Native American women are contesting their misrepresentation in media

NOT YOUR PRINCESS

There are levels to this erasure, said Rebecca Nagle, a filmmaker and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Whether on television, film or the news, "we're just not there," she said.

"I think the first level is invisibility," she said. "And when we do appear, there are a lot of stereotypes and tropes we fall into. So we're either there to fall in love and save a white man or we're either brutalized on screen."

Not only are Native American women often sidelined by other characters, they are often erased from their own historical narratives, Nagle pointed out, like the 2017 release "Woman Walks Ahead." The film implies there was romantic tension between painter Catherine Weldon and Lakota chief, Sitting Bull.

"Sitting Bull had multiple Lakota wives and had no romantic involvement with that white woman who came to paint his portrait," she said. "To erase these Native women in his life to create a narrative around a white woman is just one example of how when Hollywood tells stories of Native communities, Native women are erased."

The lack of focus and misrepresentation of the American indigenous community has not substantially improved in the last few decades, believes Lisa Charleyboy, a Canadian First Nations writer and editor of Tsilhqot'in descent. Their constant erasure from mainstream media's narrative makes it easy for audiences to not think of Native women as people seated in reality, furthuring the invisibility of crimes against them, she said.

Both women stressed the high rates of violences against indigenous women across North America. A study conducted by the National Institute of Justice surveyed over 2,000 women in the United States who identified as Native American and found more than half had experienced sexual violence. In Canada, 24 percent of First Nations women reported abuse from a partner.

#WhyWeWearRed continues to gain traction on social media, along with similar counternarratives that Romero hope will present a more empowered, truthful depiction of Native American women.

It is a perspective Charleyboy saw little of growing up.

"As a teenager I really experienced a lot of negative stereotypes in mainstream media and pop culture," she said. "And that really made me full of self-loathing, not wanting to be indigenous, wanting to distance myself from my background."

She described her upbringing as distant from her First Nations heritage, raised by a white mother and stepfather in a predominantly white area of British Columbia, Canada.

The images she saw of Native American people were hard to confront, she said.

"It's just things that you see in the news, that all Natives are lazy, they do drugs. They don't work hard, they don't have an education." Charleyboy said.

As for Native American women, "I mean, the only thing that really existed then was Pocahontas .... or they're either like a drunk or a squaw, so those are the two kind of things that you always have to deal with." she remembered.

Disingenuine tropes are what Native American people on television usually had to depict, Charleyboy said, with the modern experience hardly making its way to the forefront. She was determined to confront this with her own body of work.

Most recently, this has been in the form of "#NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women", an anthology of writings, stories and poems from First Nations and Native American women across Canada and the United States.

The project was inspired by the cultural emotional resonance she saw come with Beyonce Knowles, "Lemonade" album - an artistic work acclaimed for its dialogue on race, feminism and the African-American female experience.

She and co-editor Mary Beth Leatherdale thought "that it would be great if we could create an ontology that had a similar emotional resonance with our readers and our audience in terms of displaying and sharing the Native American indigenous female experience."

The book features indigenous women and their stories told in their own voices: authentic, powerful and raw. It is a series of writings that Charleyboy hopes will give Native American children better role models to look up to, citing the lack of the same in her own childhood.

Others like Nagle work on using film as means to reckon with critical issues they face. Nagle has dabbled in "experimental short films" before making her piece, "How to Heal Without Justice."

Described as "an open letter, visual poem, and experimental short," she faces the camera and speaks directly to an ex-girlfriend who stalked and attacked her at a party.

"It was about not being able to get justice," she said of the incident's aftermath. "I think the vision of the film came to me just a means to express how it made me feel crazy, but also to express how I was able to cope with it."

So far, Nagle believes the bulk of the work in drawing attention to indigenous issues through film has been done largely only by indigenous people.

Though other ethnic groups have made begun to make their mark in the film industry, contemporary depictions of Native Americans are still absent from the mainstream. This is part due to American audience's reluctance to confront the vices of their colonial past, believes Nagle.

"It's much harder to confront that narrative when we acknowledge the contemporary Native people still living in the United States today," she said. "Part of the narrative that there are no longer any Native people is part of the way to avoid what the country has done [to Native Americans] and continues to do."

Bringing more contemporary, accurate depictions of Native American women to the screen is an issue Hollywood has still not seen as vital, said Chris Finley, assistant professor of American studies and Ethnicity at USC.

"It's not even about representation, it's about debt," Finley said. "Because you know, this is our land."

Finley, a member of the Colville tribe , describes herself as a "queer indigenous scholar" and has documented indigenous feminisms and queer indigenous studies in her work.

Historically, several tribes followed matrilineal lineages , with women playing key leadership roles. In contrast, her analysis of Native American women in mainstream film highlights how they are often silenced, sometimes literally. She named the example of Sacagawea in the film, "Night at the Museum", a depiction she finds ironically inaccurate.

"Native people know that Native women are very strong and very loud and very powerful," she said.

The complexities of the character, including her being a translator and also giving birth on trail during the Lewis and Clark expedition, were erased in the film. But one particular grievance is more insulting than others, Finley said.

"They have her having a love affair with Teddy Roosevelt, who was a eugenicist. I mean, come on. Anyone else."

The stereotypical tropes that Native American women embody to non-Native audiences - romanticized princesses or victims - is often what Hollywood directors fall back on, even when trying to do better.

Finley credits director Terrence Malick as an accomplished filmmaker, but still views his 2004 movie "The New World" as problematic. Despite Malick hiring a Native American cast, linguists to accurately depict the Powhatan language and making efforts to authentically portray the tribe, he just "could not give up the Pocahontas/John Smith story' which we know is not true," Finley said.

Pocahontas was no older than 10-12 years old when she first met Smith, a reality far from the tale of lovers depicted by both Disney and live action tellings of the story. Finley points to sexualized portrayal of the character in "The New World", played by a then 14-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher in Malick's adaptation.

"She's wearing that very revealing buckskin and swimming naked in the water at the beginning of the film," she said.