Provies an illustrated account of the 'Injun', or Native American, in cinema. This book discusses the representations - and the critiques - of the controversial figure of the 'Indian', or the Native American. The author discusses how certain Indian cultures came to stand in for the entirety of Indian culture.

Buscombe moves beyond the Hollywood depiction, however. Everyone is familiar with the Italian-made 'spaghetti Westerns', which rarely contained images of Indians, but less well known are the Westerns made in Germany. In West Germany, a series of films was based on the works of the prolific nineteenth-century novelist Karl May, which enshrined the concept of the "noble savage." He also discusses products of the Cold War: the East German film industry created the Indianerfilme, in which the Indians function as third-world freedom fighters struggling against Yankee imperialists. Today, the Western genre may be almost defunct. But for some time Native Americans have produced documentary films about their lives, and are increasingly moving into feature films. The book concludes with a discussion of how these films differ from the traditional Westerns.