This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Reel Injun premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009 and reached American audiences the following year on PBS's Independent Lens, broadcast November 2, 2010. Distributed by Domino Film, a Canadian production, it went on to win three Gemini Awards in 2010, for best multicultural program, best direction in a documentary program and best visual research, and it received a Peabody Award in 2011, one of American broadcasting's most selective honors, for excellence in electronic media. In 2021 the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures selected it for inclusion in its core exhibition, placing a Native made critique of Hollywood's own century of Indian pictures inside the institution most responsible for making them.
None of that recognition came from within the industry Reel Injun examines. It came from documentary juries, a public broadcaster, and a museum built to house film history rather than from the studios whose westerns and adventure pictures the film holds up for scrutiny. This atlas records that pattern as its own kind of evidence: a documented, awarded account of how Native American religion and identity were flattened into costume and caricature for most of a century, made and recognized largely outside the system that did the flattening.