Land of a Thousand Dances

Indians and Hollywood go way back, farther than either one of us might care to remember. Indian film directors in the 1920s? Yep. One of the first movies ever released starred Indians, directed by Thomas Edison, 1894. Something about a Ghost Dance. We've been acting in movies for a century, cursing them and loving them since day one. 

The movies loom so large for Indians because they have defined our self-image as well as told the entire planet how we live, look, scream and kill. 

Indian film-makers are prisoners of this creation, and it's no wonder that many of the Indian films that do exist are about stereotypes and even Hollywood movies. 

We could hardly be expected to just ignore this, so we don't. We pay close attention, perhaps too close. If it's true that Indians have been deeply involved in the movie business, it's also true that those films aren't really about Indians in the first place. They aren't made for an Indian audience, and they were not written by Indians. 

People weep about Hollywood's treatment of Indians and make the case we're owed something because Jack Palance played Geronimo. Who cares. Not Hollywood, that's for sure. Just look at how everyone else is treated in most movies. 

They don't call it The Industry for nothing. People make movies for love and money, to get dates and buy cars and drugs and always have and always will. 

Lately, though, we've crossed the line somewhere and forgotten that it's entertainment and not a vehicle invented to first denigrate and then uplift our race. I believe our ancestors were smarter than that, about movies and a great many other things. (Of course, they were stupid about a lot of things too.) 

But I don't think they would bother to attack critics for giving bad reviews to a movie written and directed by white people about Indians, as some Indian newspapers did when a timid backlash against Dances With Wolves emerged two years ago. 

That shows how confused many of us are, that we would act as unpaid press agents for a film that is based on a novel and screenplay about Comanches, and then shifted to South Dakota only after the production designer - and this is kind of poignant - finds a shortage of buffaloes in Oklahoma. And not a single Comanche or Kiowa character, some based on actual historical figures, is changed. 

I mean, yo, Kevin, Mike: saying Ten Bears is Sioux is like saying Winston Churchill is Albanian. 

It's the movies, and in the movies you can do anything, even make Ten Bears Sioux or Churchill Albanian, but don't toss out bouquets for service to the struggle and historical truth. 

I think in the old days we would have found the buffalo stampede stirring ("Hey, Reginald, don't you think it was smart of them to move production to South Dakota?" "You betcha, Eldon, paid off big time during the stampede"), dug the score and moved on to other matters. 

Now, many of us think how well Geronimo: An American Legend does at the box office will represent a significant advance for the Indian Nations. 

We are the Indians. On the screen, up there? That's a movie about Indians. 

The films we write about and debate and criticize are usually about the idea of us, about what people think about that idea, about Vietnam, the West, or buildings and food. Often, we're simply a plot device or there to provide visual excitement. That many of us would place real hopes and dreams of advancement in the hands of a business renowned for its single-minded focus on the bottom line speaks volumes about the intellectual state of Indian Country these days. 

Indian film-makers face tremendous obstacles in learning their craft, locating funding, obtaining the kind of real criticism and support that any artist needs to advance. But I believe this crisis dwarfs all others. There is a terrible problem Indian intellectuals (and believe me, dudes and dudettes, if you're red and want to make films, you qualify) must face head on, and that is that these days we're spinning tales invented by others. 

For Indian film-makers today there is no task more urgent than reclaiming a tradition of invention and story-telling by any means necessary, an intense desire to be on the world stage, and an unshakable demand to not simply star, or even produce, but to write and direct our own stories and visions. 

But whose traditions and whose stories? 

A few summers ago I did a reading at an adult literacy class of a few dozen older Indians. This was in Saskatchewan. Amid cigarette smoke and styrofoam cups of instant coffee the students struggled with learning how to read a language they spoke very well. Arranged on a table were a few dozen books, all on Indians and written for elementary to junior high school students. Not one book was written by an Indian. 

Some of us come from traditional families steeped in resistance, educated by carefully remembered oral histories and speaking our native languages. But most of us do not, and that's particularly true for those of us who've taken up pen or camera. We get much of our information from the same place everyone else does. 

For me, a book called Touch the Earth had a huge impact on my family when I was growing up. A sepia-toned picture book of the greatest rhetorical hits of various Indian chiefs, it captured perfectly what we wanted to believe about our past, and not coincidentally provided a snapshot of environmental feel-good sentiments of the 1970s. That slapdash book, written by an English woman and still in print, offered a kind of truth that was much easier to take than what my grandparents, more or less raised by the Army in Fort Sill had to offer. So it is with many of us. 

Two recent examples show that perhaps this phenomenon is getting worse. (next page)