As a relatively new holiday on the official federal calendar, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a holiday that asks us to do two things at once: look honestly at a people’s history and make room for the traditions, cultures, and stories that have been overlooked for far too long. That means acknowledging the brutality, displacement, and erasure woven into the history of the United States, but it also means resisting the idea that Indigenous stories should only be viewed through the lens of tragedy.

That is what makes this such a rich day for a movie or TV marathon. There are essential historical dramas and documentaries here, absolutely, but there are also comedies, thrillers, coming-of-age stories, family films, sports movies, and delightful shows that are simply interested in letting Indigenous characters live complicated, funny, frustrating, joyful lives. That feels like a much fuller way to spend a day off and celebrate a people who are often systemically ignored.

Top movies and TV shows to watch on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Essential Indigenous movies

If you are looking for a place to start your binge, these titles should be helpful. These films do not all tell the same kind of story or even share the same tone, but they have helped expand what Indigenous life can look like on screen, often by centering voices and communities that Hollywood spent generations flattening into stereotypes.

Indigenous history on screen

There is no honest way to talk about Indigenous Peoples’ Day without talking about history, and much of that history is painful. These movies grapple with colonization, violence, land theft, cultural erasure, and the long consequences of all of it, though some are more successful than others at shifting the point of view away from the white characters through whom Hollywood has traditionally told these stories.

Documentaries about Indigenous history and culture

Sometimes the goal of a documentary is simply to challenge the version of history you thought you knew. These films do exactly that, whether they are examining sovereignty, boarding schools, environmental fights, music, activism, or the decades of movie stereotypes that helped shape how non-Indigenous audiences imagined Native people in the first place.

Indigenous stories that aren’t history lessons

For anyone looking to get a true look at what it means to be a Native person living in modern America, this might be the most important category in the entire list, because representation is not especially meaningful if Indigenous characters are only allowed to appear when a story focuses on oppression, brutality, or outdated stereotypes. These movies make room for humor, romance, family tension, bad decisions, ambition, grief, friendship, and all of the ordinary messiness that actually makes people feel human.

Indigenous horror, thrillers, and genre movies

If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Indigenous cinema” is a solemn historical drama, this section is here to blow that idea up rather quickly. Horror, science fiction, thrillers, and action movies have given Indigenous filmmakers especially fertile ground to play with ideas about invasion, survival, identity, and colonialism, often with monsters doing some of the metaphorical heavy lifting.

Indigenous stories from around the world

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an American holiday, but the experience of Indigenous communities obviously does not stop at our borders. These films widen the lens to Māori, Aboriginal Australian, Sámi, Inuit, First Nations, and other communities, offering a reminder that Indigenous identity is not one culture, one history, or one kind of story.

Family-friendly Indigenous stories

Younger viewers deserve better than the handful of stereotypes that children’s entertainment relied on for far too long. These movies offer a much better entry point, with stories about family, adventure, sports, identity, and growing up that can open the door to bigger conversations without feeling like someone assigned a holiday worksheet. Some older family movies, including Disney’s “Pocahontas,” are included here less as models of historical or cultural accuracy than as influential depictions worth revisiting with kids — and, ideally, talking about what they simplify, romanticize, or get wrong.

TV shows to binge on Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Television has arguably done more than movies in recent years to change what Indigenous representation looks like, largely because series have the time to let characters simply exist instead of constantly carrying the symbolic weight of an entire culture. That has given us everything from crime dramas and children’s animation to supernatural mysteries and one of the funniest, warmest coming-of-age shows of the past decade.