This course examines diverse Indigenous films and television shows from Turtle Island (Canada & the United States) to Aotearoa (New Zealand). Students will study a wide variety of influential and popular Indigenous media, including activist-based documentaries, adventure comedies, sitcoms, and animations. These works challenge accepted historical and contemporary fictions that sustain settler-colonial forms of domination, offering poignant correctives to the misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples that have dominated Hollywood cinema. We will also consider the larger historical, legal, and political contexts to which these works respond. Films/television shows will include: Reservation Dogs, by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee Creek), The Mountain of SGaana, by Christopher Auchter (Haida), Hunt for the Wilderpeople, by Taika Waititi (Māori), Rhymes for Young Ghouls, by Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq), Smoke Signals, by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne and Arapaho) and Maliglutit, by Zacharias Kunuk (Inuk).
