Ankara Üniversitesi İlef Dergisi

Öz

Colonialism has constructed the myth of the “vanishing Indian” over the centuries through science, popular culture, and mainstream cinema. This myth is based on the idea that Indigenous peoples are stuck in the past or frozen in time, and that they are doomed to disappear when they encounter civilized cultures. This study emphasizes the global commonality of colonial violence aimed at the destruction of Indigenous peoples, as well as the struggle against this violence. It examines Indigenous cinema, which exposes the history of colonialism and constructs counter-narratives, as an act of resistance to vanishing and survival. Reflecting Indigenous symbols and rituals on screen, hearing forbidden languages, and articulating what official history conceals make Indigenous cinema an apparatus of political resistance, even if it does not aim to be one. Throughout the history of cinema, films made by whites “about” Indigenous people have imprisoned Indigenous peoples in stereotypes and constructed a language that legitimizes occupation. Each film produced “by” and “for” Indigenous people explicitly or implicitly challenges colonialist representations of Indigenous people and presents the resistance of Indigenous people who are allegedly destined for extinction. Indigenous cinema seeks not to cling to a nostalgic desire to return to a pre-colonial past, or to define the community only in terms of suffering in collective memory, but to construct a new language for continuing to exist as Indigenous people in the contemporary world. This study offers an ideological analysis of Smoke Signals (Chris Eyre, 1998) as an example of Indigenous cinema that deconstructs elements of popular culture and mainstream cinema, engages in a dialogue between contemporary social issues and Indigenous cultural heritage, and celebrates Indigenous existence in the contemporary world.