Reel Injun

There are still many stereotypes around native nations, especially in cinema, but they have grown and evolved overtime. During the 50's and the time of the John Ford movies, the Indian was always depicted as savage. Jim Jarmusch went against this by saying" I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn't...the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that's blocking the way for industrial progress"(Reel Injun) Movies always depicted natives as uncivilized and in the way of the correct way of doing stuff. Later, in the time of the cowboy, Indians were always the losers. Jesse Wente says "When you're kids and you're trying to play Cowboys and Indians, and if you're an Indian kid-well, doesn't that mean you're going to lose all the time?" (Reel Injun) Natives were never view as the hero or the "good guy", they were the enemy; the one the hero always had to defeat. In the next era, natives were all depicted as warriors. Adam Beach says "We'll never be able to change the fantasy of who and what Indians are. That fantasy will always be there, we will always be on the cover of novels saying 'Cheyenne Warrior'" (Reel Injun) The ideas and fantasies of Indians in all the different eras will always live on. It is not that as a new depiction comes along the old one is forgotten. All of these accumulate and the stereotypes just grown instead to change.

The renaissance time period was the start of the new native movies. These movies were made by natives for the native community. Chris Eyre says that the movies "tell out stories, our way" (Reel Injun). Native stories were no longer only be told from the outside and the perspective of someone that was in within the community. The real stories that were being pasted down though generations were now the ones being told in films. The films were not only about the stereotypes or trying to break them. Adam Beach says they are about "human beings showing human emotion" (Reel Injun). These films took way from the controversy and stereotypes and just focused on the stories and characters. It did not matter that they were natives, they were human beings and that was what was depicted. Unlike Smoke Signals, that was made to show the reservation as it was at that time, The Fast Runner was made to persevere history. Natives started using film as a way to record their history in a community were these stories were always just passed down by story telling and never written.  These stories meant something to the directors and actors to the point where they would do anything to tell the story. "That's not an actor, cause an actor wouldn't do that" (Reel Injun).  In this quote Chris Eyre when the fast runner ran across ice with bare feet in the freezing cold. There were no effects, the actor really did it. He endured this in order to make the movie they way the story has always been told. The Fast Runner has permanently preserved the stories that would have vanished with it.