Native American Religion and Film: Interviews with Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie

For decades Hollywood films have cast the American Indian as the savage, the medicine man and the noble warrior, stereotypes that either demonize or romanticize a people. Ritual and religion rarely receive much better treatment. One of the reasons for this poor representation is that filmmakers are coming from a white perspective. Director Chris Eyre and writer-director Sherman Alexie, both American Indians, have emerged in the last decade to rectify the situation, jointly creating the film Smoke Signals, a buddy road picture that forces the protagonists to rethink Indian identity and the bonds that tie them. Eyre and Alexie examine how their films deal with religion