It’s a sight not uncommon on the streets of Los Angeles.
A red carpet is rolled out in front of a theater, while cameramen hurriedly set up their equipment. Lights flash as actors smile and walk the length of carpet, the sun setting behind them.
It is the 23rd year of the Red Nation International Film Festival, an event founded and developed by Jonelle Romero, a Native American filmmaker and actress of Cheyenne, Dine, and Apache descent.
Though it features the usual trappings of a film festival, this two-week program is a statement. It features Native American-centric movies and actors, with more than 20 films directed and produced by Native American women.
“This year, we had 22 films directed by Native women, and had the same number last year, too,” Romero said. “No other film festival is doing that, bringing in those numbers.”
Romero emphasized that Native Americans—who make up roughly 3 percent of the population of the United States—are very sparsely represented in the media.
A report led by Stacy Smith, a professor at the University of Southern California, as part of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, analyzed 1,100 popular films released between 2007 and 2017. It revealed that 70 percent of leading characters in those films were white. Native American representation accounted for such a miniscule percentage that it was grouped into the “Other” category in the study’s analysis.
Another analysis of Native Americans on screen conducted by UCLA in 2016 put this number at around 0.5 percent, making it the only ethnicity at less than 1 percent. Native American women were the least represented category across film and television, according to the study.
This lack of significant, accurate representation – especially for Native American women – drove the need for initiatives like hers, said Romero. She is joined by a growing number of Native female filmmakers, directors and actors, all intent on reclaiming their narratives and showcasing their own experiences as indigenous women.
We’re creating our own content, creating our own film festivals, our own television networks,” she said. “We’re reclaiming our power.”
Romero claims this is crucial, because the consistent erasure of Native women on screen has deeper ramifications. At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, people took to social media with the hashtag #WhyWeWearBlack as a response to the staggeringly high rates of sexual assault and harassment that have permeated the media industry. Romero decided to follow suit differently and created the hashtag #WhyWeWearRed.
“I also felt like we needed to put one out from our community of Native and indigenous women and why we wear red,” said Romero.
The movement aims to highlight the relationship between Native female erasure in the media with the growing number of missing and murdered indigenous women.
“If we’re not seen and heard, then we don’t matter. It dehumanizes us,” Romero said. “Primetime networks like NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox haven’t hired Native actresses for episodic television in 15 years. So America has not seen our face.”
There are levels to this erasure, said Rebecca Nagle, a filmmaker and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Whether on television, film or the news, “we’re just not there,” she said.
“I think the first level is invisibility,” she said. “And when we do appear, there are a lot of stereotypes and tropes we fall into. So we’re either there to fall in love and save a white man or we’re brutalized on screen.”
Nagle pointed out that not only are Native American women often sidelined by other characters, they are often erased from their own historical narratives. In the 2017 release “Woman Walks Ahead,” there are implications of romantic tension between painter Catherine Weldon and Lakota chief, Sitting Bull.
“Sitting Bull had multiple Lakota wives and had no romantic involvement with that white woman who came to paint his portrait,” she said. “To erase these Native women in his life to create a narrative around a white woman is just one example of how when Hollywood tells stories of Native communities, Native women are erased.”
Lisa Charleyboy, a Canadian First Nations writer and editor of Tsilhqot’in descent, said that this lack of exposure makes it easy for audiences to not think of Native women as real people, furthering the invisibility of crimes against them.
Both women stressed the high rates of violence against indigenous women across North America. A study conducted by the National Institute of Justice surveyed over 2,000 women in the United States who identified as Native American and found more than half had experienced sexual violence. In Canada, 24 percent of First Nations women reported abuse from a partner.
Romero hopes that #WhyWeWearRed, along with similar counternarratives, will present a more empowered and truthful depiction of Native American women.
It is a perspective Charleyboy saw little of growing up. Raised by a white mother and stepfather in a predominantly white area of British Columbia, Canada, she described her upbringing as distant from her First Nations heritage.
“As a teenager I really experienced a lot of negative stereotypes in mainstream media and pop culture,” she said. “And that made me full of self-loathing, not wanting to be indigenous, wanting to distance myself from my background.”
The images she saw of Native American people were hard to confront, she said.
“It’s just things that you see in the news, that all Natives are lazy, they do drugs. They don’t work hard, they don’t have an education.” Charleyboy said.
As for Native American women, “I mean, the only thing that really existed then was Pocahontas …. or they’re either like a drunk or a squaw, so those are the two kind of things that you always have to deal with,” she remembered.
Modern Native American experience hardly makes its way to the forefront in the media, she said, and was determined to confront this with her own body of work.
Most recently, this has been in the form of “#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women”, an anthology of writings, stories and poems from First Nations and Native American women across Canada and the United States.
The project was inspired by Beyonce Knowles’ “Lemonade” album – a visual and artistic work acclaimed for its dialogue on race and African-American feminism .
Charleyboy and co-editor Mary Beth Leatherdale thought that “it would be great if we could create an ontology that had a similar emotional resonance with our readers in terms of displaying and sharing the Native American indigenous female experience.”
The book features indigenous women and their stories told in their own voices: authentic, powerful, and raw. It is a series of writings that Charleyboy hopes will give Native American children better role models to look up to.
Others, like Nagle, use film as a means to reckon with the critical issues they face. Nagle has worked with experimental short films before making her piece, “How to Heal Without Justice.”
Described as “an open letter, visual poem, and experimental short,” the film features her facing the camera and addressing an ex-girlfriend who stalked and attacked her at a party.
“It was about not being able to get justice,” she said. “I think the vision of the film came to me just a means to express how it made me feel crazy, but also to express how I was able to cope with it.”
So far, Nagle believes the bulk of the work in drawing attention to indigenous issues through film has been done largely by indigenous people. This is partly due to the reluctance of American audiences to confront the vices of their colonial past, says Nagle.
“It’s much harder to confront that narrative when we acknowledge the contemporary Native people still living in the United States today,” she said. “Part of the narrative that there are no longer any Native people is part of the way to avoid what the country has done [to Native Americans] and continues to do.”
Photo c/o Kanani Koster
Bringing more contemporary, accurate depictions of Native American women to the screen is an issue Hollywood has still not seen as vital, said Chris Finley, assistant professor of American studies and Ethnicity at USC.
“It’s not even about representation, it’s about debt,” said Finley, a queer indigenous scholar from the Colville tribe. “Because you know, this is our land.”
Historically, several indigenous tribes were matrilineal, with women playing key leadership roles. However, Native American women are often silenced in mainstream film—sometimes literally, says Finley.
The character of Sacagawea in the film, “Night at the Museum.” is a depiction she finds ironically inaccurate.
“Native people know that Native women are very strong and very loud and very powerful,” she said.
The complexities of Sacagawea, including her being a translator and giving birth on trail during the Lewis and Clark expedition, were erased in the film. But one particular grievance is more insulting than others.
“They have her having a love affair with Teddy Roosevelt, who was a eugenicist,” Finley said. “I mean, come on. Anyone else.”
The stereotypical tropes that Native American women embody to non-Native audiences – romanticized princesses or victims – are often what Hollywood directors fall back on, even when trying to do better.
Finley credits Terrence Malick as an accomplished filmmaker, but still views his 2004 movie, “The New World,” as problematic. Despite Malick hiring a Native American cast, working with linguists to accurately depict the Powhatan language, and making efforts to authentically portray the tribe, he just “could not give up the Pocahontas/John Smith story. “which we know is not true,” Finley said.
Pocahontas was no older than 10-12 years old when she first met Smith, a reality far from the tale of lovers depicted by both the animated and the live-action tellings of her story. Finley points out the sexualized portrayal of the character in “The New World”, in which she is played by a then 14-year-old Q’orianka Kilcher.
“She’s wearing that very revealing buckskin and swimming naked in the water at the beginning of the film,” she said.
In the face of what they call clichédportrayals, Native American women are stepping up to take back their own narratives – sometimes, by subverting and reappropriating the tropes they usually embody in film.
Kanani Koster, an indigenous Hawaiian filmmaker, emphasizes that her short, “The New Frontier,” is a key example of this trend. The film, which Koster co-directed with her friend Jocelyn Galindo, is shot as a series of vignettes. Both directors were determined to dismantle one of the most prominent genres that feature Native Americans: Westerns.
“It was a small project on a $6000 budget,” Koster explained. “I love Westerns, I love horses,”
But the cowboy and Indian trope has long been entrenched in the American cinematic landscape is negative, Koster said, where Native Americans are portrayed as whooping, killing bands intent on targeting innocent pioneers. She was determined to clarify the actual story of the West.
“I just thought there were so many stories within Western iconography that we could do a really good job of reclaiming,” Koster explained. While one of vignettes chronicles the fraught relationship between Christian missionaries and Native Americans, the filmmakers also wanted to piece together the missing narratives of other communities of color.
“A lot of cowboys were Mexicans who knew how to ranch,” she said. “There were a lot of black cowboys, too. We also featured the story of black female root doctors.”
One of the vignettes centers on an indigenous Mexican charra – a traditional horsewoman — played by Galindo. Koster intended the character a challenge to conventional standards of beauty Native women are measured against.
“She has this beautiful Mexican indigenous nose,” she said. “It’s a personal mission for me, telling women of color, ‘Stay who you are!'”
In the film, the charra sweeps through the frontier on horseback, enacting revenge upon “crooked lawmen” and capturing them with ease.
Native American women playing background roles is far from the reality Mohawk filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox grew up with. Fox’s short documentary “Under the Husk” was screened as a part of the Red Nation International Film Festival in October.
The documentary follows two Mohawk girls as they undergo the ohero:kon ceremony – a traditional rite of passage Mohawk youth undertake to become adults that was revived a decade ago by the tribe, so as not to lose tradition.
Those who undergo the ceremony spend days in isolation, with no food or water and minimal shelter. The point is to make the youth “more humble and able to start thinking about what their purpose is,” she said.
Fox’s documentary features a predominantly female cast, with a rare pair of protagonists: two young Native American women.
“There are very few films about Native women,” Fox said. “Even fewer films about young Native women. And even fewer films that have a positive message about our young women.”
The story focuses on the bonds of kinship between the women and the celebration of womanhood, which are characteristics of her community that Fox believed were important to showcase.
“In my community, the women are the leaders of nearly everything that is going on,” she said. “The documentary shows how close the relationship between the women is, how before the ceremony, the aunties are looking after the girls.”
Not only has the film gained acclaim at various film festivals throughout the United States and Canada, Fox said it has helped establish a sense of pride amongst young girls in the tribe.
“Having that film out there – I’m not sure if validated is the right word – but it brought a lot of pride in what we’re doing.” she said. “Even my granddaughter, when she watched it, even though she was only 6 [at the time], she has it in her head now that, ‘Okay, when I’m a teenager, that’s what I’ve got to do, I’ve got to go find my roots.'”
Films must present more such complex characterizations of Native American women that stretch beyond victimization and one-dimensional tropes, she added.
“One of the reasons I love the film “Frozen River” (2008) is that actress Misty Upham’s character is not nice,” she said’ “She is not doing great. And you rarely get to see that.”
The character’s inner dilemmas are also explored in a rare showcase of “an interior life”, added Finley.
Fox hopes to do exactly that with her future work.
“I don’t want to be portrayed as a victim, I don’t want our young people to be portrayed as victims,” she said. “I want to show what we are doing today, how we are being active and empowered.”
Though Native American women have come far in telling their own stories, Nagle believes it is time for Hollywood and the larger industry to take notice.
“Though we have Native women pushing back, we still don’t have those voices in the mainstream,” she said. “They’re making incredible work, we just don’t have the same amount of exposure.”
Romero concurs. The Red Nation International Film Festival pulls in a diverse range of films from across the Native community. “Why isn’t this being picked up?” she asked.
While attention and change from the larger film industry is yet to come, filmmakers like Fox are resolute to do all they can to change the way Native American women are seen by audiences.
“We need our young Native women to keep getting out and making some movies.”