From 2010 Winter Olympics medals and mascots to the opening ceremony, Native iconography has never been as prevalent in modern Vancouver as it is now. Although on the one hand the presence of Native cultures is being broadcast globally, on the other, international viewers may remain uninformed about the complicated history and contemporary realities of First Nations existence.

It’s fitting, then, that a Canadian documentary that examines a more pervasive—and problematic—form of visual politics is being released during the Olympics.

Reel Injun, codirected and cowritten by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond (which opens on Friday [February 19] ), is a historical survey of how Native people have been portrayed in one of the most influential shapers of popular culture: Hollywood. From the earliest cinematic images of Native Americans and westerns to the inspirational rise of Native independent cinema, Diamond takes a look at the sluggish shift from stereotypical portrayals to better depictions and indigenous films like Canada’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

On the line from his Montreal home, Diamond says that when he came up with the concept seven years ago, he was surprised to find that a lot of people had written on the subject but no one had made a film about it. “I had the original idea after watching this silly movie with a white guy in it playing an Indian. I thought it’d be a great, funny little documentary I could do for APTN [Aboriginal Peoples Television Network], you know, like just looking at all the white people who used to play Indians, like Burt Lancaster, Elvis Presley, Charles Bronson, Raquel Welch, people like that. And I was going to call it I’m Not Indian but I Play One on TV. Then the idea just grew from there.”

The depiction of Native people as the enemy in westerns was so unquestioned that Diamond and other Native children grew up identifying with cowboys. In fact, seeing a Native character being portrayed authentically for the first time had a resounding impact at his brother’s school. “When he was in the residential school, he’d watch these cowboy-and-Indian movies all the time as well. There’s a scene in a film where this Native character comes up over a rise and says this line, and it happened to be in Cree, and a whole bunch of the Cree kids in the school turned to each other and said, ”˜Holy shit!’ ”

What’s interesting is that Hollywood’s initial attempts to portray Natives as heroes bombed at the Depression-era box office. “They [Hollywood] needed to justify what happened in the Wild West,” Diamond theorizes. “They couldn’t really look at their past and feel good about it if they told the real story of what happened in the West, taking over the continent and stuff. So they needed John Wayne to come in and make them all feel good about it.”

When more successful heroic films emerged in the ’70s, Diamond noticed a corresponding shift among Native audiences. “I think it was when Little Big Man came out”¦when Indians started to be good guys. The portrayal changed a bit in Hollywood. And Billy Jack came out, of course. And we all wanted to be Billy Jack.”

Intriguingly, some of the most positive depictions came from an unlikely source: behind the Iron Curtain. Due to time and budget constraints, Diamond wasn’t able to include the information he found about European westerns, such as German Indian films and the “Red westerns” from Russia, in Reel Injun. “This was during the Cold War, so they couldn’t have the Americans be heroes,” he explains.

Presenting all this information with mirth rather than angst was important to Diamond. “I’m not really an angry person,” he explains. “If you put out something really angry, you just turn people off. And we always work with humour, too. It’s better to make people laugh and teach them that way rather than giving them shit, and then they just get angry or something or just get turned off and don’t listen to you.”

Reaching audiences, however, continues to be a problem for Native independent cinema. “Those kind of films still aren’t being seen. They’re out there, but there’s nobody to distribute them, nobody to screen them. They play at festivals, but who’s going to see it in the States? They don’t have their own [TV] network like we do.”

When asked what he thinks is fuelling the growth of aboriginal cinema around the world, he says it’s the same old problem. “Native people still aren’t seeing their stories told well on-screen [in the mainstream]. Even if the intent is there, it just doesn’t come through for them.”