Native American and Indigenous Media

Of the films and videos screened at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, 72 percent were made by Indigenous women directors; the work included feature films, documentaries, experimental films, new media, animation, games, digital stories, and virtual reality projects.¹ This remarkable proportion is the exact inverse of the notoriously dismal numbers in Hollywood and the independent film industry; of independent films screened at high-profile festivals in the United States in 2016–17, 72 percent of those working in key behind-the-scenes roles were men.² The surge and new visibility of Indigenous women's production registers a historic shift taking place in North America, and especially in Canada.

Indigenous media scholarship makes visible the centrality of Indigenous images to film and media history not only through the study of screen representations, but also by recovering and re-recognizing the presence and participation of Indigenous performers, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals. Scholars in...