These 19 Movies & Shows Offer Authentic Depictions of Indigenous People (2024)

For nearly a century, since the era of silent film, Native American movies made in Hollywood has provided the primary avenue for Indigenous images and stories to be displayed to non-Native audiences. 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. But contemporary filmmakers, documentarians, and artists are working to combat these dominant, largely negative narratives.

Today, the list of Indigenous-made cinema, documentaries, and television continues to steadily rise each year. To celebrate the artistry of Indigenous creators this Native American Heritage Month and all year long, here’s a guide to a few Indigenous-led films and shows that share more honest depictions of resilience, resistance, community, language preservation, and climate justice among Native communities.

Below, check out these Native American movies and shows that bring us more real, honest depictions of Indigenous communities.

Dark Winds (2022-)

Dark Winds is a 2022 series created by Chickasaw producer and writer Graham Roland and directed by Chris Eyre. Based on the Leaphorn & Chee book series written by Tony Hillerman and set in the early 1970s, this series follows Navajo police officers stationed on a remote outpost of the Navajo Nation near Monument Valley. The show explores the difficulties that Tribal Police on reservations might face regarding Indigenous spiritual beliefs while undergoing an investigation of a double murder.

Watch Dark Winds on AMC+ or Amazon Prime Video.

Rez Ball (2024)

Released on Netflix in 2024, Rez Ball, directed by Sydney Freeland, and co-written with Sterlin Harjo, is based on the nonfiction sports novel Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, by The New York Times journalist Michael Powell. THe film centers around the Chuska Warriors, a Native American high school basketball team from Chuska, New Mexico, who are competing for the state championship title but lose their star player.

Watch Rez Ball on Netflix.

Fancy Dance (2023)

Directed by Erica Tremblay in her feature directorial debut, Fancy Dance stars Oscar-nominated actor Lily Gladstone, Isabel DeRoy-Olson and Shea Whigham. The film centers around Jax (Lily Gladstone) and her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) as they scrape by on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. What begins as a search for Jax’s sister unfolds into an exploration of the ways Indigenous women move through a colonized world while at the mercy of a failed justice system.

Watch Fancy Dance on AppleTV+.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

This film offers one of the first authentic depictions of the terrorism against the Osage Tribe of Oklahoma in the 1920s, in which white Americans attacked, and in some cases killed, Osage people to get rich after oil was found on tribal land. Regarded as a modern classic, directed by Martin Scorsese, features an Oscar-nominated performance by Lily Gladstone.

Watch Killers of the Flower Moon on AppleTV+.

Reservation Dogs (2021-2023)

Reservation Dogs is a comedy from co-creators and executive producers Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, featuring a range of Indigenous screenplay guest writers. Launched by FX on Hulu in 2021, the show follows four Indigenous teenagers in a small community in Oklahoma following the death of their close friend. A coming-of-age story, the show explores the modern Indigenous youth experience. It is a breakthrough in Indigenous representation with its cast and crew and has been recognized and critically acclaimed in its run. Golden Globes and Primetime Emmy nominated Reservation Dogs has won awards from The Gotham Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, and received a Peabody Award.

Watch Reservation Dogs on Hulu.

Prey (2022)

Yes, Prey is a sci-fi movie in the Predator franchise, but it also serves as one of the few, perhaps only, depictions of a mainstream sci-fi horror heroine that is Native American. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, Prey stars Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Michelle Thrush, Stormee Kipp, Julian Black Antelope, and Bennett Taylor. Midthunder is Naru, a young Comanche woman, who has to defend herself and her tribe from the dual horrors of both a vicious alien predator—and the French fur traders hunting the buffalo her people rely on to survive.

Watch Prey on Hulu.

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019)

The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is a 2019 film directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. It tells the story of two Indigenous women from very different circumstances and explores the experience of domestic violence from their perspective. Part of the film's description reads as follows: “Taking its title from an essay by Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, and based on a watershed moment in Tailfeathers' life, this story of a chance encounter between two women — living in the same Vancouver neighborhood, but coming from distinct worlds of class and lived experience — reveals the necessity for Indigenous people to look out for each other in a society that's too often indifferent to their existence.”

Watch The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open on Netflix.

The Stories for Climate Justice Collection (2021)

The Stories for Climate Justice Alaska Native Filmmakers collection was produced in 2021 during the inaugural Alaska Native Filmmaker's Intensive, made possible with a partnership between the nonprofit Native Movement and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of Theatre and Film. The all-Indigenous Alaskan-made films examine how Indigenous Alaskans respond to climate change's impacts on their families and communities.

Watch the collection on the Always Indigenous Media Youtube page.

SG̲aawaay Ḵʹuuna/The Edge of the Knife (2018)

SG̲aawaay Ḵʹuuna/The Edge of the Knife is a 2018 film co-directed by Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown and is the first feature-length film made entirely in Xaat Kíl — the Haida language, an endangered language spoken by Indigenous people in Southeast Alaska and Haida Gwaii/British Columbia. Taking place in the 1800s, the story follows a man that lives in the Temperate Rainforest of Haida territory after the accidental death of a child and brings in a character of Haida stories: the Gaagiixid, the Wildman.

Watch SG̲aawaay Ḵʹuuna on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and the Roku Channel.

Dawnland (2018)

Directed by Adam Mazo and Ben Pender-Cudlip, Dawnland is a documentary that focuses on the systematic separation of Wabanaki children from their families by government agents, children that were then placed with white families during most of the 20th century. Many of these children suffered devastating emotional and physical trauma after being taken from their family and many of the people interviewed for the documentary share how they have lost a sense of their identity due to these experiences. A major part of the film is about Maine's government-sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which gathered testimony from Wabanaki families who were affected by this practice.

Rent Dawnland, here.

The Canary Effect (2006)

The Canary Effect is a documentary that explores a variety of topics, including various policies from the United States government that have negatively affected Native American people over the years. It touches on the economic marginalization these communities have faced, along with the media's refusal to report on various stories of death by suicide and Columbine-style school shootings that have occurred among Indigenous youth. Directed by Robin Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman, it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006.

Watch The Canary Effect free on Youtube.

Project Chariot (2013)

Project Chariot puts a spotlight on when the United States government wanted to experiment with nuclear testing in Alaska during the 1950s and '60s. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission planned to detonate thermonuclear bombs at a site near the Indigenous village town of Point Hope. People from Point Hope protested the plan and eventually stopped it from happening. While no detonation happened, it was later revealed that the site was radioactively contaminated by another secret experiment in which the government buried several thousand pounds of radioactive soil in the same area without telling nearby people. A 1996 report from The New York Times points out that the cancer rate in the area was much higher than the national average.

Watch Project Chariot free on Vimeo.

The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo (2009)

The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo is a documentary that tells the history of when the United States Army marched over eight thousand Navajo men, women, and children at gunpoint through three hundred miles of desert in the Southwest to a prison camp in eastern New Mexico. Hundreds of people died from starvation and exposure to the winter elements.

You can order it or watch parts on YouTube.

Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools (2016)

Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools focuses on the history and brutality of American boarding schools that tried to "kill the Indian" in Native peoples, as put by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt. These institutions forced assimilation onto people who were unwillingly taken from their families; their hair was cut, they were made to wear military uniforms, along with being forced to learn and speak English. Many were punished physically and sexually abused at the boarding schools.

Watch Unspoken free here.

Our Spirits Don't Speak English (2008)

Our Spirits Don't Speak English is another documentary that, like Unspoken, focuses on the first-hand experiences of the people that survived the boarding school system. A part can be viewed here and the DVD can be ordered here.

Aleut Story (2005)

Aleut Story showcases the journey of the Alaskan Unangan (Aleut) people of Alaska. The Unangan people’s traditional territories became a major point of defense for the U.S. Military as World War II crept into Alaska. Aleuts were forced out of their homes and put into isolated internment camps. Those who survived later fought for reparations from the federal government.

Rent Aleut Story on Amazon Prime Video.

Our Sisters in Spirit (2018)

Our Sisters in Spirit focuses on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) epidemic, a crisis that hard largely gone uncovered by the media. There is systemic violence that has led to a disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, many cases which have never been solved. According to information from the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, Native Americans and Alaska Natives represent only 0.8% of the U.S. population, but in 2017, they made up 1.8% of missing persons cases.

Watch Our Sisters in Spirit free on YouTube.

We Shall Remain: The Trail of Tears

We Shall Remain: The Trail of Tears tells the story of the forced relocation by gunpoint of thousands of Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee people between 1830 and 1840 due to provisions of the Indian Removal Act under President Andrew Jackson. Some of these people were forced to march more than 1,200 miles. As a result, thousands of people died due to cold, hunger, and disease. The Trail of Tears is the third in the five-part American Experience miniseries We Shall Remain by documentarian Ric Burns.

Rent We Shall Remain: The Trail of Tears on Apple TV.

Amá (2018)

Amá is a documentary about the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of Native American women across the United States over the 1960s and 1970s. Due to poor record-keeping, this number is estimated to be much higher. Directed by filmmaker Lorna Tucker, part of the synopsis of Amá reads as follows: “The film features the testimony of many Native Americans, including three remarkable women who tell their stories — Jean Whitehorse, Yvonne Swan and Charon Aseytoyer — as well as a revealing and rare interview with Dr. Reimart Ravenholt whose population control ideas were the framework for some of the government policies directed at Native American women.”

Watch Amá on OVID.tv.