While the image of a stereotypical Native American entity and the sad demise of this noble savage increasingly got normalized in the twentieth century, the historical and contemporary facts about American and Canadian First Nations state a different perspective. The mediatic theoretical model of a vanishing Indian starts, roughly speaking, from films like The Indian Wars Refought (1914) and the 1925 movie The Vanishing American. However, an objective understanding of geopolitics and the existence of Native Americans helps us understand the implications of these and other narrative mediatics.

This research project studies how the auteurs of some docudramas navigate through the mediatics of ecriture with the perspective of environmentally ethical mise-en-intrigue about the Native Americans. The storytelling of these First Nations or Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the docudramas of the second and third decades of this century offers an informed narrative media technique for decolonizing the dominant tropes that may be adapted in other similar realms. Using the theoretical nexus of docudrama, narrative mediatics, and environmental ethics, this project discusses four docudramas as case studies. 


Bio note

Rabia Aamir is an Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, NUML, Islamabad, Pakistan; a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center of Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a research fellow at CIGA, Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, Turkiye. She is a former awardee of PhD Research Fellowship at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, USA (2018-19). With over twenty-five years of teaching experience at different levels, she is an Approved PhD Supervisor and recipient of the Best University Teacher Award for 2021-22. With a wide range of pedagogic interests, she conducts voiceovers for documentaries, academic discussions, and conferences. She publishes in different genres of poetry and petite poetic memoirs about her times of growing up in Lahore, book chapters on Pakistani Fiction and the changed landscape of Palestine, and articles of seminal importance problematizing the idée reçues in the debates on Kashmir and Palestine. Her research domains include American/Native American literature, Post 9/11 Pakistani Fiction, Middle Eastern and Kashmiri Literature and visual literary narratives, Film Studies, life narratives, and Environmental Ethics. Her recent book Environmental Ethics: Life Narratives from Kashmir & Palestine (2023) is an epistemological theorizing to the debates of environmental humanities and decoloniality.