographs that situate Scholder as a figurative artist and highlight his brilliant use of color. Over the past two centuries the lives of American Indians have been romanticized and idealized in everything from Hollywood films to souvenir shops. Fritz Scholder took another approach in his artwork. He blended figurative and Pop Art influences to create compelling and revolutionary images that challenge viewers to look beyond the stereotype and reveal the raw reality of being an American Indian. Part American Indian himself, Scholder defied the label "Native American artist." This paradox and others are evident in these works from his renowned Indian series, which spanned the years 1967-1980, and which are characteristic of the era's revisionist and rebellious spirit. Full color reproductions of works from the Denver Art Museum and public and private lenders display the full range of Scholder's vision. Essays from noted scholars discuss Scholder's influences and artistic process, including, for the first time, an assessment of the impact of his foreign travels on his work.
Jeffrey Gibson: like a hammer by John P. Lukavic
ISBN: 9783791357331

Publication Date: 2018-05-22

Featuring work from the past decade by Jeffrey Gibson, one of America's most prominent contemporary artists, this monograph shows how he blends American Indian and Western cultural influences and explores issues of identity, alternative sub-cultures, post-colonialism, and marginalization. A citizen of the Mississippi Choctaw Nation and part Cherokee, Jeffrey Gibson spent time in Germany, England, and Korea in his youth. This mix of cultures informs much of his work, which combines elements from historical and contemporary Native arts and traditions, such as powwow regalia and the use of animal skins, with those from the artistic traditions of Modernism, Geometric Abstraction, and Minimalism. As a gay Native artist, Gibson explores in his work issues of oppression and civil rights in America, as well as universal ideas of love, community, strength, vulnerability, and survival. This magnificent volume focuses on nearly 60 works completed in the last decade, including culturally adorned punching bags, three-dimensional figurative works, text-based wall hangings, painted works on rawhide and canvas, and light and video works.
Perfidia by Sky Hopinka; Julie Niemi (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9781732708686

Publication Date: 2020-09-22

Sky Hopinka's PERFIDIA moves within the textured landscape of memory, both personal and collective, to address the founding colonial violence of the United States and its lasting impact. In a series of cantos, the book-length poem surfaces a first-person narrative amidst the stream of history and its accounting through the voices of ancestors and kin. Shifting registers between the embodied and the spiritual, PERFIDIA's subjective syntax destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and concomitant descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood. PERFIDIA sits at the center of Hopinka's most recent body of filmic work, which draws from the poem's sixteen cantos and its previous iterations. These filmic works include the short film Lore (2019), the 2-channel video installation Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), the feature-length film maÉ¬ni (2020), and the photo series The Land Describes Itself (2019). PERFIDIA is published on the occasion of Hopinka's solo exhibition Centers of Somewhere at the Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, beginning October 17, 2020 and will remain on view through February 14, 2021.
Clearly Indigenous: Native visions reimagined in glass by Letitia Chambers
ISBN: 9780890136584

Publication Date: 2021-01-13

The expertise of Native glass artists, in combination with the stories of their cultures, has produced a remarkable new artistic genre. The glass art created by American Indian artists is not only a personal expression but also imbued with cultural heritage. These artists have melded the aesthetics and properties inherent in glass art with their respective cultural knowledge. The result is the stunning collection of artwork presented here. A number of American Indian artists were attracted to glass early in the movement, including Larry "Ulaaq" Ahvakana and Tony Jojola. Among the second generation of Native glass blowers are Preston Singletary, Daniel Joseph Friday, Robert "Spooner" Marcus, Raven Skyriver, Raya Friday, Brian Barber, and Ira Lujan. This book also highlights the glass works of major multimedia artists including Ramson Lomatewama, Marvin Oliver, Susan Point, Haila (Ho-Wan-Ut) Old Peter, Joe David, Joe Fedderson, Angela Babby, Ed Archie NoiseCat, Tammy Garcia, Carol Lujan, Rory Erler Wakemup, Lillian Pitt, Adrian Wall, Virgil Ortiz, Harlan Reano, Jody Naranjo, and several others.
Reimagining History from an Indigenous Perspective by Joyce M. Szabo
ISBN: 9780826364098

Publication Date: 2022-11-01

Few contemporary artists before the 1990s explored the negative impact of the Spanish in the Southwest, but unreflective celebrations of the Columbus Quincentennial brought about portrayals of a more complicated legacy of Columbus's arrival in the Americas--especially by Indigenous artists. Through a series of etchings, Floyd Solomon of Laguna and Zuni heritage undertook a visual recounting of Pueblo history using Indigenous knowledge positioned to reimagine a history that is known largely from non-Native records. While Solomon originally envisioned more than forty etchings, he ultimately completed just twenty. From nightmarish visions of the Spanish that preceded their arrival to the subsequent return of the Spanish and their continuing effects on the Pueblo people, Solomon provides a powerful visual record. In Reimagining History from an Indigenous Perspective, Joyce M. Szabo positions Solomon among his contemporaries, making this vibrant artist and his remarkable vision broadly available to audiences both familiar with his work and those seeing it for the first time.
About Face: self-portraits by Native American, First Nations, and Inuit artists by Zena Pearlstone, Allan J. Ryan (Editors)
ISBN: 9780962277733

Publication Date: 2006-02-05

This catalogue accompanied a well-received exhibition organized by the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in 2006 featuring sixty-two self-portraits by indigenous artists from throughout the United States and Canada. The photographs and accompanying essays explore the artists' communal and cultural connections, and discuss the evolution of self-portraiture as a medium for empowerment and self-representation.
In Our Hands: native photography, 1890 to now by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Jaida Grey Eagle, Casey Riley (Editors)
ISBN: 9780300272161

Publication Date: 2023-10-24

A groundbreaking exhibition catalogue of Native, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit photography from the nineteenth century to the present day. Photographs of and by Native people have long been exhibited in museums. All too often, however, such exhibitions have misrepresented vital cultural and historical contexts, neglecting the depth of practice, supporting scholarship, and Native perspectives relevant to the work. By developing a broadly representative curatorial council of prominent academics and artists, more than half of whom represent Native communities in the United States and Canada, this book significantly expands the traditional discourses of photographic history. The publication features 130 photographic works by Native photographers from the late nineteenth century to the present, ranging from documentary photographs to family snapshots to conceptual works. Illustrated in full color, the photographs in this book offer diverse perspectives spanning geographic, chronological, and artistic experience, and shed new light on the extraordinary contributions of Native, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit artists to the art of the Americas.
Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography by John Rohrbach, Will Wilson (Editors)
ISBN: 9781955161046

Publication Date: 2023-02-21

This groundbreaking project summarizes how contemporary Indigenous photographers have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation and Indigenous Visuality. These photographers enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an Indigenous sense of community and visuality. Speaking with Light reveals and examines these Indigenous artists' explorations of themes such as identity, the contribution of customary practice to contemporary life, belonging and the assistance that Indigenous worldviews can provide to building healthier relationships with each other and the earth. Speaking with Light is a summary statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.

Native American Representations: first encounters, distorted images, and literary appropriations by Gretchen M. Bataille (Editor)
ISBN: 0803261888

Publication Date: 2001-09-01

From Columbus's journal jottings about "Indios" to the image of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, from the marauding Indians portrayed in the traditional western to the appearance of Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, from cigar box caricatures to the Crazy Horse monument rising near Mt. Rushmore, Native Americans have been represented--and misrepresented--over the past five centuries. What such depictions mean--what they say, and what they do, historically, culturally, and ideologically--is the subject of this book. In Native American Representations, leading national and international critics of Native literature and culture examine images in a wide range of media from a variety of perspectives to show how depictions and distortions have reflected and shaped cross-cultural exchanges from the arrival of Europeans to today. Focusing on issues of translation, European and American perceptions of land and landscape, teaching approaches, and transatlantic encounters, the authors explore problems of appropriation and advocacy, of cultural sovereignty and respect for the "authentic" text.
Inventing the American Primitive: politics, gender, and the representation of Native American literary traditions, 1789-1936 by Helen Carr
ISBN: 0814715494

Publication Date: 1996-07-01

American mainstream culture has always been fascinated with the notion of the primitive, particularly as embodied by Native Americans. In Inventing the American Primitive, Helen Carr illustrates how responses to the existence of Native American traditions have shaped ideas of American identity and American literature. Inventing the American Primitive examines a body of work, both literary and anthropological, that describes, inscribes, translates and transforms Native American myths and poetry. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, as well as ethnography's recent textual turn, Carr reveals the conflicts and ambivalence in these texts. Through their writings, the writers and anthropologists studied were attempting to preserve a culture which their country, with their help or connivance, sought to destroy. Inventing the American Primitive offers a radical new reading of American literary history, as well as fresh insights into the powerful pull of primitivism in United States culture, and into the interactions of gender and race ideologies.
The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924 by Cristina Stanciu
ISBN: 0300269056

Publication Date: 2023

Challenges the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants by bringing together two groups rarely read together: Native Americans and Eastern European immigrants In this cultural history of Americanization during the Progressive Era, Cristina Stanciu argues that new immigrants and Native Americans shaped the intellectual and cultural debates over inclusion and exclusion, challenging ideas of national belonging, citizenship, and literary and cultural production. Deeply grounded in a wide-ranging archive of Indigenous and new immigrant writing and visual culture--including congressional acts, testimonies, news reports, cartoons, poetry, fiction, and silent film--this book brings together voices of Native and immigrant America. Stanciu shows that, although Native Americans and new immigrants faced different legal and cultural obstacles to citizenship, the challenges they faced and their resistance to assimilation and Americanization often ran along parallel paths. Rethinking popular understandings of Americanization, Stanciu argues that the new immigrants and Native Americans at the heart of this book expanded the narrow definitions of American identity.
Literary Indians: aesthetics and encounter in American literature to 1920 by Angela Calcaterra
ISBN: 9781469646930

Publication Date: 2018-12-17

Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.
Encountering the Sovereign Other by Miriam C. Brown Spiers
ISBN: 9781611864052

Publication Date: 2021-12-01

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews. Encountering the Sovereign Other proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous science fiction, placing Native theorists like Vine Deloria Jr. and Gregory Cajete in conversation with science fiction theorists like Darko Suvin, David Higgins, and Michael Pinsky. In response to older colonial discourses, many contemporary Indigenous authors insist that readers acknowledge their humanity while recognizing them as distinct peoples who maintain their own cultures, beliefs, and nationhood.
The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in eighteenth-century British literature and culture by Robbie Richardson
ISBN: 9781487503444

Publication Date: 2018-05-04

The Savage and Modern Self examines the representations of North American "Indians" in novels, poetry, plays, and material culture from eighteenth-century Britain. Author Robbie Richardson argues that depictions of "Indians" in British literature were used to critique and articulate evolving ideas about consumerism, colonialism, "Britishness," and, ultimately, the "modern self" over the course of the century. Considering the ways in which British writers represented contact between Britons and "Indians," both at home and abroad, the author shows how these sites of contact moved from a self-affirmation of British authority earlier in the century, to a mutual corruption, to a desire to appropriate perceived traits of "Indianess." Looking at texts exclusively produced in Britain, The Savage and Modern Selfreveals that "the modern" finds definition through imagined scenes of cultural contact. By the end of the century, Richardson concludes, the hybrid Indian-Brition emerging in literature and visual culture exemplifies a form of modern, British masculinity.
Writing Indian, Native Conversations by John Lloyd Purdy
ISBN: 9780803222878

Publication Date: 2009-10-01

Since N. Scott Momaday's 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn brought Native American fiction squarely into mainstream culture, the genre has expanded in different ways and in new directions. The result is a Native American-written literature that requires a variety of critical approaches, including a discussion of how this canon differs from the familiar, established canons of American literature. Drawing on personal experience as well as literary scholarship, John Lloyd Purdy brings the traditions of Native American fiction into conversation with ideas about the past, present, and future of Native literatures. By revisiting some of the classics of the genre and offering critical readings of their distinctive qualities and shades of meaning, Purdy celebrates their dynamic literary qualities. At once a journey of discovery for readers new to the canon and an intimate, fresh reunion with important novels for those well versed in Native studies, Writing Indian, Native Conversations invites all comers to participate in a communal conversation.
Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, settler colonialism, and the power of place by John J. Kucich
ISBN: 9781625348357

Publication Date: 2024-09-30

Henry David Thoreau's life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as "more like an Indian" than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau's radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau's effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples.

Video: What Native Americans think of "Native" Depictions. Native Media Theory (2022).

For more:

19 Native American Movies & TV Shows to Watch During Native American History Month and Beyond (Maka Monture. Teen Vogue)
21 Must-Watch TV Shows & Movies Made By & About First Nations Peoples (Alicia Vrajlal, Refinery29)
Native American Misrepresentation In Films (Video by Francisco Tzintzun, 2018)
The history of Indigenous representation in film and television (Kirby Harris, The Queen's University Journal)

Documentaries on Native American Representation

Imagining Indians by Victor Masayesva
Publication Date: 1994

Employing a keen sense of humor to reveal a Native American perspective on the misrepresentation of Native Americans in feature films, this unconventional film plows headlong into the theme of the commodification and appropriation of Native American arts and material culture.
Reel Injun by Neil Diamond
Publication Date: 2010

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.
Native America Series, PBS
At the intersection of Native knowledge and modern scholarship is a new vision of America and its people. Each hour brings a core tenet of Native heritage to life through contemporary stories of the here and now. “New Worlds” reveals the power of Indigenous art and engineering, and the musicians, astronauts, and builders who are constructing a better, Native-led, tomorrow. “Language is Life” explores how Native languages and communication have fueled the Indigenous soul since time immemorial.
Love and Fury by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole)
Publication Date: 2020

Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo follows Native artists for a year as they navigate their careers in the US and abroad. The film explores the immense complexities each artist faces in regards to their own identity as Native artists, as well as pushing further Native art into a post-colonial world. Available to stream on Netflix.

Films with Indigenous Representation

Smoke Signals by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne, Arapaho)
Publication Date: 1998

Arnold (Gary Farmer) rescued Thomas (Evan Adams) from a fire when he was a child. Thomas thinks of Arnold as a hero, while Arnold's son Victor (Adam Beach) resents his father's alcoholism, violence and abandonment of his family. Uneasy rivals and friends, Thomas and Victor spend their days killing time on a Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho and arguing about their cultural identities. When Arnold dies, the duo set out on a cross-country journey to Phoenix to retrieve Arnold's ashes. Available to stream for free on PlutoTV.
The Cherokee Word for Water');" /> The Cherokee Word for Water by Charlie Soap (Cherokee); Tim Kelly
Publication Date: 2013

Based on the true story of the Bell Waterline Project, The Cherokee Word for Water shares the struggle for, opposition to, and ultimate success of a rural Cherokee community to bring running water to their families by using the traditional concept of “gadugi" – working together to solve a problem. Set in the early 1980s, the film begins in the homes of a small town in rural Oklahoma where many houses lack running water and others are little more than shacks. Told from the perspective of Wilma Mankiller and full-blood Cherokee organizer Charlie Soap, these leaders join forces to battle opposition and build a 16-mile waterline system using a community of volunteers. Available to rent on Apple TV.
Rez Ball by Sydney Freeland (Navajo)
Publication Date: 2024

The Chuska Warriors, a Native American high school basketball team from New Mexico, must band together after losing their star player if they want to keep their quest for a state championship alive. Available to stream on Netflix.
Frybread Face and Me by Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, Laguna Pueblo)
Publication Date: 2023

A Navajo boy from San Diego experiences a cultural awakening when he spends summer vacation with his precocious cousin and their relatives on the reservation. Available to stream on Netflix.
Fancy Dance by Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga)
Publication Date: 2023

Since her sister's disappearance, Jax has cared for her niece, Roki, by scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. Every spare minute goes into finding her missing sister while also helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. Available to stream on Apple TV.
Blood Quantum by Jeff Barnaby (Mi'kmaq)
Publication Date: 2019

The dead are coming back to life and almost all of Earth's population are decimated due to a zombie virus, except for the isolated Mi'kmaq reserve of Red Crow, whose indigenous inhabitants who are strangely immune to the zombie plague. Available to rent on Amazon.
Wild Indian by Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Ojibwe)
Publication Date: 2021

Makwa, a young Anishinaabe boy, likes to escape his troubled life by playing with his friend Ted-O. One day, Makwa shockingly murders a schoolmate, and the two boys cover it up. Now as adults, the two men must come to terms with what happened. Available to rent on YouTube.
Wildhood by Bretten Hannam (Mi'kmaq)
Publication Date: 2021

In a rural East Coast trailer park, Link lives with his toxic father and younger half brother, Travis. When Link discovers his Mi'kmaw mother could still be alive, it lights a flame as the siblings embark on a quest for a better life. On the road, they meet Pasmay, a pow wow dancer drawn to Link. As the boys journey across Mi'kma'ki, Link finds community, identity and love in the land where he belongs.
Drunktown's Finest
Three young Navajo Native Americans - an adopted Native girl, a young father-to-be, and a trans woman who dreams of being a model - strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation. Nizhoni seeks out her past, well after being adopted by a white Christian family, Felixia, a trans woman, pursues a spot in the "women of the tribe" calendar, and Sickboy is headed to basic training so he can take care of his soon-to-be-born child. Directed by Sydney Freeland, a Navajo.
Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese
Publication Date: 2023

Real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal as Mollie Burkhart, a member of the Osage Nation, tries to save her community from a spree of murders fueled by oil and greed. Available to stream on Apple TV.

Video: Working toward greater Indigenous representation in film and television. UC Riverside (2023). Kimberly Norris Guerrero, an actor, screenwriter, producer, director, and associate professor with UC Riverside’s Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production discusses Indigenous representation in film and television.

Rutherford Falls
Publication Date: 2021-2022

Two lifelong best friends, Nathan Rutherford and Reagan Wells, find themselves at a crossroads -- quite literally -- when their sleepy town gets an unexpected wake-up call. Available to stream on Peacock.
Reservation Dogs by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole, Muscogee); Taika Waititi (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui)
Publication Date: 2021-

Following the exploits of four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma who steal, rob and save in order to get to the exotic, mysterious and faraway land of California. To succeed, they will have to save enough money, outmaneuver the methheads at the junkyard on the edge of town and survive a turf war against a much tougher rival gang. This first-of-its-kind creative team tells a story that resonates with them and their lived experiences -- and invites audiences into a surprisingly familiar and funny world. Available to stream on Hulu.
Dark Winds by Graham Roland (Chickasaw)
Publication Date: 2022-

Based on the "Leaphorn & Chee" novel series by Tony Hillerman and set in the 1970s, "Dark Winds" follows the FBI investigation of a bank robbery in Gallup, N.M., and the Navajo Tribal inquiry into the local murder of two Native residents. Lt. Joe Leaphorn, his new deputy Jim Chee, and Sgt. Bernadette Manuelito do the heavy lifting around the reservation, which is near Monument Valley. The strange behaviors of some of the residents and the newcomers intertwine with their personal stories as the two men battle the forces of evil and their own personal demons on the path to salvation. Available to stream for free on Sling.
Basketball or Nothing by Todd Donnelly; Joseph Witthohn; Notah Begay III (Navajo, San Felipe, Isleta)
Publication Date: 2019

This docuseries follows the Chinle High basketball team in Arizona's Navajo Nation on a quest to win a state championship and bring pride to the isolated community. Available to stream on Netflix.
Mohawk Girls by Tracey Deer (Mohawk), Cynthia Knight
Publication Date: 2010

Four twenty-something Indigenous women try to find their place in the world and try to find love; but in a small community where friends have dated everyone on the rez, or the hot new guy turns out to be a cousin, it's not that simple. Available to stream on Peacock.

Native American & Indigenous Studies

Indigenous Heritage & History Month

Beyond the Playlist

Next Steps

Library & Scholarly Sources

Popular Sources

Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples

About the Playlist

Further Reading & Resources

Next Steps

Fiction

Poetry

Drama

Essays

Memoirs

Featured Videos

Documentaries

Feature Films

Short Films

Other Online Videos

Streaming Resources

One Mail instructions:

Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Drag Artists

Academic Texts

Selected Scholarly Articles

Suggested Keywords for database searches relating to Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous* identity:

Relevant Databases

One Mail instructions:

Online Resources

Lists of Resources & Readings

Indigenous Representation in Media

Specific Figures

Databases

Reference Sources

Articles

Reports

Books

Further Reading

Congressional Hearings

Documentaries

Books

Articles

Books: Histories of Native American Representation

On Indigenous Art

On Indigenous Artists

Documentaries on Native American Representation

Films with Indigenous Representation

Social media

Additional resources

Featured Databases

IU Libraries

**Suggested Keywords for database searches relating to Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous* identity:**