Re-Imagining Indians: the Counter-Hegemonic Represenations of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre

Re-Imagining Indians: The Counter-Hegemonic Represenations of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Cassadore, Edison Duane Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 09:39:39 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195409 RE-IMAGINING INDIANS: THE COUNTER-HEGEMONIC REPRESENTATIONS OF VICTOR MASAYESVA AND CHRIS EYRE by Edison Duane Cassadore _______________________ Copyright © Edison Duane Cassadore 2007 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2 0 0 7 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Edison Cassadore entitled Re-Imagining Indians: The Counter-Hegemonic Representations of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________________________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Barbara Babcock _______________________________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Daniel Bernardi _______________________________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Joy Harjo _______________________________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Sarah Moore _______________________________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Susan White Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: September 23, 2005 Dissertation Director: Barbara Babcock 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. Signed: Edison Duane Cassadore 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the continuing support of Barbara Babcock, Daniel Bernardi, Joy Harjo, Sarah Moore, and Susan White. Your collective intellectual creativity and discourse have served as an invaluable inspiration for this dissertation. Thank you all for your steadfast support. 5 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Leah Marcine Andrez, who recognized the value of higher education and taking a “counter-hegemonic” stance for the San Carlos Apache community. I will miss our talking about the struggles in keeping an Apache community and family together in challenging times. Through our “talks,” you also sustained me to not give up on my academic pursuits and to question all instances of inhumanity. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………... ...7 INTRODUCTION: THE FORMATION OF HEGEMONIC INDIAN IMAGES AND COUNTER-HEGEMONIC RESISTANCE ……………………... ...9 CHAPTER ONE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY DISCOURSES AND THE FORMATION OF HEGEMONIC INDIAN REPRESENTATIONS ……….. .41 CHAPTER TWO: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS (1956) AS AMBIGUOUS, “MONUMENTAL” MEMORIAL TO WHITENESS-AS-SIGN... .78 CHAPTER THREE: VICTOR MASAYESVA’S RE-IMAGINING INDIANS AS COUNTER-HEGEMONIC REPRESENTATIONS…………………………... 106 CHAPTER FOUR: CHRIS EYRE’S SKINS (2001) AS IMAGINED COUNTER-HEGEMONIC NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITY……………... 135 CHAPTER FIVE: LINEAR NARRATIVES AND NATIVE AMERICAN RESISTANCE AGAINST THE EFFECTS OF MANIFEST DESTINY, BUT WHAT NEXT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY? ......................................... 155 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………… 181 7 ABSTRACT Contextualized within the discourse of United States nationalism, particularly the idea of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century, contemporary Native American representations from Victor Masayesva (Hopi) and Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho) are counter-hegemonic since their representations interrogate stereotypes about Indians as “timeless,” “props” who create “color background” for the dominant imagination. For example, in Imagining Indians (1992), Masayesva presents a range of interrogating viewpoints concerning the exploitation, commodification, and Hollywood set treatment of Native Americans. Here, the interviewees are not passive objects but active subjects who interrogate the dominant culture’s assumptions about Indians. At the end of his film, images of various nineteenth-century tribal leaders constructed from George Catlin are destroyed through computer graphic manipulation. The camera’s possessive gaze is also de-naturalized and rendered powerless. Chris Eyre uses a different representational tactic than Masayesva. Eyre’s Skins (2002) seeks to build counter-hegemonic community through the love between two brothers. Despite rampant unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism, the brothers’ love sustains them and their family and thus helps them to survive in the fractured community of Pine Ridge. Here, the Lakota philosophy concerning the cultural concepts of tisospaye (“your clan or family”) and oyate (“your people”) are significant since these ideas help the brothers to overcome personal struggles with alcoholism and the effects of the trickster figure of Iktomi. In the ultimate act of countering the magisterial gaze of U.S. nationalism, Skins ends with the cathartic throwing of blood-ret paint on George Washington in America’s much-vaunted Mount 8 Rushmore. In short, these contemporary representations from two key Native American filmmakers are counter-hegemonic since they assert agency in showing “get real” images of Indians and thus building community in the face of domination. 9 INTRODUCTION: THE FORMATION OF HEGEMONIC INDIAN IMAGES AND COUNTER-HEGEMONIC RESISTANCE Recently, I was ask to speak at a high school near Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham Nation about any relevant topic for an audience of young, teenage Indian students. The intention of this presentation was also to impart to them my “role-model” status as one of the few Native American doctorate students at The University of Arizona. Though this was not my tribe, I immediately felt eager to interrogate the universal power of dominant representations for Native Americans because of its authority to teach. Without resorting to fancy academic theories about subjectivity, semiotics and discourse, I helped these Native students to see the nationalist and racist discursive framework surrounding the image of an Indian man, who is represented with an over-sized aquiline nose, Plains Indian-type feathers, and his being inaccurately placed in a John Ford-like setting. (He is also represented sending off smoke signals shaped with the numbers “66.”) This stereotyped image of an Indian comes from a 1960s advertisement for Phillips 66 and states, “Go with Phillips 66…the gasoline that won the West”1. In what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue for in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994), I performed “a kind of pedagogic jujitsu, in the form of classroom hijacking or detournement of media texts” by interrogating and deconstructing this representation and thereby rendering its authority—to tell us Indians who we are or what we should be in real life—powerless2. I helped these Native American students to unlearn the racist stereotypes from dominant, dominating representations. Similarly, Re-Imagining Indians: The Counter-Hegemonic Representations of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre critically studies and questions the 10 U.S. nationalist discursive and representational practices concerning constructions of white masculinity, Native Americans, and the symbolic uses of both white men and women within several key media and literary texts, namely, specific nineteenth-century American landscape paintings (c. 1830-1878), some of the pertinent novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and classic Westerns from John Ford3. In my critical discussion of discursive constructions of nationalist representations, I principally ground my interrogation from Michel Foucault’s three-part definition of discourse from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)4. Foucault remarks: Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word `discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements. (80) Here, Sara Mills’s analysis in Discourse (1997) of this cryptic definition illuminates in what ways Foucault was attempting to define “discourse”5. According to Mills, “`the general domain of all

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