LITTLE ROCK — Around 1985 or so, I traveled to east Texas, to a small town that was hosting a festival themed to its putative Indian heritage. I don’t remember what the festival was called, only that it was something cheesy like “Pow Wow Days” and part of it involved speechifying by a chubby middle-aged mayor who donned a feathered war bonnet that made him look ridiculous.
(I was going to refer you to the infamous 1927 photo of Calvin Coolidge wearing a Sioux headdress, but by comparison Coolidge was a model of dignity.)
Anyway, as far as I could tell, the only person with any obvious aboriginal background was the guest speaker the mayor was slowly winding around to introducing: Russell Means, the Indian activist who was one of the leaders of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) and played a large role in the movement’s occupation of Alcatraz in 1970 and the town of Wounded Knee, S.D .,in 1973.
Means is an uncompromising, intimidating figure and it struck me as curious that he would show up at some podunk whoop-and warpaint fest put on by a local of Chamber of Commerce. He didn’t seem the kind to suffer the sort of civic foolishness that usually attends mayors in native garb. That’s why I showed up; I wanted to hear what Means would say to the good - and unmistakably and overwhelmingly - white people who turned out to hear the “chief” (as the mayor called him) speak.
I don’t recall much of what Means said, but I can’t forget his laser gaze and even, devastating tone. I do remember he called those assembled “graverobbers,” and that he said the mayor’s blithe appropriation of the Sioux headdress went beyond mere offense to blasphemy. In short, he spent a good 40 minutes chewing everyone out.
Then he took his check, got in his rented car with his assistant and drove away.
I’m not saying those people didn’t deserve what they got, but I’m grateful Canadian Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond didn’t take the same approach with his entertaining, though serious, documentary about the way Indians have been portrayed in movies, Reel Injun. (The feature-length documentary, a co-production of the National Film Board of Canada, was screened at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. I’ll keep you posted as to when it becomes available on home video or gets screened locally.)
The film uses Diamond’s cross-continental trek from his home in Canada through the American heartland and on to Hollywood in a “res car” (a dilapidated auto common to Indian reservations; there was a ’65 Chevelle in Chris Eyre’s 1998 movie Smoke Signals that only ran in reverse) as a narrative hook on which to hang various clips and interviews with Indians (including Means, activist-poet John Trudell, musician Robbie Robertson and actors Wes Studi, Graham Greene and Adam Beach) and Hollywood observers and critics (including Clint Eastwood and Jim Jarmusch).
Diamond handles the archival footage judiciously, using clips that are as hilarious (as when Diamond translates what some Indian actors were really saying when they spoke their own languages on camera) as they are appalling, and never letting the film’s tone slip into stridency.
Diamond is less interested in expressing Michael Moore style outrage than examining how these portrayals shaped the image of Indians, and tracing the filmic evolution of the depiction of Indians from Rousseauian noble savages to bloodthirsty Calibans. John Ford’s Stagecoach is considered a watershed event, Crazy Horse is posited as the inspiration for the “mystic warrior” paradigm, and Diamond looks on bemusedly as paleyoung summer campers paint their bodies, leap around and whoop in imitation of the inaccurate stereotypes they’ve consumed.
Of particular concern is the cognitive dissonance experienced by Indians who watchHollywood Westerns and see themselves depicted as either feral brutes or holy fools. The film is further informed by brief sketches of movie Indians (and pretend Indians) from silent star Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance (born Sylvester Clark Long), whose career was derailed when his mixed ancestry was exposed, to Chief Dan George and Iron Eyes Cody - a second-generation Italian-American who may have come to believe in his own imposture.
Sacheen Littlefeather, the model-actress who refused the Academy Award for Marlon Brando in 1973 to signal his solidarity with the movement’s occupiers of Wounded Knee, shows up, to retell that story and to refute a malicious rumor I’d heard shortly after the Oscars telecast and believed for 36 years: She really is of Indian heritage, and not, as widely reported, “a Mexicanactress.”
Diamond, an affable and unobtrusive onscreen presence, then continues his journey into the dark heart of Indian image-mongering with an unexpected turn North, to the Canadian Arctic, where he talks with Zacharias Kunuk, the Inuit director of the modern classic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), a drama based on ancient Inuit legend. It’s here that Diamond finds the future of Indian cinema, in the hands of Indian filmmakers like Kunuk.
Reel Injun acknowledges the problematic nature of allowing Hollywood to interpret the world for us, but it also admits the real pleasures movies provide. It reminds us that while movies don’t exist to teach us history, or even to reflect plausible reality, all of us are, to an extent, what we consume.
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MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 10/09/2009