Ernest Stromberg

Out of the Cupboard and up with the Smoke Signals: Cinematic Representations of American Indians in the Nineties

From Kevin Costner’s lieutenant Dunbar waltzing with wolves to Disney’s warbling Pocahontas, the final decade of the twentieth century saw a profusion of silver screen American Indians. In sheer numbers, the ‘Nineties rivaled the 1940s and ‘Fifties, heyday of the cinematic Western, in on-screen Indians. But unlike the Western’s tendency toward stereotypical depictions of bloodthirsty “Injuns” ready to swoop upon innocent settlers or ride down the passing stagecoach, recent films featuring American Indians have generally provided a more complex and sympathetic perspective. For example, Costner’s Dances With Wolves, with its appreciative ethnographic thick depiction of nineteenth-century Lakota life, reverses the Western’s formula of representing Indians as simply an obstacle in the civilizing of the continent, and in Columbia/Paramount’s The Indian in the Cupboard, the Onondagan Little Bear teaches Omri, the white child protagonist, several moral lessons.

Yet for all the apparent improvements in Hollywood’s representations of Indians, the extent to which the recent films have transcended the ideological assumptions that shaped the earlier films remains critically at issue. This question comes especially into focus with Miramax Films’ 1998 release of Smoke Signals. In Smoke Signals: A Screenplay, Sherman Alexie, the screenwriter and co-producer, describes Smoke Signals as “the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by Indians to ever receive a major distribution deal” (xi). Thus, while 1990’s Dances With Wolves ushered in Hollywood’s renewed fascination with Indians, the decade closed with what might truly be called the first “Indian” film.

Before discussing Smoke Signals in detail, I first want to analyze several of the decade’s successful mainstream films featuring American Indians. Examining such well financed and well received films as Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Indian in the Cupboard in terms of their representations of Indians will enable a consideration of Smoke Signals both in terms of its representational innovations and its adherence to cinematic conventions. Of central concern for my analysis are the rhetorical elements of point of view and implied audience. Specifically, I want to consider how and to what degree any of the above films establishes a Native American perspective. Also at issue for this discussion is the economic necessity of appealing to a mainstream, primarily Caucasian, non-Indian audience.

As the film that renewed Hollywood’s interest in the Indian, it is most fitting to begin with Dances With Wolves, one of the most financially and critically successful films of 1990. A box office smash, it was also praised by many critics for its sympathetic and objective depictions of Indians. As even one of the film’s harshest critics, Ward Churchill, concedes, the Indian characters “were allowed to serve as more than mere props” (244). In the years since its release, scholars of American culture have also noted how the film questions and even reverses a number of the myths surrounding westward expansion. George Hopkins argues, “Costner launched a new challenge to the popular mythology of the west” (72). Admittedly, from its development of complex Indian characters to its articulation of a revisionary history, there is much to be praised in the film’s representations. However, before applauding these features as cinematic breakthroughs, it must be noted that similar claims can and have been made for a number of earlier films. For instance, the portrayal of the Cheyenne in 1970’s Little Big Man and even in John Ford’s 1964 Cheyenne Autumn are every bit as sympathetic as the Lakota in Dances With Wolves. And both of these films, like Dances With Wolves, are highly critical of the U. S. government’s treatment of Indians. Furthermore, Little Big Man and Cheyenne Autumn are but two of a number of films that have arguably represented indigenous people sympathetically and which have questioned the triumphal national narrative of manifest destiny.

It is also important to note that Dances With Wolves shares with Little Big Man the reliance on a white narrator who shapes our understanding not only of events but of the Indians themselves. The narrative point of view is significant on several levels, not the least of which is establishing that this is not an Indian story but a story about Indians. That is, the story is not a Lakota story from a Lakota perspective; at best it is Dunbar’s story, a story in which the Lakota play a significant but ultimately secondary role. Lakota voices and concerns are subsumed under the principal story of Dunbar’s moral education. As Native American critic Edward Castillo asserts, the film “is really about the transformation of Lieutenant John Dunbar into the Lakota warrior Dances with Wolves” (qtd. in Baird 163).

Considered within the domains of literary and cinematic history, the story of Lieutenant Dunbar’s evolution into the “Indian” Dances With Wolves situates the film in a long line of “going Indian” narratives. This legacy ranges from early captivity narratives, through James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, and includes such recent films as Little Big Man and the Richard Harris Man Called Horse series, with numerous other examples in-between. Implicitly or explicitly fueling the desire to go Indian in many of these narratives is a belief in the “Noble Savage.” According to Robert Berkhofer, the Noble Savage developed as a “convention to criticize existing social institutions” (76). The Noble Savage embodies the ideal of humans in a pure uncorrupted state of nature, untainted by the vices of a “civilized,” artificial, corrupt, and decadent culture. Certainly elements of this description can be applied to the Indians in Dances With Wolves whose values and lifestyles are frequently shown in favorable juxtaposition with the violent and wasteful Euroamericans. Furthermore, the desire to “go Indian” and a belief in the innate spiritual superiority of Indians seems, if anything, to have increased in recent years, as evidenced by numerous white-authored “New Age” books on allegedly Indian spirituality. Arguably, a portion of the film’s success may even be attributed to the degree to which it caters to this mainstream expectation.

In terms of how the Lakota are portrayed and audience expectations, the film raises several issues. If we consider the film in ethnographic terms, Costner’s Lieutenant Dunbar occupies the role of participant observer, with the Lakota as his objects of study. Dunbar’s voice-over narration functions as an ethnographic thick description, and the film becomes an educational vehicle. However, the education is clearly not directed at a Lakota audience. What need would they have to learn about their own culture? Rather, the film presumes to teach white viewers about Indians. And the lesson, in the word of one reviewer, Moira Gray, is that they are a “gentle peace-loving people.” While more flattering than the typical Western’s depiction of Indian savagery, the idea of Native Americans as simply “gentle peace-loving people” is a reduction of complex cultures in the tradition of the Noble Savage.

The film also never completely escapes the binary of good and evil. It merely reverses the roles. White people are evil and Indians are good, unless they happen to be Pawnee, the Lakota’s traditional enemy. Furthermore, at the film’s end it is Dunbar who rides off with his new wife Stands With a Fist, the only white woman available to him, leaving the Lakota to face certain defeat at the hands of the U. S. Army. As Dunbar and Stands With a Fist ride off into the snowstorm, the image left behind is of a soon-to-vanish way of life, implying that the Indians have vanished.

To briefly summarize my critique, despite its sympathetic and detailed depiction of late nineteenth century Lakota culture, Dances With Wolves does not represent a radical break in a long history of representing Indians. The narrative point of view is non-Indian. The plot centers on the white protagonist’s desires and his transformation. Traces of the Noble Savage motif permeate the representations of the Lakota, traces that appeal to certain New Age ideas about Indians. And in its conclusion, the film represents Indians as beings of the past and in no way suggests their continued existence. In essence, in terms of point of view, implied audience, and the historical setting, Dances With Wolves is remarkably consistent with the majority of films about Indians.

Similar ideological limitations dog most of the films made in the ‘Nineties treating Native American subjects. Consider one of the most popular films of the decade dealing with Native Americans, Disney’s Pocahontas. While presenting Indians in a sympathetic light, this film at best retells one of white America’s most cherished myths of the “good Indian” maid who saved John Smith’s life. Literal truth aside, this story, like the story of Squanto’s aid to the Pilgrims (also the subject of a recent Disney film), functions today to legitimize European’s colonization of America, showing that even the Indians befriended the colonizers. And like Dances With Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas continues in the tradition of treating Indians as entities of the past. Obviously the Pocahontas story takes place in the past, but my point is that this film represents Hollywood’s continued avoidance of contemporary Native America. The focus on Indians of the past leaves the existence of contemporary Native Americans unimagined.

Furthermore, the construction of Indians as beings out of the past creates a sense of unreality around the idea of Native Americans. As Robert F. Berkhofer observes, “For most Whites throughout the past five centuries, the Indian of the imagination and ideology has been as real, perhaps more real, than the Native American of actual existence” (71). In the case of Disney’s Pocahontas, the sense of unreality is further heightened by the fact that the film is an animated cartoon aimed for children. While, in the words of Pauline Turner Strong, “the film begs to be taken as a plea for tolerant, respectful, and harmonious living,” the gap between the cartoon images on the screen and the lives and realities of contemporary Native Americans is vast (202). Indeed, this animated recreation of a white fantasy about Indians offers very little in the way of a Native American point of view. Strong goes so far as to assert, “Disney has created a New Age Pocahontas embodying American’s millennial dreams for wholeness and harmony” (198).

Similar critiques can be made of Columbia/Paramount’s successful children’s film The Indian in the Cupboard. While not an animated cartoon—indeed, Cherokee actor and rap performer Litefoot gives a powerful performance as the Onondaga character, Little Bear—The Indian in the Cupboard focuses on the transformation of the white child protagonist, Omri. In a manner similar to Costner’s Lieutenant Dunbar, Omri learns significant moral lessons from the three-inch tall Little Bear. And while the picture is set in contemporary time, Little Bear is an Onondaga from the eighteenth-century, and all allusions to his culture but one are couched in the past tense, again suggesting that Indians exist only in the past. As an Indian representation, Little Bear is a fairly accurate historical representation—albeit he is only several inches tall. However, the movie just barely hints at the continued existence of the Onondaga people and gives no suggestion as to what contemporary Onondaga life might be like.

Hollywood’s location of Indians in the mythical past of the frontier clash between savagery and civilization both reflects a response to a perceived audience desire to continually revisit this narrative space and functions to powerfully shape the viewing public’s perception of Native Americans. Yet there have been exceptions to this trend. For example, both The Vanishing American (1925), and Tony Curtis’s portrayal of Ira Hayes in the Outsider (1961) set Indian characters in a contemporary setting. More recently, Michael Apted directed and Val Kilmer starred in Thunder Heart (1992). Loosely based on real events that took place in the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Thunder Heart explores corruption on a fictional Sioux reservation and the involvement of the U.S. government in that corruption. The film is notable in its examination of fairly contemporary Indian realities and in its indictment of the current political system for its role in the problems on the reservation.

Yet even this explicitly political film by Apted, who also directed Incident at Oglala, a documentary on Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier, succumbs to a number of the traditional structures of representing Indians. The main character, played by Kilmer, is FBI agent Ray Levoi. Levoi, of mixed Indian and European ancestry, was adopted as a child and has grown up with the assumption that he is a white man. However, when the FBI needs someone to infiltrate the reservations, Ray Levoi’s previously suppressed Indian heritage comes in handy. Levoi for the FBI’s purposes becomes an Indian. Much of the film, like Dances With Wolves, centers on Levoi’s transformation into his true Indian identity. Yes, Levoi has the genetic background, but for all intents and purposes this is a modern “going Indian” story. Furthermore, the point of view is primarily through Levoi, which positions him as a cultural mediator for the non-Indian audience. While the film is a powerful dramatization of real events, the narrative itself is not a story told from a Native American angle of vision. The main plot line does not emerge from a resident of the reservation, such as the tribal police officer played by Graham Greene or the reservation’s highly educated activist (Sheila Tousey), who befriends Levoi. And in its conclusion, the film makes an obvious if perhaps ironic allusion to the Western when the “good” Indians appear on the canyon rim, just in the nick-of-time to save Levoi from the corrupt FBI agents and the “bad” Indians.

While Thunder Heart arguably marks an important advance in bringing Indians into the modern era and in bringing contemporary Native American political issues to the big screen, as a cinematic form it relies in many ways on the narrative inheritance of past representations of Indians. The point this seems to suggest is just how ideologically overdetermined cinematic form is when it comes to the subject of Native Americans. Which brings us to the most recent film, Smoke Signals (1998). To what extent does this Native American authored, directed, and coproduced film undo the ideological assumptions that seem to burden the tradition of cinematic representations of Indians? To begin to answer this question, I would like to highlight the numerous ways in which the film explicitly engages this burden and to emphasize its major accomplishments in attempting to present an Indigenous perspective and to appeal to an Indigenous audience.

Unlike the majority of films featuring Native Americans, Smoke Signals takes place in contemporary times, ranging from 1976 to 1998. Also, unlike Little Big Man, Dances With Wolves, or 1993’s Geronimo: An American Legend, there is no white narrator to mediate for an assumed non-Indian audience. While the movie does operate with a voice-over witness-as-narrator, the voice is supplied by Evan Adam’s character, Thomas Builds-the Fire. The film positions Thomas Builds-the-Fire character as a contemporary Native American story-teller, and so having him tell the story heightens the impression that we are getting an Indian story from an Indian perspective. And while the film clearly operates within the genre of the male road film, the men who hit the road together are Native American.

The film further builds on the construction of a Native American perspective and an implied Indian audience through the use of humor and irony. The film begins with the voice-over of Thomas describing how his parents were killed in a house fire started “On July 4, 1976, [when] my mother and father celebrated white people’s independence by hosting the largest house party in Coeur d’Alene tribal history.” The painful irony of this opening narration accomplishes several things. It situates “white people” as the other. In referring to the Fourth as white people’s independence day, the film implies a non-white audience and offers a Native American perspective on the significance of the Fourth of July. This point is further emphasized when Lucy, the driver of the “rez car,” says of the United States beyond the reservation, “that’s as foreign as it gets. I hope you two got your vaccinations” (41).

The film includes a number of other examples of what might be called Indian humor. These range from the “rez car” Lucy and Velma drive everywhere in reverse, to ironic commentaries on earlier cinematic depictions of Indians. The humor of the car that drives only in reverse comes from the unstated assumption that reverse is the only gear that works. The transmission problem is not made explicit, but appeals to an assumed knowledge about reservation automobiles being driven in various states of disrepair due to the expense of having them fixed. The several humorous references to fry bread, including the account of how Victor’s mother, Arlene Joseph, was able to feed a hundred Indians with only fifty pieces of fry bread, gesture to the significance of fry bread as a specifically pan-Indian food.

These constitute only a few of the various ways in which the film explicitly gestures to a Native American audience. But perhaps its most critical component comes in the form of its humorous allusions to the ways in which Native Americans are perceived by the mainstream or what Cheyenne/Arapaho Director Chris Eyre calls in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine “the over culture.” One of the earliest and subtlest examples is a humorous comment on New Age perceptions of Indians. When Victor asks Thomas how he learned that Victor’s father has died. Thomas replies, “I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mother was just in here crying.” The dialogue plays on the notion that Indians have a mystical relationship with nature, and then undercuts this notion. Indeed, Thomas’s reference to hearing it on the wind might be taken as a direct allusion to the song “Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas. There are also several scenes that feature a television playing in the background, featuring sounds and images from what is clearly a Western. At one point this prompts Thomas to comment, “You know, the only thing dumber than Indians on television is Indians watching Indians on television.” And at another point in the movie, Victor asks Thomas, “how many times have you seen Dances With Wolves?” When Thomas simply looks embarrassed, Victor tells Thomas that he doesn’t know how to be “a real Indian.” What follows is one of the funniest scenes in the film. Victor instructs Thomas that he must appear tough and mysterious: “Indians ain’t supposed to smile. . . . Get stoic. . . . You got to look like a warrior.” The scene then shifts to the image of a changed Thomas. No longer in his nerdy suit, now wearing a fry bread power T-shirt, glasses removed from his stern frowning face, he strides purposely in slow motion towards the bus. Visually, this scene perfectly captures the stereotype Victor has described. But when Thomas reaches Victor standing by the bus, he cannot hold the pose and breaks into his familiar grin, returning his glasses to his face.

The two scenes send a mixed message. It seems apparent that we are to read Victor’s instructions ironically, recognizing them as stereotypes. Yet Thomas does alter his image, suggesting that he has taken Victor seriously. When he breaks into a grin and puts his glasses back on, however, his adherence to the warrior image is undercut. I want to suggest that this illustrates how film undercuts the notion of any set definition of Indian identity. As Victor asserts, there may be times when you do need to present a “warrior” image to confront a racist society. And Thomas’ temporary transformation highlights how this image is a role, not a fixed identity.

The next scene adds to the significance of the previous scene when Victor and Thomas find two “cowboys” occupying their seats. Thomas tells the cowboys that they are sitting in their seats, to which the big cowboy responds, “these were your seats.” In what follows, Victor attempts to stare down the cowboy with his best “warrior look.” But the cowboy remains unmoved. After Victor and Thomas have found other seats at the back of the bus, Thomas comments, “I guess your warrior look doesn’t work every time.” And then Thomas adds, “Man, the cowboys always win, enit?” When Victor denies this, Thomas asserts, “Yeah they do. The cowboys always win. Look at Tom Mix. . . . Roy Rogers. . . . Clint Eastwood. And what about John Wayne? Man he was the toughest cowboy of them all, enit?” Thomas’s litany of cinematic cowboys emphasizes the ways in which the image of the cowboy has been constructed as the heroic avatar of triumphant civilization in a conflict in which the Indians are always the losers.

Victor’s response to Thomas’ assertions is to point out that “you never saw John Wayne’s teeth. Not once. I think there’s something wrong when you don’t see a guy’s teeth.” Victor then proceeds to break into a powwow style song, which Thomas joins him in singing loud enough for everyone else on the bus, including the two cowboys, to hear:

Oh, John Wayne’s teeth, John Wayne’s teeth, hey, hey

Hey, hey, ye! . . . Are they false, are they real?

Are they plastic, are they steel? Hey, hey, hey, hey,

Yeeee!

Faced with a situation that could not be resolved by warrior looks or warrior violence, the song becomes an aesthetic blow, both against the representational history and against the two cowboys on the bus who come to embody its ideal. In essence, the politics of the song reflect in miniature the politics of the film.

The film succeeds on many levels in subverting the “over culture’s” conceptions of Indians in order to open up a more complex space of Native American representations. The film forwards important Indian values of story telling and the function of stories to form or heal communities. At the same time, the film very deliberately establishes narrative themes that transcend their Native American context. For instance, at the level of basic plot, the story is essentially the story of Victor’s coming to terms with the anger he has felt at his father, Arnold Joseph, for years of abuse and ultimate abandonment. The film actually ends with the image of Victor releasing his father’s ashes into the Spokane River while in the narrative voice-over, Thomas recites a version of Dick Lourie’s poem, “Forgiving Our Fathers.” The story also follows a traditional quest narrative, with Victor leaving the reservation, retrieving his father’s ashes, and then returning home a wiser and better man.

Perhaps in part because of these “universal” themes, screenwriter Alexie and director Eyre acknowledge in the Filmmaker interview that the film is “easily digestible” for a mainstream audience. And as Alexie goes on to explain, “Chris and I are in the unique position of having to make this be a very accessible film.” Alexie goes so far as to acknowledge in his film script that the “film has to be safer . . . and we’re going to get taken to the rug because of it.” Taking Alexie’s observation as an invitation of sorts to take the film to the rug, in my closing paragraphs I want to indicate several significant limitations to the film.

While the film is political, its political edge remains directed primarily at the level of representations. Not that this is insignificant, but the film provides little sense of any current political or socio-economic issues confronting Native Americans today. Obviously, the film has no obligation to dwell on these concerns, but the shots of the reservation and the interior shots of reservation homes, suggests an average middle class suburb that just happens to be populated by Indians. This may be a means of achieving the goal Eyre states in the Filmmaker interview: representing Indians as “like anybody.” This universalizing of the characters, however, results in an effacement of any specific cultural differences. While the film mocks New Age mysticism of Indians, it gives little sense of the existence of an actual ongoing Coeur d’Alene spirituality. And while Thomas reminds Victor that the Salish of the Coeur d’Alene reservation were fisherman, his use of the past tense suggests that fishing no longer constitutes part of a living Coeur d’Alene culture.

The only explicit social problem treated is alcoholism, which is clearly a prominent dimension of Arnold Joseph’s problems. But Arnold’s and initially Arlene’s abuse of alcohol is represented simply as a personal problem, the result of being an alcoholic or perhaps of being an Indian with a genetic predisposition to alcohol. This is a problematic representation because it neglects the social factors that frequently contribute to alcohol abuse. Instead, the problem is simply the alcohol. Even Arnold Joseph’s rage and guilt are reduced to his culpability in the fire that killed Thomas’ parents. Again, we get no real sense of Arnold Joseph’s social and economic status. Frankly, we get very little sense of any of the characters’ economic status or what they do for a living, aside from Suzy Song who works for the Indian Health Service.

In these ways, the film remains fairly insular, reducing the problems and conflicts to psychological family traumas unrelated to larger social issues. It almost seems a willed neglect of these issues. I understand quite well Paula Gunn Allen’s point that Indians are “much more than victims of white invasion and colonization” and that Native American writers and film makers are in no way obligated to create works with an explicitly political bent (78). Smoke Signals, however, plays it safe to the extent that there is no real questioning of the current structures of society and the place of Native Americans in this society. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke’s argues that all art articulates a political position, and so-called pure or apolitical art “tends to promote a state of acceptance” (320). This is a line that Smoke Signals treads precariously. While creating a significant disruption within the history of cinematic representations of Indians, Smoke Signals does not provide the answer to critic Ward Churchill’s call for a “[c]inema focusing on the socio-political and economic realities of Native America” (246).

Despite these limitations, Smoke Signals represents a significant evolution in the cinematic representation of American Indians. Unlike the majority of films featuring Indians, including the recent examples discussed earlier, the central conflict in Smoke Signals is not between whites and Indians. Rather, this film focuses on American Indian characters from an Indian viewpoint that in many ways assumes an audience numbering Indians among its members. The issue of point of view may in fact be the most significant difference from earlier movies about Indians. Smoke Signals demonstrates that when American Indians assert control over their own representations the results can still be critically and financially successful. Perhaps the success of Smoke Signals will play a significant role in creating a receptive space for future Indian films. Indeed, even as I complete this article, it is my understanding that Alexie is working on the cinematic adaptation of his first novel, Reservation Blues.

Ernest Stromberg

James Madison University

The Writing Program MSC 2103

Harrisonburg, VA 22807

Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. Smoke Signals: A Screenplay. New York: Hyperion/Miramx Books, 1998.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon P, 1986.

Baird, Robert. “‘Going Indian’: Dances With Wolves.” Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. Ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1998. 153-169.

Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Random House, 1978.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3^rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973.

Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians. Ed. M. Annette Jaimes. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1992.

Eyre, Chris, and Sherman Alexie. Interview. Filmmaker Magazine. Winter 1998. 24

September, 1999 <www.filmmag.com/filmmaker/winter98/alienation.html>

Gray, Moira. “Dances With Wolves: An Essay by Moira Gray.” Media Matters. 7 July, 2000

< http://lrrc3.plc.upenn.edu/popcult/dwwolves/DANWOLVS.HTM>

Hopkins, George, W. “Constructing the New Mythic West: Dances With Wolves.” Studies in American Culture 21.2 (October 1998): 71-83