Hollywood has an obsession with Native culture – take a look at films like 'Pocahontas' and 'Dances With Wolves' – but often, the image conveyed to audiences is far from accurate. In 'Reel Injun', a documentary about the way aboriginals have been portrayed in movies and popular culture, we get a first-hand look (via some remarkable footage) at the way the media has formed public conception.

Over the last century, aboriginal people have been depicted as savages, saints, warriors, healers, lovers, criminals and heroes, usually to the nth degree of whatever stereotype is being used. In their doc, co-directors Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes of Rezolution Pictures seek to show how these corrupted ideas have seeped into the psyche of the general population.

Moviefone sat down to talk with Bainbridge about making the film, how aboriginal audiences have been reacting, and why it's about time we move past the whole feathers-and-buckskin thing.

Hollywood has an obsession with Native cultures – take a look at films like 'Pocahontas' and 'Dances With Wolves' – but often, the image conveyed to audiences is far from accurate. In 'Reel Injun,' a documentary about the way aboriginals have been portrayed in movies and popular culture, we get a first-hand look (via some remarkable footage) at the way the media has formed public perception.

Over the last century, aboriginal people have been depicted as savages, saints, warriors, healers, lovers, criminals and heroes, usually to the nth degree of whichever stereotype is being used. In their doc, co-directors Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes of Rezolution Pictures seek to show how these corrupted ideas have seeped into the psyche of the general population.

Moviefone sat down to talk with Bainbridge about making the film, how aboriginal audiences have been reacting and why it's about time we move past the whole feathers-and-buckskin thing.

Can you give me a little bit of background to the film – how it came to be?

Neil and I have been working together for a while. We co-own, with some other people, a magazine called The Nation, which services northern Quebec and Ontario, and we've been doing documentaries together for about 10 years. This subject matter is what we do; it's all around us. Neil came up with this idea about 10 years ago, and since then, he's been watching movies. Like we say in the doc, there are about 4,000 films that have been made about Native people in the past 100 years. He hasn't watched them all, but he watched a lot.

There are other docs that have looked at this topic, but a lot of them are angrier and just focus on the stereotype. Ours wants to convey the bigger picture, a more inclusive world view. We wanted to include people in the conversation, and we wanted it to be funny.

How have aboriginal audiences been reacting to the film?

It opened at imagiNATIVE; it was packed. We were coming in the cab from the hotel, and as we were getting closer, we noticed a huge line-up. We were like, 'What is that huge line-up for? Holy s**t, it's for our movie!'

I would say the audience was about 90 percent aboriginal, and let me tell you, people went nuts. They were laughing so hard they would miss the next joke. What I found interesting was when it played at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was a more non-Native crowd, just as packed, but it took them a while to realize that they had permission to laugh.



The Bugs Bunny footage [showing him shooting 'Indians'] particularly disturbed me. What was that?

I think I saw that one time, originally on TV, as a kid. It's something I wasn't a stranger to. Have you seen 'Peter Pan'?

Yes.

Well, it's in there too – 'Ooga-booga, ooga-booga' – the native guy. All that sort of thing; savages, shoot them to death, they're dumb. And then 'Pocahontas,' in that movie too. There's a song in it that goes, 'Savages, savages, barely even human...' and I guess it's politically correct because the Natives are singing about the Europeans and the Europeans are singing about the Natives. My kids are half-Native, since my husband is Native, so seeing our kids hopping up and down on the couch singing that song... it was awful.

Even more eye-opening was the footage at the kid's camp [where the kids engage in an 'Indian' ceremony before dinner].

So many of us went to camps like that, including me. The more shameful thing is that I loved going there. Our camp director, who was British, would get dressed up for council ring in a buckskin dress, with a braided wig, and sit on this chair in a glen made out of wood. There'd be a huge fire, and we'd enter the glen and have to greet her by her 'Indian' name. All of us were in on the fantasy, 150 girls totally absorbed.

But here's the thing: a lot of Natives love that sort of thing. My husband said it best when he said, 'Who wouldn't want to ride a fast horse on the plain? Who wouldn't want to be considered wise and knowledgeable?' Whenever people from Europe come to visit us, they always want to talk to my husband about spirituality. It's wild. That's what they've learned about Native people, exclusively through film.

It's amazing what we, the general population, hear about Native people and the reservations. It's usually a story about the desperation or bleakness suffered in the Native community.

I know. My daughter's in school in Quebec, and there's a reform in the education system where they have to learn about Native history and modern Native life. She was learning about the desolation and trouble on the reservations, and she asked why it was happening. The teacher replied, 'It's because Natives have trouble adapting to modern life.' Can you believe it? What the hell was she talking about?

It's the ignorance.

And you know, it's this love of the fantasy, that's where it gets really damaging. When it denies people a reality, a living existence. It appears again in 'Avatar.' The white person gets to be Native. You have to look at the big picture – some of the stereotypes come from truth, but at the same time, you just can't limit or stereotype people to the point where they don't exist.

'Reel Injun' opens in Toronto and Vancouver on February 19, 2010.