...With consistent depictions in film as being people only present in history and not contemporary North American society, Native American culture and filmmaking have struggled to work into the national conscious. Casey Camp Horinek (Ponca) noted at a Native American video and film festival, “When you look back twenty years ago, when the media blitzes were on Wounded Knee, and you think about a time ten years ago when we weren’t getting our voices heard in virtually any way…Look at five years ago, four years ago, and three years ago…(7)” Indigenous film has had to overcome insurmountable obstacles, many of those obstacles having been erected through their previous film characterization, in order to push Smoke Signals through to completion.

Michael Apted, the director responsible for the 1992 documentary Incident at Oglala (1975 reoccupation of Wounded Knee) remarked that there would never be an Indian director in the United States due to “infrastructure” problems(8). Sandra Osawa responded, “Well, its not the infrastructure…I believe it has something to do with racism(9).” Production funding for projects is limited to this day, despite the relative financial success and breakthrough of Smoke Signals. The Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut are currently entertaining plans to underwrite film projects by other Native American filmmakers in the hopes of providing the funding for native film that would otherwise be denied, apparently due to lack of “infrastructure(10).”