This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For most of film history, when Hollywood told a story set on a reservation, the people who actually lived there had no hand in writing, directing, or producing it. Smoke Signals broke that pattern in 1998. Sherman Alexie, a Spokane Indian raised on the Spokane Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, adapted his own 1993 short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, into a screenplay. Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne and Arapaho filmmaker, directed it, in his feature debut. The film follows Victor and Thomas, two young men from the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho, on a road trip to collect the ashes of Victor's estranged father, shot on location in Plummer, Worley, DeSmet and Tensed on the reservation itself and across Eastern Washington.
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy, and it became, by the description Hollywood itself had never applied to a Native story before, the first feature film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians to reach commercial distribution. Twenty years later, on December 12, 2018, the Library of Congress named it to the National Film Registry, praising its witty, droll script and calling it a funny, unpretentious look at Native Americans in the nation's cinema and culture, an honor reserved for works judged culturally, historically or aesthetically significant enough to preserve.