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Rooting for the Indians and Damn that Custer Anyway!

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Movies, Narrative VIolence, Native American Issues, Politics

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Alice Cooper, Dances With Wolves, George Armstrong Custer, Indians, Iraq, Little Big Man, Movies, Patriotism, Time

Dances-With-WolvesWhen Dances With Wolves came out in November 1990, audiences throughout the country cheered as Kevin Costner and his Lakota friends killed U.S. soldiers in one of the final scenes of the film. The Lakota in this film were decent (perhaps noble?), and the soldiers had been as contemptible as any character could be. More than that, the soldiers were emissaries of an aggressive nation bent on taking everything Costner’s Lakota friends had. Nothing could have been more obvious than our loyalties at that point in the film. Of course we rooted for the Indians!

Two months later, American troops attacked Iraqi forces that had taken Kuwait, and Americans cheered as bombing attacks appeared on CNN just about all day every day for some time. Iraqi treatment of the Kuwaitis had been cruel and Saddam Hussein posed a threat to world peace comparable to that the great Hitler (as some would have it anyway). Nothing could have been more obvious than our loyalties at that point in history. Of course we rooted for the American forces!

The transition always appeared to me rather seamless. It was a very disheartening moment, an indication of just how powerless the left wing critique of American imperialism had been. Seeing audiences cheer on the Indians in Dances With Wolves, it seemed as if for once, the American public had gotten the message, at least one some level, and then they went right out and repeated all the same mistakes over again. Just as sensationalist accounts of Indian atrocities had once fueled military aggression against them, lurid stories of Iraqi conduct fueled support for military action in the Gulf War. And once again, America expanded its military presence in the world, to what end, we are still learning.

There are differences between these stories of course, and we could haggle over the details, but I’m not particularly interested in debating the Gulf War here. What concerns me is the question of which difference made the distinction matter? I can’t help but think that difference was time.

I would say that the critical difference is also a question of entertainment versus reality, but of course few war movies have provided near the entertainment value that the Gulf War presented to the American public. Whatever else that conflict represents, it was also a tremendous achievement in the theatrical violence. Plus, the conflicts depicted in Dances With Wolves have real world analogs. The specifics may have been fictional, but the issues in question were quite real. no, the difference is time. Dances With Wolves depicts a conflict most Americans believe to be over, and that makes it safe to flirt with critical appraisal providing it isn’t going anywhere.

Dances With Wolves was a story about America’s past. Cheering for the Indians in a fictional skirmish about an event long ago didn’t pose much of a personal cost for the average American. Sure, there may be some jingoists out there who really couldn’t stomach the thought that any aspect of American history had been anything short of a gift from God himself, but any discomfort they might have felt at the final scenes of Costner’s epic was surely the price of their own extremism. More folks could flip loyalties for that one brief moment, and then flip them right back again when push came to petro.

Custer Little Big manThat’s hardly an unusual transition. It’s as easily done as shifting from present to past tense when the topic of Indians comes up in a conversation, or shifting from particular issues to a great big general narrative about the history of Indian white relations. The hat trick is of course the phrase; “what we did to the Indians.” What continually fascinates me is its appearance in otherwise focused conversations. You could be talking about some specific policy and its impact on some specific native community RIGHT NOW, and the next thing you hear is someone telling you that they really think it’s sad what ‘we’ did to the Indians.

…except the past tense undermines the ‘we’ part. Those saying this know very well they aren’t including themselves in the damned ‘we’ of that sentiment, not really. A good portion of the times I’ve heard this, the impact of the utterance was precisely to shift the conversation away from anything that ‘we’ really could do anything about today. And that is of course my rather long winded point; it’s easy to root for the Indians in Dances With Wolves, much easier than it is to support them in present, and much easier to support them than it is to question attacks on any prospective enemy we have today. Whether it be casinos, tribal mascots, or tribal jurisdiction, the same folks who will happily root for the Indian in a fictional battle set in the remote past are much less likely to support the native side in present day conflicts. As to foreign policy? Well…

Bombs away!

But let’s stick with Indian-white relations for a bit. You can see the whole transition in a stanza from one of Alice Cooper’s more obscure songs, but to get the full effect, you have to listen to the full tune. (Don’t worry; it’s one of his less shocking pieces.).

In case you missed it, the relevant lines are as follows:

I love the bomb, hot dogs, and mustard.

I love my girl, but I sure don’t trust her.

I love what the Indians did to Custer.

I love America.

There they Come. There they go.

– Alice Cooper

The line about Custer fits with the rest of Cooper’s rhyme scheme, but the line about Custer is a bit of a thematic twist. The over-the-top jingoism of Cooper’s song seems inconsistent with the celebration of a set-back to the march of American history. We wouldn’t expect Cooper to root for the other side. And then suddenly, he isn’t cheerful at all, or at least the song isn’t, as we hear an Indian war-party come and go accompanied to faux-Indian music right out of the movies. He drops his rhyme scheme and sings almost as an aside, “There they come,” and then “there they go.” And thus a line about the demise of Custer and his troops becomes a comment about the proverbial vanishing Indian.

It’s safe to root for him, because he’s vanished.

Cooper’s song celebrates an Indian victory in order to mourn a Native loss, and of course that loss is precisely what the voice of the song calls for, the removal of an obstacle to the America cooper loves so much. And then of course the song picks up again as Cooper continues to celebrate all-things red, white, and soldier blue. It seems likely that Cooper’s treatment was deliberately ironic; it seems equally unlikely that he appreciated the full depths of that irony.

alicecooper13I don’t think Cooper’s attitude is at all unusual. I’ve heard similar sentiments many times. I understand why my old professor, a Choctaw celebrated the Custer’s last stand, and I understand why Lakota and Cheyenne do today, but they are celebrating a victory, something their people did right. Folks like Cooper are celebrating a loss, and one has to wonder just what they think that loss means?

As with any other great cultural icon, what is said of Custer is often really said of other things. At this point he seems to stand in proxy all of western history. The man has always had his critics, but it was probably the movie Little Big Man that taught the public to think of him as a raving lunatic. The Custer of this film is as ruthless as he is incompetent, and he is clearly the voice of western expansion. In the real world, it was Horace Greeley who advised young men to go to the West. In Little Big Man, it is Custer who tells the main character, Jack Crabb, to go West. It is Custer who carries out the most horrible atrocities of the film, the ones which make that migration possible, and ultimately, it is Custer (along with his troops) who will pay the price for Western expansion.

I grew up with that vision of a Custer in mind, one shared by multiple sources of popular culture in the 70s and 80s. I can’t recall meeting anyone personally who defended Custer in my youth, not once. From time to time, I heard or saw echoes of Custer’s previous incarnations in popular culture, the heroic Custer of Anheuser Busch or the onion-loving Custer of some old movie whose name I’ve long since forgotten. I could easily think that heroic vision as deluded, but of course that was a Custer who belonged to someone else, one who had been slain literally and figuratively on the screen of Little Big Man.

While we can haggle over the facts of Custer’s career and the details of his final battle, the successful caricature of Custer doesn’t facilitate a pro-native view so much as a an easy dismissal of the larger problems of American expansionism. This is where Little Big Man fails in its politics. (It was of course also a commentary on Vietnam.) In framing the horrors of American Indian policy as a reflection of personal lunacy, the movie invited us all to feel far too much relief at Custer’s ultimate defeat. It’s simply easier for all of us if Custer can take responsibility for all the horrors of America’s Indian policies, easier because he lost, and in his loss, folks can well imagine that he carries those horrors with him into the grave.

All of which brings to mind the title of Vine Deloria’s old classic, Custer Died for Your Sins.

abu+grahib+photo+4To be sure films like Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves call attention to larger problems, but they also point to a way out which all too many Americans seem to have taken, the belief that the ugly side of American military can be laid at the feet of the occasional lunatic clad in buckskin.

Or perhaps to a cigarette puffing soldier who lost her moral compass somewhere along the way.

Because surely the problems don’t go any further than that!

 

 

 

 

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Ten Little White Indians, Final Volume! (Spoilers Already Spoiled!)

28 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Native American Issues, White Indians

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

American Indian, Avatar, Dances With Wolves, Film, Graham Greene, Kevin Costner, Lakota, Last Samurai, Movies, Pawnee, Stereotypes

Bet y’all didn’t notice!

I am one short on my promise of 10 Little White Indians. Well, it turns out that my three-part series on White Indians has four parts, and there is surely a good Monty Python reference in there somewhere, but maybe we’ll save that for another day

***

Let us start with a brief consideration of the near misses.

Wind talkers

WIND TALKERS (2002): I remember when this movie was on its way to the theaters, rumor had it that the flick was about the Navajo Code Talkers. Working as I did then on the Navajo Nation, I was (like a lot of my students and colleagues) really excited to see this part of American history portrayed on screen. My enthusiasm waned considerably when I realized it wasn’t about a Code Talker so much as a white guy who might have to kill a Code Talker if things took a turn for the worse. I don’t think I was the only one who sank in my seat when I realized where this was going.

…not quite a white Indian, but definitely the same sort of bait&switch one normally gets with this theme.

The Last (White) Samurai

THE LAST SAMURAI (2003): Don’t act surprised. You know this movie is about a white Indian. I mean, the Indians are Japanese, but let’s not get too worked up about the details. It’s the same story, just transplanted to a different setting. Tom cruise goes to live with a strange and seemingly savage people. He comes to know their ways and love them. Finally, he leads them in a battle to revitalize the way of life that is so brilliant, it needs an outsider to save it.

What separates this from A Man Called Horse? Geography.

Avatar

AVATAR (2009): I owe this reference to simplycarola as she mentioned it in another discussion. But the story of a human who enters an alien world filled with nature-loving creatures is just too much to pass up. Jake Sully, our hero, in this film struggles to survive among these savages, finds them wonderful, and leads them in war against his own people. Yes, this is a white Indian on another planet. …and the ease with which ‘white’ transits into ‘human’ while the role normally reserved for Native Americans morphs into an altogether alien species, …well that takes icky to infinity!

***

Okay, so what about it? Why does it matter that Hollywood makes so many stories about white Indians?

Truth be told, I don’t see anything wrong with this kind of story. In fact, the subject of white Indians (or any other non-Indians going native) is fertile ground for storytelling. The problem lies rather in the way this persistent theme seems to marks an inability to venture into stories about Indians themselves, a sort of hesitance at the threshold of another interesting subject. We want to know about Lakota, about Cheyenne, about all of these people! But in the end it seems that they prove too strange, their world too foreign to deal with on its own terms, so we end up with a story about someone else, someone who knew them.

That is the problem; in at least some of these cases, the white Indian is a confession of sorts, an admission that certain movie-makers, and perhaps certain audiences are not quite up to the subject at hand.

Non-Natives seem to better appreciate film depictions of Native Americans if we get to see that depiction through the lens of another non-Native. That in itself certainly isn’t a crime, but it does skew the details of the story in odd ways. The frequency with which the white guy gets the red girl is a bit disturbing, as is the myopic celebration of a romance in the midst of a world that is rapidly falling apart around the fair Indian maiden. Are we really supposed to be happy for the hero that he gets the girl, devastated though she must be? And doesn’t the loss of her family and her people merit a little more than a brief moment of regret. Hell, I can’t help wondering if her story isn’t clearly the more dramatic one in every single one of these films. That the Indian maiden is so often portrayed as a kind of princess should drive the irony meter all the way to 11.

And then of course there are the men who come to lead their adopted native communities. It isn’t enough to imagine one’s white self as an Indian, one has to be their leader too! The characters have to out-Indian the Indians (or in the case of Tom Cruise’s, out-samurai the samurai). As far as self-indulgence goes, I have to admit this theme makes me a little ill.

It’s not that these movies are terrible. Okay, some are. (Pathfinder was dreadful!) Others are really quite wonderful.

And some are both at the same time.

***

Dances With Wolves

Which brings us to the 10th and final white Indian. You guessed it, DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990). The narrative is familiar to most by now. This is the story of a white Indian made larger than life and then some. Disturbed by his experiences in the Civil war, John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) asks for a post on the frontier and soon finds himself quite alone on the great plains.

In time, Dunbar will befriend a local band of Lakota. He will hunt buffalo with them, help to defend them against Pawnee raiders, and fall in love. His love interest (“Stands-with-a-Fist” played by Mary McDonnell) is herself a white woman, adopted by kicking Bird (Graham Greene), the village Medicine Man. Dunbar soon finds himself on the Indian side of hostilities with the U.S. Army. It is a role he embraces willingly.

There is no happy ending here. Realizing that his presence puts the people in danger, Dunbar leaves with Stands-with-a-Fist, and the movie ends with an epilogue telling us that the Sioux were subjugated 13 years later.

…ouch!

Kicking Bird Takes a Look

This movie has all the elements one might expect from a story about a white Indian, and it presents those elements in truly majestic fashion. The Buffalo-hunting scene alone is enough to warrant at least three viewings of this wonderful movie. And the Indian characters around Dunbar come through with a richness seldom seen in Hollywood productions. Greene proved himself to be especially brilliant.

But Dances With Wolves also has all the vices of a movie about white Indians. Dunbar’s girl is not quite an Indian princess. At least the facts of her life story seem to complicate that theme, but then again she is still the daughter of the most prominent Indian in the story, and Stands-with-a-Fist is fully assimilated when Dunbar finds her. White or not, she occupies the role of an Indian princess to a T (…or maybe a P), helping us to tread old ground in this awful movie.

Stands With a Fist

Do I need to comment on Dunbar’s role as a leader in the battle scenes? He never quite becomes a chief, but Dunbar rallies the troops (…pardon me, warriors) to great effect during a battle scene with the Pawnee. If he lacks a crown (or rather a feather), it is clear enough that Dunbar has already begun to assume the role of a war chief when the final plot twists interrupt his happy ending. As far as the out-Indianing-the-Indians theme goes, Dances With Wolves would have to be considered among the worst offenders.

But of course this magnificent film is best remembered for its nuanced treatment of Indian characters. The film rightfully received much praise for getting past stern warriors and stoic expressions to show us real people with complicated lives and rich personalities living in that Lakota camp. Dances With Wolves did a lot to dispel the Hollywood Stereotypes and introduce people to a fuller sense of the humanity in Indian peoples.

…unless, of course you are a Pawnee. If you are Pawnee, this movie takes all those stereotypes and dumps them right on your shoulders. Don’t get me wrong. Dances With Wolves does not make any overt statement that Pawnee are evil; it just consistently portrays them as the aggressors in every major conflict of the film. (The historical irony is, well a topic for another post.) It is Pawnee that orphaned Stands-with-a-Fist, and it is Pawnee that attack the Lakota village forcing Dunbar to become the white Indian hero that he was meant to be. The closest we get to any indication that Pawnee might not be a uniformly homicidal indigenous nation is a line from one Pawnee warrior questioning the wisdom of his aggressive leader. That one moment, aside, Pawnee appear largely to exist in this movie for the sole purpose of making other people miserable.

In its treatment of Pawnee, Dances With Wolves carries forward a Hollywood tradition. It seems that so many films sympathetic to Indians deal with Cheyenne or Lakota, indigenous peoples that went to war with the Pawnee. Not surprisingly, Pawnee come out bad in the resulting narratives. Even Jack Crabb didn’t have much use for them, as he told us. But if Little Big Man’s treatment of the subject was nuanced, qualified through use of an obvious frame, the treatment in Dances With Wolves seems flat-footed. One cannot help but to think that we are invited to think of Pawnee as the bad Indians in this awful movie just as its main character would.

After all, we do need some sort of villain don’t we?

And here is where I come to wonder about the real significance of Dances With Wolves. I remember the rave-reviews when it came out. I remember the gushing praise from folks happy to finally have a movie that portrays Indians in a positive light. And I wonder how the Hell so many people could have forgotten about Little Big Man? The stereotypes had already been kicked around quite a bit back in that old flick. So, why didn’t people remember the last time someone went out of their way to introduce us to the rich characters living in those tepees? Why did the stereotypes need a fresh thrashing in 1990?

Dances With Wolves

It might well be that those characters faded with time, and what we were left with was the story of the white guy who lived among them.

And therein lies the problem. However wonderful the part, a supporting role is still a supporting role. And that can be a wonderful thing. But one must remember the difference.

When done well, stories about white Indians may give us a glimpse of life in Native American communities, but that glimpse is always filtered through the significance of a character whose role in that world is tenuous at best. At their worst, such films celebrate Native themes only to subordinate them with a (hopefully unintended) message of white dominance. Even at their best, however, one should always remember the real subjects of the story-line are NOT the indigenous people. Whether the treatment of Native American subjects in such films is sympathetic or hostile, nuanced orĀ  crass; either way the treatment is filtered through the eyes of the white characters.

The limitation is rather signifcicant.

71.271549 -156.751450

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