Detours Homeward: Indigenous Uses of the Road Movie

• Main Author: Gay Pearson, Wendy
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2010
• Subjects: Native studies; road movie; Film and Media Studies; sami
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/filmpub/140

This article examines three of the earliest Indigenous films to engage with and to transform a genre that might normally be understood as colonial due to its historical relationship to American national identity. However, Bázo (Sami), Smoke Signals (Native American), and Beneath Clouds (Aboriginal Australian) all rework the genre in different and sometimes surprising ways, yet always in the service of a decolonizing project that sees Indigenous film-making as a singularly important anti-colonial tool. Each film imagines a notion of "home" that is both a recognition of the importance of family, kinship and land and a culturally specific corrective to stereotypic colonial misrepresentation.