Imagic Moments

Indigenous North American Film

Lee Schweninger

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780820345154, 9780820345147
• eBook ISBN: 9780820345765
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native.

Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.

ONE
He Was Still the Chief

Masayesva’s Imagining Indians

His horse stumbled. And he got all wet, and got run over two or three times…. The war bonnet was hanging way down there, and dripping with water, you know, and buckskin outfit all wet…. “No,” he says, “I’m the chief,” and he was still the chief when he got all wet.

—Imagining Indians

The documentary film Imagining Indians about Hollywood representations of American Indians, directed by Victor Masayesva Jr. (Hopi), includes a narrative, fictional frame that tells the story of a Native American woman’s visit to a dentist’s office. This narrative plot, such as it is, revolves around the dentist’s chair, and the unnamed patient (Patty Runs after Swallow). She sits in the chair surrounded by walls plastered with posters advertising classic Hollywood Westerns; she listens to diatribes against Native people on the dentist’s radio; and she endures the anesthetic, the drill, the pliers, and the male, non-Native dentist’s monologue about his having seen repeatedly Kevin Costner’s film Dances with Wolves. Unsolicited, he shares his thoughts about that film and about how it has inspired him to establish a resort in order to sell to non-Indians “Native spirituality” packaged as sweats and ceremonies. Between the several brief scenes in the dentist’s office, Masayesva intersperses the stories of over thirty people who offer accounts of how American Indians and American Indian cultures are and have long been imagined in film and how those people and those cultures have been appropriated and consumed in other Native art forms. In addition to the series of interviews, Masayesva includes a few clips from selected Hollywood Westerns, movies such as the silent-era film The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), The Plainsman (1936), and The Last Hunt. The one-hour film maneuvers the viewer by pulling in several directions at once. Despite its fictional frame, it is indubitably a documentary whose subject is the different ways mainstream American culture, especially Hollywood, has imagined, invented, appropriated, and coopted American Indians and American Indian history and culture. Masayesva’s relatively early film anticipates similar documentary studies such as Reel Injun (2009), directed by Neil Diamond, and the short, I’m Not the Indian You Had in Mind (2007), directed by Thomas King. Both of these films, like Masayesva’s before them, confront and refute Hollywood and other mainstream depictions of Indigenous peoples.

Masayesva’s method as documentarian is conventional enough: he appeals to the authority of several of the men and women who worked as American Indian extras in different Hollywood Westerns, and he films the interviews and includes interspersed archival film clips as well as shots of posters of some of the films discussed. The film thus constitutes expository documentary, yet through its inclusion of the fictional plot as a framing device, it at the same time offers a generic hybrid that challenges the genre. The film also challenges and actually reverses Hollywood’s discourse of the vanishing Indian. Several of the narrators in the documentary, that is, are literal survivors of the deaths they acted as extras in those films, and they often humorously recount those filmic deaths or experiences. In addition to reversing a prevalent and long-standing Hollywood discourse, Masayesva deconstructs other mainstream representations and images of American Indians, especially in his final sequence in which portraits of American Indians by George Catlin drop away like shattered glass and are replaced by the face of the dental patient character, who until this final moment has remained passive. In yet another ironic stratagem, Masayesva makes invisible the Hollywood blockbuster Dances with Wolves by refusing to show a single clip of that film. He deconstructs non-Indian (mis)representations of American Indians; and he privileges the former extras who acquire a voice and take center stage. The cumulative effect of these maneuverings and reversals, as this chapter argues, constitutes an important step toward establishing a visual sovereignty and insisting on and actually demonstrating American Indian survival despite longstanding Hollywood tropes.

Masayesva’s film as documentary relies on visual images of the art of filmmaking to address, as Fatimah Tobing Rony writes, “the absurdity and indignity of dominant culture’s appetite for images of Native Americans” (27). The documentary is concerned with demonstrating how the dominant culture imagines American Indians, especially as extras in mainstream Hollywood Westerns. As Masayesva himself says, “It was about imagining Indians, and I was part of that imagining. And I wasn’t trying to absolve myself … I was implicating myself by having, by showing the technology, the filmmaking, the transparency behind the scenes” (qtd. in Rony 31). The documentary as documentary is belied or undermined, however, by the fictional narrative frame, a device that calls into question the validity of a genre that purports to frame reality and that colonizers and/or anthropologists have used for over a hundred years to represent Indigenous peoples around the world. Masayesva’s film questions its own premise and offers the complications of myriad representational viewpoints.

Both the patient and the viewer hear a series of different recitations on the radio in the opening sequence of the documentary, and as far as the film lets the viewer or the dental patient know, these recitations could be present-day editorial comments read by a talk-radio guest or host. In that they are heard on the radio diegetically and without context, that is, they appear to be contemporary. But in fact, unbeknownst to the viewer, the texts consist of anti-Indian diatribes from previous centuries. The presentation of these apparently present-day passages suggests how pre-twentieth-century history of and inflexible mainstream attitudes toward American Indians remain very much a part of the present. With these passages Masayesva further complicates any easy distinction between fiction and documentary in his clever and disingenuous presentation of these passages without identifying the speaker or offering any context: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, [and] children…. The Indian Bureau keeps feeding and clothing the Indians ’til they get fat and saucy, and then we are only notified that the Indians are troublesome…. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all” (Imagining). These particular excerpts, heard over the radio in the dentist’s office as if of one piece, are actually sentences combined from three different comments William Tecumseh Sherman made as Commanding General of the U.S. Army (1869–83). The first sentence is from a telegram he sent to Ulysses S. Grant on December 27, 1866. What Masayesva does not include in the excerpt is that Sherman follows the clause about extermination with this: “nothing less will reach the root of this case” (Simon 422). The next sentence, about the troublesome Indians, is from a different source, the House Reports (1874). Masayesva cuts the final clause of the original sentence, which continues the thought: “Indians are troublesome and are going to war, after it is too late to provide a remedy” (Utley 165). The sentence concerning the buffalo hunt comes from yet another source, the Sherman to Sheridan correspondence, and here Masayesva omits any contextual help: Sherman is concerned about the railroads, and maintains that “until the Buffaloes and consequent[ly the] Indians are out from between the Roads we will have collisions and trouble” (Athearn 197). Because of the omitted contextual material, the viewer has reason to assume that these particular nineteenth-century excerpts actually express late-twentieth-century attitudes. Furthermore, the radio texts anticipate and foreshadow much of what is to come in the films and film clips that Masayesva’s documentary investigates. This anticipation is made immediately evident by the cut from the radio broadcast to one man speaking of his role, as discussed below, as an extra in Dances with Wolves.

In a subsequent scene in the dentist’s office, the radio continues to blast, this time with a reading of excerpts from an “Oration at Plymouth,” delivered in 1802 by then Massachusetts state senator John Quincy Adams. The passage the viewer hears, also unidentified within the film, concerns part of the future president’s commemoration of the landing of the Plymouth pilgrims in 1620. Jedediah Morse would later quote this passage and use the argument in his rationalization of and justification for Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy (see Morse 409). Adams’s words come alive for the viewer of the documentary: “Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of the world? Shall the fields and the valleys, which a beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness?” (Imagining). This passage, read almost as if part of a sermon, is followed by an excerpt from a few lines of a speech by Andrew Jackson in which the then sitting president attempts to explain and justify his administration’s Indian Removal Act of 1830:

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country. And philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising a means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, as one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation of people to make room for another…. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms? (Imagining)

Although the viewer does not hear it on the radio, a few sentences later in his actual speech, Jackson states that that a preferable country would be one “filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion” (Jackson 115–16). One of the very painful ironies inherent in this presidential address and exposed by Masayesva’s film is that Jackson attributes to mainstream American people and culture the very attributes it lacks in its bearing toward the Cherokee people and the members of other “civilized” tribes subject to removal in the 1830s: liberty, civilization, and religion.

Meanwhile, with the pernicious radio continuing in the background, the dentist chatters as he anesthetizes the patient and waits for the sedative to take effect. He describes having seen the film Dances with Wolves, commenting that “the whole sort of spiritual lifestyle you guys had is really very inspirational, very inspirational” (Imagining). The thought leads him to talk at the patient about the “higher consciousness resort” he has going with some other New Age people in Phoenix. The juxtaposition of radio broadcast and dentist’s ignorant harangue certainly suggests that when it comes to mainstream attitudes toward Indigenous peoples, there is no separation of past and present. These radio broadcasts of words from a previous century provide Masayesva thematic links between the historical physical violence advocated by former U.S. presidents and military commanders—Adams, Jackson, and Sherman in these instances—and the violence represented on Hollywood’s screen for over a hundred years. This physical violence is simultaneously juxtaposed with the violence done through the misrepresentation and commodification of American Indians near the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The radio broadcasts at first interspersed with crosscuts to interviewees’ comments also add a verbal element to the mise-en-scène visual in the dentist’s office, an office whose walls are covered with posters of Hollywood movies featuring American Indians, including Taza, Son of Cochise (1954) and Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953). The dentist’s report of his own attempts to coopt what he (mis)understands to be the “spiritual lifestyle” of American Indians fuses the nineteenth-century attitudes toward the land evident from the radio with late twentieth-century attitudes concerning the availability of Indigenous spirituality. Masayesva thus offers examples through both the verbal and the visual of how Indians have been and continue to be imagined and treated and of how mainstream European America has always been at the same time dismissive and exploitative of American Indians. Neatly layered with the radio broadcasts is the dentist’s numbing of the actual patient, which is merely another form of violence, preamble to the pulling of the tooth, a procedure that meanwhile renders the patient voiceless.

Early in Imagining Indians, the dentist holds up to the light an x-ray slide of his patient’s tooth, and at the instant he does so there is a match on action cut, in a sense, to an interview that concerns the (mis)treatment of American Indian extras in film, specifically during the filming of Dances with Wolves. The crosscut to Marvin Clifford as he begins his account of working as an extra in that film is thus implicitly paired with the dentist’s holding the x-ray film up to the light; similarly, Clifford holds up to the light an analogous x-ray, a verbal picture of what goes on behind the scenes as experienced during his work as an extra. The documentary then makes an explicit match on action cut: in the opening moments of Clifford’s interview sequence, a child in the background turns on a television, and on the television screen the viewer sees the same Marvin Clifford, this time wearing a Washington Redskins cap, beginning his account. Through this metafilmic match, Masayesva again calls attention to the artifice of film and of his own complicity. That it is Clifford on the television screen is also an instance of Masayesva’s reversal of the normal emphasis in such a scene. Typically, especially in such contexts, the viewer could expect to see an old black-and-white Western on a television that would remain in the background during Clifford’s account. Instead, as the actual informant begins to tell his story, the Indian man himself, the extra, becomes not only the authority figure as interviewee, but at the same moment becomes the star of the television show. Clifford dominates the television screen, and Masayesva thus completes the reversal. The Hollywood film and its star become marginalized, and an extra takes center stage; his story becomes central; Clifford (re)writes the history.

Masayesva includes no clips from or posters of the film Dances with Wolves itself. That particular film becomes the “invisible other,” so to speak; much spoken of and alluded to and thus almost palpably present, but at the same time kept invisible. By strategically keeping any visual reference to this blockbuster completely absent, Masayesva further privileges the roles of the American Indian extras at the same time that he forthrightly diminishes the value of Costner’s film. Clifford mixes humor and chagrin as he relates his stories about working as an extra. Expecting a Greyhound-type charter bus with comfortable seats to get to and from the site of the filming, for example, he describes instead the old, white school bus that arrives to take him and the other extras to the set. He makes a joke about the skimpy clothing, the “G-string,” he and the others have to wear during the shoots, and he notes that it was a long day on horseback. He is more serious when he describes the horses themselves:

The horses we had, I’ll say that too, was, were really green-broke horses, you know. I grew up around horses, and I know horses, and those horses weren’t very good horses, you know. And, um, I told that David right away about that. I said, “You know David, these horses aren’t broke too good.” And he said, “Well, we got them from a local rancher, and he says that they’re quality horses,” you know. I said, well, you know, I just kinda said, to myself mostly, “Well, I know horses and these horses ain’t worth a crap, man, you know.” And the thing about it was, is, we were riding them bareback, and it just had a rope around their noses, with just one rope, riding green-broke horses, and we’re running amongst people and everything, full gallop, downhill. (Imagining)

By presenting such a viewpoint at the outset of his documentary, Masayesva immediately turns the tables on the mainstream understanding of the hugely popular blockbuster. One of the interviewees late in the documentary comments that the film remains “all his [Costner’s] story. And Native Americans are all props…. We provide the stage.” The viewer does not “ever get to know what the Indian feels about those two people coming … to come and be part of the tribe” (Imagining). By reversing the perspective or point of view, Masayesva challenges the viewer to rethink not just the one film but the entire enterprise of Hollywood’s attitude toward and exploitation of American Indian extras in Westerns.

Clifford’s interview is on occasion overlaid with panels containing newspaper clippings. One headline insists “Indian Extras Got Treated Fairly.” With this filmic device, Masayesva offers the viewer a juxtaposition of Clifford’s sometimes humorous oral narrative with the written newspaper accounts that offer a much different version of the issues Clifford discusses. The clippings present not only what seems contradictory, given Clifford’s narrative, but they also appear to be overly defensive reactions on the part of the press and the film’s publicity people. Clifford includes a story of a woman coming with a pail of water, but that water is literally for the dogs rather than for the extras, who, according to Clifford, were not provided any drinking water:

And here this lady comes up, a younger white lady comes running up and she’s got a little bucket like that and she comes from way over there where all the cameras are and stuff are because Costner was shooting his scene over here you know and we’re in the background and this lady comes running up like that and she has a little bucket like that for water and there’s water in that bucket and she comes running over there and she goes up to them dogs and she takes the water to the dogs, you know, and I, we’re sitting there, I look down, and I say “Hey, blank the dogs, man; give us that water.” (Imagining)

The newspaper clipping accompanying this part of the story challenges the firsthand narrator’s account: “Clifford’s complaint of a water shortage was disputed by TIG’S craft service assistant. Also, the anonymous extra working said water was available” (Imagining). Whether or not there was actually sufficient drinking water made available to the extras, the impact of the sequence within the documentary serves to ensure that issues of concern to the Indian extras are front and center. They are important, as substantiated by the very existence of a newspaper response to their concerns. Masayesva so manipulates it that the viewer of this documentary loses all sight, both literally and figuratively, of Costner and what might be considered the main action of that particular film. It is as if the specific film no longer matters. What matters instead is that the extras are real people, people who have been to some degree misled and mistreated, and perhaps most importantly, American Indian people who have clearly survived, both figuratively and literally, against all odds, the final scenes of so many such Westerns. They have neither died nor disappeared.

The interview sequence’s final newspaper clipping is perhaps the most poignant because it is the farthest reaching. The viewer sees this excerpt from the newspaper: “‘If Clifford did not understand what he was signing, why did he sign the papers?’ Haas asked. ‘He is educated and should have known better’” (Imagining). Underlying this statement by an otherwise unidentified Haas is an ironic echo or evocation of centuries of treaty signing. By showing to the viewer the visual of Haas’s statement, Masayesva is able on a certain level to subtly link the broken promises of the filmmaker (Costner) with broken promises by the U.S. government, made manifest in hundreds of broken treaties. Much of American Indian history after contact with Europeans is, after all, about the loss of land through treaties and broken treaties, and this theme of land loss, of course, underlies the action in Costner’s film as well. As Masayesva’s interviewee Rennard Strickland puts it, “The theft of so much land must be rationalized. Films are a part of the process of rationalizing the frontier theft of Native Americans’ rights and land. What you have worked out on film is the ritualized justification of what at its kindest can be called the greatest land theft in history” (Imagining).

In a humorous scene just after Clifford has talked about his participation as an extra in Dances with Wolves, another interviewee comments on a character’s hair. Without naming the character—Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell)—Karmen Clifford, who worked as an extra in the same film, wonders why the actor’s hair is not long and braided if the woman has been living all these years with the Lakota people. When she is told by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Where to Concentrate
• Chapter 1 He Was Still the Chief: Masayesva’s Imagining Indians
• Chapter 2 Into the City: Ordered Freedom in The Exiles
• Chapter 3 The Native Presence in Film: House Made of Dawn
• Chapter 4 A Concordance of Narrative Voices: Harold, Trickster, and Harold of Orange
• Chapter 5 I Don’t Do Portraits: Medicine River and the Art of Photography
• Chapter 6 Keep Your Pony Out of My Garden: Powwow Highway and “Being Cheyenne”
• Chapter 7 Feeling Extra Magical: The Art of Disappearing in Smoke Signals
• Chapter 8 Making His Own Music: Death and Life in The Business of Fancydancing
• Chapter 9 Sharing the Kitchen: Naturally Native and Women in American Indian Film
• Chapter 10 In the Form of a Spider: The Interplay of Narrative Fiction and Documentary in Skins
• Chapter 11 The Stories Pour Out: Taking Control in The Doe Boy
• Chapter 12 Telling Our Own Stories: Seeking Identity in Tkaronto
• Chapter 13 People Come Around in Circles: Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind
• Epilogue Barking Water and Beyond
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• Index