Land of a Thousand Dances (continued)

Also, he rode with Cody and Sitting Bull when they toured Europe, and survived the Wounded Knee massacre. He led a spectacular, intricate life, faced everything the modern world could throw at him. 

But most of us settle for the edited picture of Black Elk, given to us by Indian fans with their own agendas, and when we think of him, we're conjure up an image of Old Lodge Skins, the brilliant character from "Little Big Man" that set the standard for a funny, deep, wise and cantankerous spiritual leader. 

But where's the Nick Black Elk who fought desperately for the cultural integrity of his people to the point of embracing Christianity? Where's the guy who must have had fabulous tales of late nights and fast times in London? Who will honor the real Nick Black Elk and tell his story? 

The people who write these books usually have a fascination with us "The Other." John Niehardt, when he wrote Black Elk speaks, was talking to someone who for 27 years was a devout a Christian, but didn't bother to mention this fact. We don't know him, and the reason we don't is because too often we've ceded our history, the stories of our people, to historians and fans and experts with their own agendas. 

If Nick is our most famous medicine man, Chief Seattle is our most famous orator. And it turns out most of his most famous speech was written by a University of Texas professor in 1974 for a documentary by the Baptists for the environmentally themed "Expo 74" in Spokane. 

And the fact is many Indians care nothing about the details of Nicholas Black Elk or Seattle. One Indian who performs Seattle's talk dramatically before audiences told a reporter that yes, the evidence is convincing, but irrelevant. To him, that speech summed up what it meant to be Indian, and he didn't care who wrote it. 

Indians can be just as good at turning out hackneyed, cliched stories of noble savages as any white person. We defer to no people when it comes to bad taste, and feature a full complement of hacks, crooks, scammers and those who want nothing more than wealth and fame. 

But Indian film-makers, as opposed to those who want jobs in the Industry, must care. And not just about who exactly wrote it, but to understand the story in its context. It means being skeptical and inquisitive, to not believe that because a speech in a book says it's by an Indian chief it is, or that a ghostwritten autobiography necessarily tells the whole story. 

An Indian film aesthetic must challenge the manufactured images if it seeks to represent our lives and experiences. This doesn't necessarily mean long hours in dusty archives (although that wouldn't hurt -- a mediocre history by a librarian at the University of Illinois called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is treated as both gospel and the final word on the 19th century). But it does mean a deeply skeptical approach to the history, and not just that "white people told us" or what is taught in schools, or endless cheap shots at easy targets (and I write this as one who could easily be brought up on those charges) but a serious attempt to question and investigate what we know as Indian people, and how we know it. 

That is simply too important a task to delegate to librarians and Indian fans, no matter how sincere they may be. 

For all the new respect and attention, the fact is Indian folks have produced relatively few novels, or works of history, non-fiction, and journalism. And that's the reason for many "Indian" projects the source material is often from whites. (Of course, others can and have written intelligently about Indians; the problem is when work by Indians is a small percentage of what exists.) 

The shocking truth is that our real stories are so much more entertaining, so much stranger, so much more interesting than the tedious recitation of wrongs and elders trying out their Old Lodge Skins imitations. 

An Indian film will star the beautiful losers, belligerent drunks, failed activists and born-again traditionalists that make up our community. It will be brave enough to engage issues like the civil war that tore through some communities in the 1970s, the terrible plagues of isolation, alcoholism and poverty. It will not turn away from complex issues like the current debate over identity. (Can you believe it? South Africa is dismantling apartheid while some Indian artists and activists insist that without being enrolled with the U.S. government you are not officially an Indian, and artists not so enrolled can even be prosecuted.) 

To fly, Indian film must embrace the extraordinary complexities of Indian life, in the past and the present. It must face up to both the ugliness and beauty of our circumstances. 

A real Indian film about Geronimo might start with the reservation days, his days at Fort Sill, his still-debated conversion to Christianity, his hard drinking and skilled gambling. It would not be afraid to show him dead in a ditch of exposure. It would not be afraid to show him bitter, and angry, feeling betrayed by his people. 

Despite a rich history of Indians in Hollywood, in a real sense the first Indian films are just now being made. Maybe on three quarter inch video in Montana, or in South Minneapolis, or in the East Village of Manhattan. The format doesn't matter. It will have many different faces and styles, but it won't look like anything that's come before. 

Let a hundred flowers bloom. Let's use film as billboards, propaganda, and cheap entertainment. Let's use it to record oral histories and basket-weaving. Let's make blockbusters and soap operas and who knows, maybe a remake of that lost TV show from the 1950s called "Hawk," about an Indian detective in Brooklyn. 

But let's make sure some of those flowers show our communities, past and present, as they really are, with all their beauty and ugliness and sadness and joy. Five centuries ago this continent was rocking, a place more diverse and outlandish than Europe, with empires evil and kind, with high tech cities and agrarian paradises. 

We come from the Land of a Thousand Dances, and our cinema, if it's really ours, will celebrate each and every one of them. 

Let's make films for us, in the same way that film-makers in Bombay or Fort Greene tell intimate stories of their own experiences, knowing that by making it specific it can be of universal interest. 

Respect is nice, but it isn't power. And in the parlance of Hollywood, the question for Indian film-makers, and writers and cinematographers is this: 

Do you want to direct? Or not?