Native Americans in film

The portrayal of Native Americans in films concerns Native Americans' roles in cinema, particularly their depiction in Hollywood productions, as well as television and videos. Especially in the Western genre, Native American stock characters can reflect contemporary and historical perceptions of Native Americans and the Wild West.

The portrayal of Native Americans in U.S. cinema has, since the beginning of the motion picture industry, employed harmful stereotypes, especially the archetypes of Native Americans as violent barbarians or noble savages. During the 1930s, negative images dominated Westerns. In 1950, the watershed film Broken Arrow appeared, which many credit as the first postwar Western to depict Native Americans sympathetically.

While Native Americans have directed and produced films since the 1910s, a new movement beginning in the 1990s, Native American filmmakers have attempted to make independent films that work to represent the depth and complexity of indigenous peoples as people and provide a realistic account of their culture. Contemporary Native filmmakers have employed the use of visual sovereignty, defined by scholar Michelle H. Raheja (Seneca descent) as "a way of reimagining Native-centered articulations of self-representation and autonomy that engage the powerful ideologies of mass media," to take back the right to tell their own stories.