Minority retort

Ernest Webb on Reel Injun,
his doc feature about onscreen natives

CORRECTING CARICATURES: Webb

by MATTHEW HAYS

Montreal producer Ernest Webb recalls watching Western movies when he was a child growing up in James Bay. “We always cheered for the cowboys, even when they were killing Indians,” he says now.

Those experiences were formative ones for Webb, who has produced a broad range of film and TV in Montreal, some of it with aboriginal themes (like Moose TV). And he says many native people end up learning all sorts of erroneous things about their own culture via Hollywood’s twisted (mis)representations of native people.

Thus Webb is producing Reel Injun, a feature-length doc all about the history of cinematic aboriginal representations, which is being directed by Neil Diamond. “We were very impressed with The Celluloid Closet, the documentary that looks at how gays were represented in film, so we thought the same thing should be done about natives in film,” says Webb.

Reel Injun, which Webb hopes to premiere at next September’s Toronto International Film Festival, includes interviews with native American actor Wes Studi, Toronto-based critic Jesse Wente, filmmakers Zacharius Kunuk (Atanarjuat) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man), actor Adam Beach and a rare appearance by Sacheen Littlefeather, the woman Marlon Brando sent to the Academy Awards ceremony in 1973 to decline his Oscar win for The Godfather. “Littlefeather has never really told her story about that Oscar night,” Webb says. “Now she’s getting the chance.”

Webb says there have been a lot of surprises from the research his team has done. “In the silent era, in fact, native Americans were working on films. But for some reason, when the talkies came in, many of them were pushed out.” And some of the native representations have strange Cold War overtones. Webb was intrigued to learn of the so-called Red Westerns—Soviet films that portrayed the white American cowboys as evil and the American Indians as heroic freedom fighters, in an inversion of the standard Hollywood formula.

Webb hopes Reel Injun will be the definitive text on the history of aboriginal representations in the movies. A $1.5-million co-production by his own company Rezolution Pictures and the NFB, it will be broadcast on the CBC (after a theatrical run). But Webb says that when he thinks of what the target audience for Reel Injun is, he thinks back to the Cree community he grew up with in James Bay. “That’s who I consider our primary audience. I just want them to be proud of what we’re doing.”