Ahead of the BFI London Film Festival premiere and UK release of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, we look at 10 films that made strides for the representation of the Indigenous people of North America.
Within a few days of each other, I saw Schindler s List and Geronimo, and it occurred to me that both films are about Holocausts, about entire populations murdered because of their race.
But Americans are not quick to describe our treatment of the Indians as genocide, and even a somewhat revisionist film like Geronimo is careful to describe the conflicts between the U.S. government and Indian hostiles as a war.
It was a war carried out with most of the power on our side, and our justification - that the land belonged to us and we therefore had the divine right to cleanse it of an alien race - is, of course, Hitler s argument. One of the unanswerable questions in this film comes when Geronimo asks why there is not enough land for everyone.