Reel Injun

: Growing up on the reservation,

the only show in town

was movie night in the church basement.

Raised on cowboys and Indians,

we cheered for the cowboys,

never realizing

we were the Indians.

Soon, we will be gone.

Your civilization will have destroyed us.

But by your magic,

we will live forever.

Do I have to cut your throat

to get it through your head? I'm a white man!

You fooled 'em, Chief!

You fooled 'em! You fooled 'em all.

- You know the only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV?

It's Indians watching Indians on TV.

: I'm an Indian.

A Cree who grew up in one of the most isolated

Native communities on earth,

close to the Arctic Circle.

Up here, we don't wear feathers or ride horses,

but because of the movies,

a lot of the world still thinks we do.

I'm on a journey to make sense

of how Hollywood's fantasy about Indians influenced the world,

even Natives like me.

- You got to look like a warrior.

You got to look like

you just came back from killing a buffalo.

- But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen.

: But the myth of the fearless,

stoic warrior lives on.

We'll never be able to change

the fantasy of who and what Indians are.

That fantasy will always be there.

We'll always be on covers of novels saying,

The Cheyenne Warrior!

: I'm only three and a half years old.

: I'm off to Hollywood,

4,000 miles through the American West,

in the reservation Indian's vehicle of choice, the rez car.

A rez car is probably

like a piece of luggage or something to other people,

and you kind of keep it together

with tape and with string.

And, you know, I have all sorts of people telling me,

"Oh yeah, I know that story about driving backwards,

'cause we actually did it."

I had a rez car, and, you know, the ignition didn't work,

so we had a screwdriver in the ignition,

and, you know, all sorts of stuff.

Nobody said to me that they had a car

with three wheels yet, but that would be a rez car.

: These are the American Great Plains,

the setting for most of Hollywood's Indian stories.

I'm headed West

to the sacred Black Hills,

once the domain

of Chief Sitting Bull, and the legendary

Tashunka Witko,

otherwise known as Crazy Horse.

- Tashunka Witko, which does not mean Crazy Horse.

Tashunka Witko means his horses are spirited.

He was a great horse trainer,

and all his horses had spirit.

You could just see them prancing, yeah...

: I've always wanted to ride a horse

on the open plains.

I finally feel like a real Indian.

This is where Crazy Horse outmanoeuvred Custer

at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Ever since,

Hollywood has been telling that story

over and over again, turning the battle into legend,

and Crazy Horse,

an icon.

- Why you dirty, moth-eaten, cockeyed son of a rattlesnake!

If it ain't old Crazy Horse, chief of the Sioux! Ha! Ha! Ha!

: Legend has it,

hekilled Custer.

There's a romanticism

in the glory to Little Big Horn, we defeated Custer

and all this and that, at that emotional level.

But, you know, within 15 years, our leader Crazy Horse was dead,

Sitting Bull was dead.

You know... And we were herded up.

: Pine Ridge is the poorest Indian reservation

in North America.

These are the descendants of Crazy Horse.

Their Lakota Chief is

a direct descendant of Chief Red Cloud,

who fought alongside Crazy Horse.

So, this is where it happened?

This is where it happened.

Right here, this is where Chief Crazy Horse

was imprisoned, here.

: After surrendering here to troops,

Crazy Horse was stabbed in the back.

- So, I always think this is sacred ground to me.

Where our ancestors used to walk,

where they used to camp and live. Here.

: To Native people, Crazy Horse

is a mystical warrior, just like in the movies.

- It was a continuation of the idea that Natives

were really great warriors,

that they were just incredibly skilled at warfare,

almost unstoppable, really.

Yah!

- I've gotta say, Neil, you know,

I'm really glad that you're doing this.

For once, somebody's taking the time to let the...

to tell the... To tell the real story of Crazy Horse.

As he says in his song,

"Whenever you look, see the Black Hills,

"remember me.

That is our homeland, our sacred grounds."

: Carved out of the sacred Black Hills

is Crazy Horse Memorial.

When complete,

it will be the largest statue to a human anywhere.

- And there'll be a 44-foot stone feather

on the back of his head. It will be carved

from 11 pieces of stone.

: An ironic tribute to a man,

who it is said refused to have his image captured.

Most experts agree that every photo of him is a fake.

Who was Crazy Horse?

Not who wasCrazy Horse:

who isCrazy Horse?

Who he is, is he's an idea,

he's an embodiment of the human spirit,

he's an embodiment of what can be done

when you're centered and balanced within yourself

as a human being, when you have a relationship

to the spiritual reality that you are a part of.

See, to me he's an embodiment of that.

- Shortly, there will be a blast.

It's a good crowd, yeah.

It's nice doing a TV shot. Maybe a couple more,

I'll be able to get in the movies some day,

and maybe change some of the movie clichés, you know,

you see everyday in the movies, where the settlers come in,

gets the Indian loaded, and wants his resources, you know?

"Say, Indian, which way does this road go?"

"Hmm! Road stay! You go!"

"You don't understand,

some day we want to live together and love one another

like brothers and sisters."

"We cannot love the white eyes,

it is painful to kiss forked tongue."

: Zigzagging my way through the American Heartland,

I'm hoping to make sense of the world's enduring love affair

with the Hollywood Indian.

In the movies,

we're often portrayed as spiritual, noble, and free.

This image has captured the world's imagination.

This fascination with everything Native

begins with the very first explorers.

They encountered hundreds of nations,

rich and diverse cultures, languages, and beliefs.

The world is hooked.

- Native Americans were among the first subjects for films.

Thomas Edison shot silents about Native Americans.

This is in the late 1800's.

- Thomas Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope

in Times Square,

and it was a penny machine that played

"The Lagoon of Pueblo, Ceremonies and Dances."

And those were the very first moving images.

There were more than a hundred

silents made involving Native Americans.

Very much 'cause this part of American history, of course,

was really still ongoing at the time that cinema

was really being born.

: With populations dwindling,

most Natives are confined to reservations.

Then, as film is being invented,

the Seventh Cavalry, in revenge for Little Big Horn,

opens fire on the last

free community of Natives.

Three hundred men, women, and children

are killed at Wounded Knee,

on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

- That is a genocide that occurred, and the culture

wanted to perpetuate the idea that

these people are now mythological, you know,

they don't even really exist, they're like dinosaurs.

The reason that Indians

were projected so heavily into movies

was the romance of the tragedy,

Greek, roman tragedy.

The Western, as a form,

is a very open form.

It's a very pure kind of American metaphor,

a kind of frame

within which you can write or say

all kinds of things.

I think that the cinema

was created to film First Nations.