Wes Studi is late calling.
"I was cleaning up poop out there. I keep a horse, and I just stayed out working a little too long for our appointment," the venerable actor (Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans) says by phone from his New Mexico home.
Taking care of the horse was probably good preparation for his most recent movie Hostiles, where he plays an aging Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hawk, who's being escorted back to his homeland by the reluctant cavalry officer Capt. Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale).
Blocker and Yellow Hawk have battled in the past, but the journey crosses through Comanche territory, where neither man is welcome. The Comanche hardly see the chief as a kindred spirit and would kill him and his party just as readily as they would Blocker.
"The Cheyenne were not as allied with the Comanche at any particular point, but different tribes and different groups had pretty much their own interests and went about protecting them in whatever fashion they felt was right," Studi explains.
"All of these groups had their own interests in mind, and that's what leads to the confrontations that happened. I don't think that there's any group or individual person that can be villainized to where they were in the wrong and we were in the right. I don't think it's that different today."
Warfare is something Studi understands well. Before he became an actor, he served in the Vietnam War. He says the conflict might have been analogous to the 19th-century range wars Yellow Hawk fought.
"There's some comparison to be made in that you're in combat of some sort," he says. "It's hard to say because it's a different time and different circumstances. It's a matter of being in a situation of where you're forced to kill or get killed.
"These were two different kinds of motivations for Yellow Hawk and Wes Studi. Wes Studi was there as part of an invading force, part of a police action, whatever you want to call Vietnam. Yellow Hawk, on the other hand, was defending that which he considered his. He had been on the other end of the invading forces, if you will, which are made up of Blocker and those characters. He had been held prisoner for seven years, or thereabout, at the beginning of the story."
A Different Tongue
One factor that might have kept the tribes apart was language. To prepare for the film Studi and the Welsh-born Bale learned how to speak Cheyenne, which is distinct from the Cherokee Studi grew up speaking in Oklahoma. Both actors had to train hard with consultants to speak it credibly.
"I would compare (the barrier between Cherokee and Cheyenne) to difference between French or Mongolian, or whatever language it is. You have very little crossover or ways to relate one language to another here in North America," he says.
"In Cherokee, there's a symbol for and a sound represents only the 'ssss' sound, which would be broken down into some kind of an 'S.' It has to be with a consonant to be a sound. There are differences in timing in terms of how to express one emotion over another, which may not be the same in either of the two languages."
Studi didn't speak English until he was 5 years old, and one of his early jobs was keeping the Cherokee language alive through newspaper writing.
"We went into a program as trainees and developed The Cherokee Phoenix for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. That was a learning experience for me. I learned how to type the syllabary. IBM developed a (typewriter head) for the Cherokee Nation that included the entire syllabary. It took a while, but I learned how to use it," he said.
A Face Like My Own
Having turned 70 shortly before our conversation, Studi clearly sees his current profession as more than a gig. Like Jay Silverheels, who the Lone Ranger's partner-in-justice Tonto, Studi says simply being on camera helps debunk a lot of stereotypes about American Indians.
For example, John Ford's The Searchers features a terrifying performance by German-born Henry Bogdon as the terrifying Comanche Chief Scar. In Last of the Mohicans, Studi plays an equally mean and scary antagonist named Magua. Like Scar, he has a reason to be angry at white people, but Magua becomes more sympathetic simply because viewers don't have to suspend disbelief.
"I think it's been a fortunate accident that I've been able to blend the things that I believe in with what I do in this particular line of work as an actor. It gives me the opportunity to portray American Indians in a different light than has previously been shown," Studi said.
"I'm more than happy to show that American Indians are still here, and we are very much a part of the real world we live in today. That's just something that happens and gets lost in the shuffle in how the larger parts of our population are educated. It's a shame that some people have no knowledge, no idea of who in the world they live with here.
Somewhere along the line, people have been taught that we as American Indians are extinct. That's even more prevalent outside the United States. It's saddening, but on the other side, it's nice to show that, no, the genocide did not work. We are still here."
MovieStyle on 01/26/2018