I really enjoyed watching the documentary, “Reel Injun”. I was expecting it to be more of a movie, not a documentary. I have never stopped and thought about how often Indians were wrongly portrayed in movies. They are almost always shown as some form of a stereotypical Native American such as the drunk, stoic warrior, savage, etc. This has proven to be detrimental to society because as we view these movies, we subtly and unconsciously drill these images into our brains and start to accept these stereotypes. Even if we know that these are stereotypes, constantly seeing them on the big screen can seep the cliches into our brains without us even trying.
A part in the movie that stuck out to me was when the movie moved to talk about hippies and the Native American woman had talked about how when she was younger and wore her culture’s traditional garb around the town that she lived in circa 1970, people would ask her, “What are you supposed to be, a hippy?”. This demonstrates the extreme culture appropriation that the Indians faced. For their clothing to not even be seen as their own and believed to belong to a whole different group of people is insane.
mikerose June 22, 2018
MaKayla,
I also really enjoyed the movie Reel Injun, and it really is an eye opener of how much Hollywood and movies really portrayed the “stereotypical” Indian. I also like the point you brought up about the one lady getting asked if she was a hippy. Imagine someone doing that to us while we are wearing our normal clothes and asking us if we are a hippy. One of my favorite parts of the movie was when the one famous Indian actor literally was in so many historically wrong movies that he almost thought that was the truth about Indians.
-Mike