(De)Constructing Indianness: The Intersection of the Native American Body, Identity, Environment and Film Space

This project will study Native Americans in film by considering the relationship between inherited Hollywood tropes and recent protest aesthetics in contemporary Native American filmmaking. This project develops current scholarly work on the body - 'a site of fascination, colonial oppression and indigenous agency' (Fear-Segal and Tillett, 2013) - in analyzing the way new constructions of the Native American have emerged in film, an area that has been critically undervalued and overlooked in the study of indigeneity. This site offers an opportunity to consider how Native American filmmakers are revising western designs of identity, race, gender and sexuality, as well as landscape, space and place, empowering indigenous polities against ongoing colonial dispossession and dominant designs of 'Indianness' (Byrd, 2011).