The word “Indian” has been as fluid as smoke. Misapplied to the aborigines of the New World, the name stuck even when the geographical confusion it revealed had been plainly exposed. Displaced for a while by “Native American,” it has been recuperated by some among the very people it supposedly demeaned—but not fully rehabilitated, so its use is self-conscious and often ambivalent.
In the history of film, Indians themselves have had all the smoky shiftability of signs. Sometimes they represent the peace of the “noble savage” uncorrupted by civilization; more often than not, of course, they have been signals of evil, murderous impediments to Western advancement. One early silent, The Aryan (1916), warned viewers about Indians thus: “Oft written in letters of blood, deep carved in the face of destiny, that all men may read, runs the code of the Aryan race: ‘Our women shall be guarded.’ ” (That the original Aryans were Indo-Europeans, including the peoples who created India’s great civilization—Indians, in short—was an irony lost on the guardians of women.) In the 1940s, Native Americans employed by Hollywood were sometimes given lessons on how to “act” Indian; they became smoke signals of themselves.
Indeed, Indians are signals of movie-making itself—not only in the sense that our image of Indian culture is largely a construction of the movies, but also that Indians are so much a part of America’s self-representation that they inspired some of its earliest moving representations. In 1893, Thomas Edison captured a “Hopi Snake Dance” on film in order to demonstrate his kinetoscope invention at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. After him, silent filmmakers produced nearly 3,000 cowboy and Indian movies, including Hollywood’s very first feature film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1913).
There are at least nine scholarly books focusing on portrayals of Indians on film. Two of the most recent, Celluloid Indians and Hollywood’s Indian, discuss how the meaning of Indians has changed with differing cultural contexts.1 Some critics speculate, for example, that John Ford, the director most responsible for our traditional image of “the Western”—in films like Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), Rio Grande (1950), and The Searchers (1956)—created a more favorable depiction of Indians in Cheyenne Autumn (1964) because debates on black racism had made him more sensitive to the plight of minorities. And film historians discuss how the anti-establishment sentiments of the Vietnam era created sympathy for America’s disenfranchised natives. More recently, Dances With Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1993) have been celebrated for the nobility they grant to Native Americans as a result of increased cultural sensitivity to the dignity of marginalized peoples.
The assumption seems to be that current filmmakers, and hence the audiences they seek to please—you and I, for example—are morally superior to their benighted predecessors. Taking our cue from C. S. Lewis, who called such hubris “chronological snobbery,” we should be suspicious of the idea that no one before the 1960s questioned the portrayal of Indians as one-dimensional signs, whether of savagery or of childlike innocence. Indeed, as early as 1911 an essay appeared protesting the depiction of Indians in film, followed by a 1912 movie sympathetically portraying Indians. And in 1936 The Southwest Review published an essay appropriately titled “The Hollywooden Indian.” Furthermore, one could argue that the “sensitive” Westerns merely inverted the simplistic binary between good and evil, with the white establishment now acting the latter role. Certainly, as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick argues in Celluloid Indians, Native Americans in films like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue (both 1970) were merely serving as signs for something else: white guilt over Vietnam.
Can a reel Indian, then, ever be a sign for a real Indian? The question is somewhat specious, since most Caucasians imaged on American film are not signs of real people: the teeth are too white, the noses too sculpted, the bodies too buffed, the hair too perfectly coifed, the repartee too witty. To a certain extent every movie is a smoke signal of cultural values. For this very reason, then, we should pay attention to cinematic signs generated by Native American culture itself, as in the 1998 film Smoke Signals, the first commercially successful movie written (by fiction-writer and poet Sherman Alexie, whose book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven inspired the film), directed (by Chris Eyre), coproduced, and acted by Indians.
Set in 1998, with recurring flashbacks mostly to the 1980s, Smoke Signals is about the signs that represent Indians in contemporary culture. Not only do drumbeats associated with Indian war parties punctuate the score, but televisions in the background of several shots display Indians on the rampage in old black-and-white Westerns. When one of the protagonists answers his question, “What is the only thing more authentic than Indians on TV?”, with “Indians watching Indians on TV,” we realize that the film ironizes the very idea of authenticity. The desire for “authentic” movie Indians may simply generate “types” rather than complex human beings with strengths and weaknesses like our own. In contrast, Smoke Signals not only gives us flawed characters that elicit our sympathy and admiration but also displays, with affection, the dysfunction of the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in Idaho from which they come.
The movie begins in 1976 with the voice of Lester Fallsapart reporting traffic for KREZ radio from atop a broken-down Winnebago. When the film cuts forward to 1998, Fallsapart, situated on the same Winnebago at the same crossroads, announces “It’s a good day to be indigenous.” The image, of course, forces us to question whether the “indigenous” have made any gains at all or, like the appropriately named Fallsapart and his Winnebago, are the victims of ethnic inertia—or worse. One scene of the film is shot from inside a car that can only run in reverse, so that the camera watches the driver from the backseat as she stares out the rear window to steer the car down the road.
These vehicular metaphors provide an ironic contrast to the central convention of the movie: a road trip taken by two radically different personalities who end up learning from each other. Gleefully appropriating the clichés of the “road picture” for the screenplay, Alexie implies that Indians can escape those other film clichés that leave them broken down at the crossroads of “good Indian” or “bad Indian” portrayals. Like the protagonists of Powwow Highway (1989), a more quirky Indian road movie, yea, like the mismatched buddies of every road movie ever made, the stars in Smoke Signals travel the path of self-discovery: a filmic thoroughfare not usually open to Native Americans.
The protagonists, Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams), barely out of adolescence, learn to negotiate what it means to be “Indian” as they travel to Phoenix to retrieve the ashes of Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer), Victor’s deadbeat, absentee father, who saved Thomas, as a baby, from a burning house. At one point Victor instructs the constantly grinning and upbeat Thomas how to act like a “real Indian”: “Stop smiling. Get stoical. Look mean or people won’t respect you. Look like a warrior, like you just killed a buffalo.” Thomas challenges these signals of authenticity by pointing out that their people were fishermen, not buffalo hunters; “Dances With Salmon” would more accurately describe their origins.
While Victor seeks to appropriate signs of the noble warrior, Thomas tries to sound like a Medicine Man, closing his eyes to hypnotically recount mythic stories of their people. In the course of the movie, however, it becomes quite clear that Thomas’s tales are eclectic, snycretistic fictions, woven from the threads of personal experience, oral tradition, pure imagination, and whatever else comes to hand. When Victor asks Thomas how he knew that Arnold Joseph had died, Thomas intones, “I heard it on the wind . …I heard it from the birds . …And your mother was here crying.” He describes someone’s delicious Indian frybread as “Jesus frybread; frybread walking on water; frybread rising from the dead.”
Using outrageous metaphors to destabilize convention, Thomas is the source of hope and healing in the film, quite literally when he provides both money and motivation for the road trip. Through Thomas, Alexie suggests that inertia can be surmounted when we appropriate new stories to live by—like stories of rising from the dead. And it is Thomas who narrates the film, providing voiceovers at its beginning and end, implying that Smoke Signals itself is one of Thomas’s creations.
As his name suggests, Thomas Builds-the-Fire is aligned with the origin of smoke signals throughout the film, from the burning house out of which he is thrown as a baby, to a reflection of fire in his glasses and a sparkler he holds as a child, until, as a young man, he carries away the ashes of Arnold Joseph. The film asserts that, just as fire can both destroy and sustain us, so also the stories, or smoke signals, with which we give meaning to existence can smother or ignite our lives.
Smoke Signals ends with a voiceover as the anguished Victor throws his father’s ashes into a river. Thomas asks,
How do we forgive our fathers? … Shall we forgive them for never speaking or never being silent? … Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs? Or in their deaths saying it to them or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers, what is left?
What’s left, Alexie implies, is a new story, a story that avoids the traditional signals of civilized white man versus savage Indian, of native victimization versus white mastery, of good Indian versus bad Indian.
What is left, if we forgive our fathers, is Grace.
Crystal Downing is associate professor of English and Film Studies at Messiah College.
1. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999); Peter D. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1998).
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
