This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 2009, the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, from Waskaganish in northern Quebec, released Reel Injun, a documentary tracing how a century of Hollywood cinema had depicted Native peoples, and, just as pointedly, how little those depictions had to do with any actual nation. Working with co-directors Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes, Diamond gathered archival footage stretching from the silent era to contemporary releases and set it beside interviews with directors, actors and activists, among them the Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means, the Santee Dakota activist John Trudell, and Sacheen Littlefeather, of Apache and Yaqui descent, best known for declining an Academy Award on Marlon Brando's behalf in 1973 in protest of the film industry's treatment of Native Americans.
The film names its recurring inventions plainly: the noble savage, the drunken Indian, the Indian princess, and what Reel Injun calls the mystic warrior, a Hollywood invention that treated whole traditions of belief and ceremony as a costume for anyone to put on, rather than as the specific practice of a specific nation. Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals, appears among Diamond's interview subjects, one Native filmmaker's documented account of the pattern another Native filmmaker's own work had already tried to break.