In Prins’ (2002) article about visual media and the primitivist perplex, he relayed that “white dominant society then began to subvert indigenous understandings of themselves and the world around them. Acting out their own colonial fantasies, whites superimposed the invented “Indian” of their own imaginations on the captive indigenous nations. In this hegemonic configuration, North American Indians became subjects of internal colonialism in a double sense-both politically and psychologically. We might think of this as the “primitivist perplex.” This translated into film, which served to broadcast these inventions to a wider audience and helped to perpetuate these stereotypes and figments of white imagination. The National Film Board of Canada, in 2018, has launched Indigenous cinema, an extensive online library of over 200 films by Indigenous directors — part of a three-year Indigenous Action Plan to “redefine” the NFB’s relationship with Indigenous peoples.
References
Prins, Harald. (2002). “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies and Indigenous Imagination in North America.” Pp. 58-74. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. eds. F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod, and B.Larkin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.