Dammit, Hollywood. Indigenous Screen Sovereignty

Disclaimer: Sometimes I swear in my blog… Now lets get on with it.

Sovereignty is an ideology and practice that for many, can take multiple forms in different mediums. Ideas connected to sovereign bodies having the right to govern itself with no interference from outside forces is a good, simple way of defining ideas of being sovereign and can be applied to many different forms of practicing such freedoms.

These rights however, are often not afforded to Indigenous folks worldwide in terms of self governance, allocation of land and resources (overlooking the problematic aspects of these terms for the purposes of focusing this post), and quite blatantly, representations in forms of media including visual portrayals on screen. This discussion is meant to focus on Indigenous representations and examples of screen sovereignty (or lack thereof) in Hollywood feature films, as well as the points of resistance by Indigenous folks within these mediums to reclaim sovereignty over our representations on screen.

The idea of screen sovereignty as described Kristen Dowell in her work “Vancouver’s Aboriginal Media World” as an “articulation of Aboriginal peoples’ distinctive cultural traditions, political status and collective identities through aesthetic and cinematic means” (Dowell, 2).

I wish to discuss where these forms of screen sovereignty are not being afforded to Indigenous peoples as well as where it is being actively taken back and practiced by many Indigenous folks in forms of generating media through film, websites, and overall representations on screens, be it televisions or phones.

Hollywood’s troubling history of depicting Indigenous peoples in film is well known and carried on today. One need only look at the representations of Indigenous peoples from classic western films such as “The Searchers”,  film featuring John Wayne, and an Indian chief of the Nawyecka band of Comanches named Cicatriz, or “Scar” who kidnaps a white woman. The plot of the film centers around some white folks’ revenge on these Indians who murdered and kidnapped members of one of the protagonist’s family. Did I also mention that the character of Scar is played by Henry Brandon? A German-American actor with two first names.

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Henry Brandon as Comanche Chief, “Scar” in 1956 film “The Searchers”

Dammit, Hollywood.

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Fast forward to 1974, a Mel Brooks film titled “Blazing Saddles”,  a satire of Hollywood western films that in many ways subverts and pokes fun at Hollywood’s overt racism and discrimination. Within this film there is one scene involving the Western image of “Indians”, wherein Mel Brooks himself plays an Indian chief whom, after dispatching a white wagon train, allows the protagonist and his family, who are Black to pass through without trouble. Brooks’ character speaks Yiddish, stopping one of his men from killing the family, acknowledging to his fellow Indians, “Have you ever seen such a thing in your life? They’re darker than us!”.

This scene can be seen and discussed from a variety of perspectives. The satirical nature of this film leads many to discredit the claims that the scene is offensive to Native Americans. Many claim that Mel Brooks is not spoofing Native Americans here. Blazing Saddles is a spoof of Hollywood Westerns, and this scene specifically is a spoof of those movies’ depiction of “Indians”. Ethnic white people wearing ridiculous red-face makeup and outrageous costumes, whooping and acting silly, and speaking either some horrible broken English “Um. Howe”, or some made-up gibberish that might as well have been Yiddish. And what does Mel Brooks’ “Indian Chief” character say in Mel Brooks’ native Yiddish? “Na, na, zeit nicht meshugge” – No, no, don’t be crazy (holding back his lieutenant who was fixing to attack) “La zum geyn!” Let them go! In Yinglish: “Cop a walk, it’s alright” “Abie gezint” – Go in health. “Take off.” And as the family rides off, the dialogue translates to “Have you seen such a thing in all your life?” followed in English by, “They’re darker than us!” – and by “darker” in this context is supposedly meant, “even more screwed by white people.” The whole scene demonstrates the principle of “solidarity among the oppressed.”

This is one reading of this scene, which taken out of the entire context of the film itself when shown on its own, seems like somewhat of a stretch. The fact remains that there is still no Indigenous self-representation in this film, and while the scene may be attempting to draw parallels and intersections of oppression, by dawning the character of an Indigenous person, the message being conveyed is related to ideas of Indigenous traumas and oppression being accessible for appropriation and understood only through comparisons to the oppression of others (also being labeled as lesser than that of others). The failure here to have an Indigenous actor in this role speaking an Indigenous language and accurately addressing forms of oppression is also a failure of the efforts Brooks may have set out with that are discussed above.

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Mel Brooks as an Indian Chief in his 1974 film, “Blazing Saddles”

Dammit, Hollywood.

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Fast forward yet again to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 blockbuster “The Revenant”. Though much care was taken in regards to language, clothing and use of Indigenous actors in the film to satisfy the historic accuracy of the film, the Indigenous characters are still used simply as narrative and story-telling devices; constantly backgrounded for the sake of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character of the relentlessness and indomitable spirit of a white frontiersman to access and cross Indigenous lands at any cost for his own purposes of revenge. Indigenous representations in this film continue to fall under tropes of backgrounding, instrumentalism, binaries of “civilized” and “savage”. These tropes are not without purpose, they fall in place to reinforce ideas of relationship based in a hierarchy within which Indigenous folks are placed at the bottom and therefore, justifiably discriminated against.

These representations do not occur in a vaccum as they have been present in Hollywood for decades and clearly still carry on today, reinforcing Stuart Hall’s argument in his work, The Whites of their eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media that “ideologies do not consist of isolated and separate concepts, but in the articulation of different elements into a distinctive set or chain of meanings” (Hall, 18). This chain of meanings relative to Hollywood films directs the view to naturalize a form of racism that, though initially may not be overtly violent, is still a form of violence in its justification of the oppression and discrimination of Indigenous peoples past and present. This, in Stuart Hall’s terms is referred to as “inferential racism… naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether factual or fictional which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (Hall, 20).

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A bear attacking Leo’s Oscar Winning Performance as a white savior.

Yay Hollywood?

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Wait no…

He survived and proceeded to literally wear that bear…

Dammit, Hollywood.

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Despite these best efforts of Hollywood to erase any trace of Indigenous self-representation on the screen, there are many points of resistance being made to assert Indigenous screen sovereignty. God’s Lake Narrows, an interactive website that in so many ways reverses the ideas of outsiders looking into and potentially appropriating Indigenous experiences in Canada. Text by Burton informs me that we here in Vancouver are around 2,037 Km away from God’s Lake.

The website is locating me as a visitor, forcing me to confront the fact that these experiences and representations in the website are not my own, they are not free to take, it is instead my responsibility to witness this process and hold myself accountable to the content and knowledge within, I’m a guest and Burton wants me to know that and that he knows it too. The text reading that if you’re from a reserve, the houses can tell you certain things. This statement resonated with me on a personal level that I do not know how to communicate through words yet; but I know that is is centralizing Indigenous experiences living in these worlds, in reserves and the houses on them. For those who have no experiences with reservation life, these ideas I’m sure are unsettling, they are not for you and it is your responsibility to sit with that fact and reflect as you navigate this website.

These are all forms of claiming Indigenous experiences by Indigenous folks. Countering any colonial effort like those seen in Hollywood to appropriate and decontextualize Indigenous experiences while also homogenizing them under a “pan-indian” experience, as though we’re just all the same damn people with the exact same experiences despite differences of geographies, cultural values, languages, relationships with others and the lands and waters, worldviews, ways of life and vast distances between many of us.

This website disproves these false theories and asserts Dowell’s definition of screen sovereignty by articulating a specific nation’s distinctive cultural traditions, political status and collective identities through aesthetic and cinematic means (Dowell, 2). By decentralizing the imposition of white assertions of Indigeneity and what it means, this website actively works as a demonstration of sovereignty on the screen, and hopefully provide filmmakers an example of an alternative to this backwards, awkward, racist, whitewashing shit…

Johnny Depp as Tonto in the 2013 Feature film, “The Lone Ranger”

Congrats on your academy award nomination for Red-face makeup on yet another white actor…

Dammit, Hollywood

Works Cited

Dowell, K. (2013). “Vancouver’s Aboriinal Media World” in Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. University of Nebraska Press: 1-20.

Hall, Stuart, Dines, Gail and Jean McMahon Humez. Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Critical Reader. 3rd Ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications, 2011. Web.