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Authors: Thomas King
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good about producingmovies—
Medicine River
(1993),
Dance Me Outside
(1994),
Atanarjuat
(2002),
Hank Williams First Nation
(2005), and
Tkaronto
(2007)—and television series
—North of Sixty, The Rez, Moccasin Flats, Moose
TV, and
Mixed Blessings
—that make use of Native actors and that focus on contemporary Native life. As well, the country has the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN), the only Aboriginal television network in North America.
While the United States has been slow to shift its focus from the 1800s, it has still managed to put together a reasonable modern movie resumé that includes
Powwow Highway
(1989),
Grand Avenue
(1996),
Smoke Signals
(1998),
Skins
(2002),
The Business of Fancydancing
(2002), and
Dreamkeeper
(2003), but its contributions to series television have been dismal, with
Northern Exposure
being the exception to the rule.
In the end, the history of Indians in Hollywood is more a comedy than a tragedy. The Indians that Hollywood shows on the silver screens of North America bear only a passing resemblance to Native people. Native filmmakers are trying to change this, particularly through documentaries that deal with a contemporary Native world. Phil Lucas (Choctaw) made over one hundred such short films and documentaries in the course of his life. Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) has made over thirty. Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapaho), Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna), Neil Diamond (Cree), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway), Gil Cardinal (Métis), Tracy Deer (Mohawk), Paul M. Rickard (Cree), Sarah Del Seronde (Navajo), Amy Tall Chief (Osage), Lisa Jackson (Ojibway), Ramona Emerson (Navajo), and Jobie Weetaluktuk (Inuit) are just a few of the Native filmmakers currently working in this area, and it is here that some of the best work is being done.
Helen, in her helpful way, suggested that I should cut all the lists in this chapter in half, suggested that no one likes to read lists, suggested that lists are, by and large, pedantic. She’s right, of course. I just wanted to see the names, and I wanted to make sure that you saw them too.
The only problem is that most people, Native folks included, don’t watch documentaries. Native artists could well be changing the way the world looks at Native people, but because few of these productions ever get to large commercial venues, no one, outside art theatres and the film festival circuit, will ever see them.
Of course, film, even documentary film, isn’t “real.” As with literature and Hollywood releases, documentaries are just an approximation. If you want real life and real Indians, well, that’s another matter altogether.
3
TOO HEAVY TO LIFT
Few looking at photos of mixed-bloods would be likely to say, “But they don’t look like Irishmen.”
—Louis Owens,
I Hear the Train
INDIANS COME IN all sorts of social and historical configurations. North American popular culture is littered with savage, noble, and dying Indians, while in real life we have Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians.
Dead Indians are, sometimes, just that. Dead Indians. But the Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort. Nor are they all that inconvenient. They are the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears. North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer
sees
Indians.What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers. These bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed—are what literary theorists like to call “signifiers,” signs that create a “simulacrum,” which Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and postmodern theorist, succinctly explained as something that “is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which
Medicine River
(1993),
Dance Me Outside
(1994),
Atanarjuat
(2002),
Hank Williams First Nation
(2005), and
Tkaronto
(2007)—and television series
—North of Sixty, The Rez, Moccasin Flats, Moose
TV, and
Mixed Blessings
—that make use of Native actors and that focus on contemporary Native life. As well, the country has the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN), the only Aboriginal television network in North America.
While the United States has been slow to shift its focus from the 1800s, it has still managed to put together a reasonable modern movie resumé that includes
Powwow Highway
(1989),
Grand Avenue
(1996),
Smoke Signals
(1998),
Skins
(2002),
The Business of Fancydancing
(2002), and
Dreamkeeper
(2003), but its contributions to series television have been dismal, with
Northern Exposure
being the exception to the rule.
In the end, the history of Indians in Hollywood is more a comedy than a tragedy. The Indians that Hollywood shows on the silver screens of North America bear only a passing resemblance to Native people. Native filmmakers are trying to change this, particularly through documentaries that deal with a contemporary Native world. Phil Lucas (Choctaw) made over one hundred such short films and documentaries in the course of his life. Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) has made over thirty. Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapaho), Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna), Neil Diamond (Cree), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway), Gil Cardinal (Métis), Tracy Deer (Mohawk), Paul M. Rickard (Cree), Sarah Del Seronde (Navajo), Amy Tall Chief (Osage), Lisa Jackson (Ojibway), Ramona Emerson (Navajo), and Jobie Weetaluktuk (Inuit) are just a few of the Native filmmakers currently working in this area, and it is here that some of the best work is being done.
Helen, in her helpful way, suggested that I should cut all the lists in this chapter in half, suggested that no one likes to read lists, suggested that lists are, by and large, pedantic. She’s right, of course. I just wanted to see the names, and I wanted to make sure that you saw them too.
The only problem is that most people, Native folks included, don’t watch documentaries. Native artists could well be changing the way the world looks at Native people, but because few of these productions ever get to large commercial venues, no one, outside art theatres and the film festival circuit, will ever see them.
Of course, film, even documentary film, isn’t “real.” As with literature and Hollywood releases, documentaries are just an approximation. If you want real life and real Indians, well, that’s another matter altogether.
3
TOO HEAVY TO LIFT
Few looking at photos of mixed-bloods would be likely to say, “But they don’t look like Irishmen.”
—Louis Owens,
I Hear the Train
INDIANS COME IN all sorts of social and historical configurations. North American popular culture is littered with savage, noble, and dying Indians, while in real life we have Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians.
Dead Indians are, sometimes, just that. Dead Indians. But the Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort. Nor are they all that inconvenient. They are the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears. North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer
sees
Indians.What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers. These bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed—are what literary theorists like to call “signifiers,” signs that create a “simulacrum,” which Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and postmodern theorist, succinctly explained as something that “is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which
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