"There’s just this sad truth that most people don’t really understand or realize that Native Americans are even still alive," Erica Tremblay, a queer/two-spirit Seneca Cayuga filmmaker from Oklahoma, tells Teen Vogue. She grapples with this complexity in her latest short film, Little Chief, which premiered earlier this year as part of the shorts selection at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed on a rural reservation in Oklahoma with an all-Indigenous cast, Little Chief tells the story of a weary teacher struggling to keep her school and herself afloat and the connection she forms in the face of their shared traumas with an unraveling 11-year-old, Bear.

For nearly a century, since the era of silent film, Hollywood has provided the primary avenue for Indigenous images and stories to be displayed to non-Native audiences. While historically, films have played a highly influential role in shaping deeply flawed perceptions of Indigenous peoples, for example, as extinct cultures trapped in the past, contemporary filmmakers and artists like Tremblay are working to combat these dominant, largely negative narratives. In this way, contributions like hers are an attempt to reflect the complex and vibrant experiences of Native peoples and communities.

“All of the representation that you find is stuck in this era and stuck in this specific part of our history," Tremblay says. "But the reality is that there are so many thriving indigenous communities in North America that are beautiful for all sorts of different reasons despite the specific struggles that they have."

The earliest depictions of Native Americans, crafted by white filmmakers, existed largely in a perversion of reality through the Western, and gave way for the birth of the “Hollywood Indian” in modern imagination. Films like D.W. Griffith’s The Battle at Elderbush Gulch and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man, one of the first full-length feature films produced in Hollywood, told stories of American dominance over both untamed natural elements and Native American peoples, served as a convenient stand-in for more complex character development, and allowed white characters both a backdrop for and a context in which to behave. In this wild, western playground, Native American characters were reduced to a powerfully simple, yet paradoxical dichotomy of the spiritually inspired innocence of the “noble savage” versus the brutality and hypersexualization of the “bloodthirsty bavage.”

Appearing directly opposite, the “American cowboy” trope provided a convenient proxy for audiences across the country, creating a heroic symbol for the imagined process of colonization of lands and the people in them. The success of these films, upheld by an audience that enjoyed viewing themselves as the benevolent victors in the battle for manmade Western expansion during a time of American exceptionalism and growth, simultaneously created such pervasive misrepresentation of Native Americans that the stereotypes, plots, and ideals depicted within these films persist today in ongoing, corrosive ways more than a century later.

The glamorization of Western expansion, of manifest destiny, of the inherent goodness of the American cowboy and his pursuits rests on a premise of erasure of Native American genocide, one which excludes narratives of violent forced displacement, rape, genocide, and the removal of children from their families and cultural heritage to become indoctrinated in white, Christian boarding schools.

As insidiously, the complexity of culture and individuality that exists across more than 500 federally recognized Native American tribes and beyond has, in popular imagination, also been flattened to largely inaccurate symbols sloppily stitched together from fragments of a handful of tribes. This is evident from the very inception of film at the turn of the century, from the silent film era in the 1910s through to the 1920s and ’30s, a period when these characters were especially popular. John Ford’s 1939 Western, Stagecoach, is a landmark of this time, garnering two Oscars and cementing John Wayne as the quintessential cowboy, and perhaps American, for the first half of the 20th century. It is a level of cultural immortality few entertainers can boast, but one which inherently furthers this destructive imagery. The popularity of Westerns waned as the 1960s closed and the antagonists in American action-adventure films shifted to other, international cultures, shockingly inaccurate depictions of Native Americans never wholly left American storytelling.