The Inconvenient Indian (7 page)

Two Indians on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Will Rogers, an Indian who didn’t get to play Indians, and Jay Silverheels, an Indian who only played Indians. Curious. And it raises the nasty question, does it matter? In the world of entertainment, does it matter that Branscombe Richmond (Aleut) played an Indian (Bobby Sixkiller) in the television series
Renegade
(1992–97) while Oliver Reed (English) played an Indian (Joe Knox) in
The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday
(1976)? Does it matter that Graham Greene (Oneida) played an Indian (Joseph) in the film
Maverick
(1994) while Nick Mancuso (Italian) played an Indian (Horses Ghost) in
The Legend of Walks Far Woman
(1982)?

How about a remake of
Beau Geste
, but this time with Adam Beach (Saulteaux) playing Beau, Raoul Trujillo (Apache/Ute) playing John, Nathaniel Arcand (Plains Cree) playing Digby, and Wes Studi (Cherokee) or Gary Farmer (Cayuga) as Sergeant Markoff?

The Cree playwright Tomson Highway, in a 2001 article “Should Only Native Actors Have the Right to Play Native Roles?” in the Canadian magazine
Prairie Fire
, argued that to insist that Native parts go only to Native actors was a good way to silence Native drama and starve Native playwrights, since there were not enough Native actors to mount plays in various cities around North America at the same time. Highway found that if he didn’t use non-Native actors to play some of the parts, his plays couldn’t be produced.

And what should we make of those truly Hollywood moments, such as the minor controversy over the casting for the movie
New Moon
(2009), in which Taylor Lautner played a Quileute Indian, Jacob Black? At the beginning of the project, Lautner was just another White actor who got to play an Indian. But after he got the part, Lautner discovered that he was part Ottawa and Potawatomi.

New Tribe
magazine had no problem with this. One article, “The Twilight Craze: The Rise of Native American Actors in Hollywood,” suggested that if White actors didn’t get roles as Indians, “these young actors may have never even discovered their family lineages.” Which offers up an intriguing scenario. Get a role as an Indian in a major Hollywood production, do some genealogical research, and, presto, you’re an Indian.

The article goes on to suggest that, “despite the controversy that Hollywood has caused with its practices of casting, Native Americans are finally beginning to develop in their roles and story lines in Hollywood films,” and that this movie franchise is “a gateway for non indigenous people to view more accurate indigenous characters than those of the past, forever changing how the world sees Native Americans through film.”

Right. We used to be portrayed as bloodthirsty savages. Now we’re vampire-killing werewolves.

So, does who gets cast as what matter? Nope. With regular type-casting, reasonable makeup, and a good voice coach, almost anyone can be a Hollywood Indian. Does it hurt the veracity of the film? Nope. Film has little veracity to begin with. The only “truth” you see on the screen is the fancy that you see on the screen. We expect too much and too little from Hollywood, and we never get what we desire.

When I was at the University of Utah, I had a chance to be in a Christmas commercial for a local appliance store. They needed an Indian couple, a Latino couple, and a Black couple. Off we went to the studio, and when we arrived we were given our “authentic” ethnic outfits. Yes, mine was a faux-leather vest with a headband and a single red feather. The Latino outfit was a skirt and huipil, along with a serape and an enormous sombrero. Black traditional dress on this occasion consisted of an agbada for him and a dashiki for her.

I had a moustache at the time and probably looked more Mexican than Indian, while the guy who was supposed to play the part of the Latino looked more Indian than Mexican. He was tired of wearing sombreros, he told me, and suggested that we trade places. I’ve never been one to say no to a complication, so I put on the sombrero, and he put on the headband with the feather. The producers didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Just stand among the appliances,” they told us, “and wish everyone a merry Christmas. In your own language.” Fortunately for me, I knew how to say “
Feliz Navidad
,” but I had no idea how to say “Merry Christmas” in Cherokee. “Make something up,” I told the guy with the feather. And he did. We all did.

Since then, I’ve found out that
danistayohihv
is more or less “Merry Christmas” in Cherokee. The next time such a situation arises, I’ll be ready.

Tony Hillerman, the author of the Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn mysteries that are set on a Navajo reservation, once told me a story about a producer who couldn’t find enough extras for a jungle movie he was making, so he hired a group of Navajo, did them all up in blackface and bad wigs, put them in a dugout, and set them
loose on a river. When the Navajo asked what they were supposed to do, the director told them to paddle and sing something that sounded African, something that sounded fierce. The Navajo obliged, singing parts of the Night Chant, a Navajo healing ceremony, as they paddled along. Tony told me that whenever that movie came to drive-ins in the Four Corners area, Navajo would come from miles around to hear their relatives singing “African war chants” on the big screen.

So, what’s the problem with casting an Indian actor as a doctor or a lawyer or a baseball player or some rich asshole everyone hates? Black actors play a wide range of characters. Will Smith played a fighter pilot in
Independence Day
, a dating coach in
Hitch
, a superhero in
Hancock
, a man who begins giving away pieces of his body in
Seven Pounds
, and a lawyer in
Enemy of the State
. Denzel Washington played an army officer in
The Manchurian Candidate
, a futuristic warrior in
The Book of Eli
, an angry father in
John Q
., a bodyguard in
Man on Fire
, and a corrupt cop in
Training Day
. Samuel L. Jackson played a cop in
Freedomland
, a gangster in
Pulp Fiction
, a cop turned private detective in
S.W.A.T
., a villain in a wheelchair in
Unbreakable
, and a fight promoter in
Hype
. And these were all principal or leading roles.

At the same time, Native actors—Eddie Little Sky, Shelia Tousey, Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse, Irene Bedard, Tantoo Cardinal, Evan Adams, Byron Chief-Moon, Ben Cardinal, Tina Louise Bomberry, Shirley Cheechoo, Rodney Grant, Michael Horse, Billy Marasty, Elaine Miles, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Ted Thin Elk, John Trudell, Eric Schweig, Tom Jackson, Alex Rice, Russell Means—were cast, and for the most part continue to be cast, with stunning regularity, as Indians. In mostly minor roles.

So, is there a dearth of talent in Indian country? Well, Chief Dan George (Salish) was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Old Lodgeskins in the 1970 film
Little Big Man
, while Graham Greene was nominated for the same award for his role as Kicking Bird in the 1991 film
Dances With Wolves
. Of course both of these roles were nineteenth-century Indians, and there is a troubling assumption that an Indian playing an Indian is an infinitely easier acting job than, say, an Italian actor playing a mobster or an Irish actor playing a cop. I spent a fair amount of time trying to find Indian actors, apart from Will Rogers, who have been given leading or supporting roles as characters who were not Indian, and I couldn’t find many. Gary Farmer (Cayuga) played a Fagin-like character in
Twist
and a police chief in the television series
Forever Knight
. Graham Greene played a cop in
Die Hard: With a Vengeance
and was the narrator on the television crime show
Exhibit A
. Jennifer Podemski (Saulteaux) has played non-Native characters in the television series
Degrassi: The Next Generation
and
Riverdale
, and in the 1999 television movie
Mind Prey
. Still, none of these is a major breach in the garrison that is Hollywood.

A good friend of mine, the Choctaw-Cherokee writer Louis Owens, once suggested that Indians were viewed in much the same way as the livestock that had to be requisitioned for a Western film—cattle, a herd of buffalo, a couple of dogs, a dozen horses, maybe a wolf or a bear. You don’t cast a cow to play a horse, Louis said, no matter how great an actor the cow is. It was a joke. And we both had a good laugh.

Still, Louis’s joke reminds me of the actor Daniel Simmons (Yakama), who went under the name Chief Yowlachie. Originally trained for opera, he switched to acting in the 1920s, and for the
next forty years or so, you could find him working away in the
Ma and Pa Kettle
films (1949) as Crowbar, in
Yellowstone Kelly
(1959) as a medicine man, in
Oregon Trail Scouts
(1947) as Red Skin, in
Rose Marie
(1954) as Black Eagle, in
The Invaders
(1929) as Chief Yowlache, in
Forlorn River
(1926) as Modoc Joe, in
The Prairie
(1947) as Matoreeh, in
The Lone Ranger
(1949) as Chief Lame Bear, and in
The Yellow Sky
(1949) as Colorado. He had over a hundred film and television credits. And in each and every one, he played an Indian.

“Even if the cow was a great actor …” It’s a good joke, and it sits at the back of my mind like a benign tumour.

If you wanted to, you could break down the Indian roles that Indians get to play into two categories: historical Indians and contemporary Indians. As you might expect, most Indian actors wind up in historical roles. Provided they look Indian. That’s the catch. If you don’t look Indian, you don’t get historical Indian roles. These are roles in which Italians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Greeks, mixed-blood Asians, and the like will do just as well. One of my favourite examples is that of Mel Brooks in
Blazing Saddles
, where he plays two different parts. Turn him loose with a little paint and a headdress and you have a perfectly respectable Indian chief. Comb his hair and dress him up in a three-piece suit and you have a perfectly sleazy White politician.

For casting the historical Indian, then, race need never be an issue. Things are a little different, however, for the contemporary Indian in film and television.

Now it is true that in the last twenty years Indian actors have found roles that do not involve the nineteenth century, roles that don’t require loincloths and full feather headdresses. Canadian broadcasters, in particular, have been good about producing
movies—
Medicine River
(1993),
Dance Me Outside
(1994),
Atanarjuat
(2002),
Hank Williams First Nation
(2005), and
Tkaronto
(2007)—and television series
—North of Sixty, The Rez, Moccasin Flats, Moose
TV, and
Mixed Blessings
—that make use of Native actors and that focus on contemporary Native life. As well, the country has the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN), the only Aboriginal television network in North America.

While the United States has been slow to shift its focus from the 1800s, it has still managed to put together a reasonable modern movie resumé that includes
Powwow Highway
(1989),
Grand Avenue
(1996),
Smoke Signals
(1998),
Skins
(2002),
The Business of Fancydancing
(2002), and
Dreamkeeper
(2003), but its contributions to series television have been dismal, with
Northern Exposure
being the exception to the rule.

In the end, the history of Indians in Hollywood is more a comedy than a tragedy. The Indians that Hollywood shows on the silver screens of North America bear only a passing resemblance to Native people. Native filmmakers are trying to change this, particularly through documentaries that deal with a contemporary Native world. Phil Lucas (Choctaw) made over one hundred such short films and documentaries in the course of his life. Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki) has made over thirty. Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapaho), Billy Luther (Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna), Neil Diamond (Cree), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway), Gil Cardinal (Métis), Tracy Deer (Mohawk), Paul M. Rickard (Cree), Sarah Del Seronde (Navajo), Amy Tall Chief (Osage), Lisa Jackson (Ojibway), Ramona Emerson (Navajo), and Jobie Weetaluktuk (Inuit) are just a few of the Native filmmakers currently working in this area, and it is here that some of the best work is being done.

Helen, in her helpful way, suggested that I should cut all the lists in this chapter in half, suggested that no one likes to read lists, suggested that lists are, by and large, pedantic. She’s right, of course. I just wanted to see the names, and I wanted to make sure that you saw them too.

The only problem is that most people, Native folks included, don’t watch documentaries. Native artists could well be changing the way the world looks at Native people, but because few of these productions ever get to large commercial venues, no one, outside art theatres and the film festival circuit, will ever see them.

Of course, film, even documentary film, isn’t “real.” As with literature and Hollywood releases, documentaries are just an approximation. If you want real life and real Indians, well, that’s another matter altogether.

INDIANS COME IN
all sorts of social and historical configurations. North American popular culture is littered with savage, noble, and dying Indians, while in real life we have Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians.

Dead Indians are, sometimes, just that. Dead Indians. But the Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort. Nor are they all that inconvenient. They are the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears. North America has had a long association with Native people, but despite the history that the two groups have shared, North America no longer
sees
Indians.
What it sees are war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, loincloths, headbands, feathered lances, tomahawks, moccasins, face paint, and bone chokers. These bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed—are what literary theorists like to call “signifiers,” signs that create a “simulacrum,” which Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and postmodern theorist, succinctly explained as something that “is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.”