Teaching Native American filmmakers: Osawa, eyre, and redroad

Feature films written, directed, and produced by Native Americans have increased substantially in the past ten years, and while Native filmmakers have been making documentaries since the late 1960s, there is relatively little information published on how to teach these films. There is a wealth of knowledge contained within these artistic works and educators might find that they can broach a number of topics via Native media. This chapter outlines pedagogical strategies for teaching Native American film1 from a Native American studies' perspective. I specifically address ways to build teaching units around individual films to educate students about issues of representation and self-representation.