In Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, Beverly R. Singer argues that American Indian control of the camera and the cinematic process is significant if Native people are to become more than objects captured and emulsified on film. In 1993, an official Aboriginal Film and Video Alliance issued the following: "To govern ourselves means to govern our stories . . . To re-imagine and reclaim our ground in the intimate, small, everyday things of life and community is to become self-governing." Simultaneously, the Native American Producers Alliance (NAPA) was created with a focus on tribal ownership of culture and stories. Both alliances are interested in promoting a dialogue about aesthetics and tribal sovereignty. This course will look more closely at this increasingly transformative energy and examine the variety of methods and patterns in which American Indian filmmakers, producers, writers, and actors/actresses have negotiated this terrain of the contested and complex nature of cultural production. We will look at western, anti-western, and postmodern western traditions, transcultural identities and their relationship to the historic construction of the frontier, and the "howling wilderness" and the "wild frontier" in films such as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990), Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Antonia Bird's Ravenous (2000), and Christopher Gans's The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2002). We will discern modern re-shapings of early encounters between American Indians and European missionaries in films such as Bruce Beresford's Black Robe (1991) and John Fusco and Steven Barron's Dreamkeeper (2004). Much of the course will concentrate on contemporary documentary, feature films, and telefilm by indigenous filmmakers such as Valerie Red Horse's Naturally Native (1998), Shelley Niro's Honey Moccasin (1998), Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals (1998) and Skins (2002), Randy Redroad's The Doe Boy (2001), Zacharias Kunuk's The Fast Runner (2002), and Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002). This course, finally, will engage in the laughter of a Native American trickster shaking up our status quo with irreverent act and words in Gerald Vizenor's Harold of Orange (1984), Charlie Hill's On and Off the Res (2000), and Sherman Alexie's The Business of Fancy Dancing (2002).