Reel Injun

Reel Injun
Directed by	Neil Diamond Catherine Bainbridge Jeremiah Hayes
Produced by	Catherine Bainbridge Christina Fon Linda Ludwick
Written by	Neil Diamond Jeremiah Hayes Catherine Bainbridge
Starring	Angela Aleiss Adam Beach Clint Eastwood Sacheen Littlefeather Zacharias Kunuk Jim Jarmusch Robbie Robertson Russell Means Melinda Micco Jesse Wente Neil Diamond
Music by	Claude Castonguay Mona Laviolette
Cinematography	Edith Labbe
Production company	Rezolution Pictures National Film Board of Canada
Distributed by	Domino Film
Release date	September 10, 2009 (2009-09-10) (Toronto) February 19, 2010 (2010-02-19) (Canada)
Running time	85 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

Reel Injun is a 2009 Canadian documentary film directed by Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes that explores the portrayal of Native Americans in film. Reel Injun is illustrated with excerpts from classic and contemporary portrayals of Native people in Hollywood movies and interviews with filmmakers, actors and film historians, while director Diamond travels across the United States to visit iconic locations in motion picture as well as American Indian history.

Reel Injun explores the various stereotypes about Natives in film, from the Noble savage to the Drunken Indian. It profiles such figures as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian American who reinvented himself as a Native American on screen. The film also explores Hollywood's practice of using Italian Americans and American Jews to portray Indians in the movies and reveals how some Native American actors made jokes in their native tongue on screen when the director thought they were simply speaking gibberish.

The film was inspired, in part, by Diamond's own experiences as a child in Waskaganish, Quebec, where he and other Native children would play cowboys and Indians after local screenings of Westerns in their remote community. Diamond remembers that although the children were Indians, they all wanted to be cowboys. When Diamond was older, he would be questioned by non-Native people about whether his people lived in teepees and rode horses, causing him to realize that their preconceptions about Native people were also derived from movies.