The Native American Lens -
Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
Master’s Thesis
Submitted for the degree of
Master of Arts (MA)
at the University of Graz
Submitted by
Michelle-Francine Natascha ULZ, BA
at the Institute of Amerikanistik
Supervisor: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Klaus RIESER
2021
The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
Table of Contents
1 Introduction ...... 1 2 Relevance ...... 2 3 A Postcolonial Approach ...... 6 3.1 A Postcolonial Approach Towards Film ...... 8 4 Native American Identity in Film - From The Vanishing American to Smoke Signals .... 10 4.1 The Hollywood Produced Indian Identity ...... 10 4.2 Why On-Screen Representation Matters ...... 13 4.3 Movies as a Medium of Cultural Identity ...... 14 5 Main Analysis ...... 17 5.1 The Native Lens - Native Identity Visualized by Native Directors ...... 17 5.1.1 Smoke Signals - A Breakthrough ...... 19 5.2 Movie Introductions ...... 20 5.2.1 RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS/2013/ dir. Jeff Barnaby ...... 20 5.2.2 Barking Water/ 2009/ dir. Sterlin Harjo ...... 22 5.2.3 MEKKO/ 2015/ dir. Sterlin Harjo ...... 22 5.3 Analysis ...... 23 5.3.1 Native Culture, Native Gaze ...... 23 5.3.2 Give Back History ...... 29 5.3.3 Native American Christianity ...... 33 5.3.4 Native Storytelling ...... 40 5.3.5 Native Language ...... 47 5.3.6 Social/Economic Situation...... 50 5.3.7 The Resilient Native American Identity...... 56 5.4 Findings ...... 62 6 Future Potential...... 63 7 Conclusion ...... 70 8 Bibliography ...... 73 8.1 Online Sources ...... 75
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
List of Figures Figure 1: Artwork - Sage Deal III Figure 2: Barking Water (1) 23 Figure 3: Barking Water (2) 24 Figure 4: Barking Water (3) 24 Figure 5: Barking Water (4) 25 Figure 6: Barking Water (5) 26 Figure 7: Barking Water (6) 27 Figure 8: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (1) 30 Figure 9: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2) 31 Figure 10: Barking Water (7) 33 Figure 11: Barking Water (8) 34 Figure 12: Barking Water (9) 34 Figure 13: Barking Water (10) 35 Figure 14: Barking Water (11) 36 Figure 15: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (3) 37 Figure 16: Mekko (1) 40 Figure 17: Mekko (2) 41 Figure 18: Mekko (3) 41 Figure 19: Mekko (4) 42 Figure 20: Mekko (5) 42 Figure 21: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (4) 44 Figure 22: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (5) 45 Figure 23: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (6) 45 Figure 24: Mekko (6) 47 Figure 25: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (7) 47 Figure 26: Barking Water (12) 48 Figure 27: Mekko (7) 50 Figure 28: Mekko (8) 50 Figure 29: Mekko (9) 51 Figure 30: Mekko (10) 51 Figure 31: Mekko (11) 52 Figure 32: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (8) 52 Figure 33: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (9) 53 Figure 34: Mekko (12) 55 Figure 35: Mekko (13) 56 Figure 36: Mekko (14) 57 Figure 37: Mekko (15) 57 Figure 38: Mekko (16) Figure 39: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (10) 59 Figure 40: TikTok - "Pass the Brush" Challenge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsI0gFuz3Lg) 65
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
“After watching Peter Pan, I felt inspired to portray the way Native children’s perception of themselves is influenced by the content around them. I decided to draw a character inspired by myself, looking into a mirror and seeing herself as society thrusts stereotypes onto people. I wanted to use this piece to raise awareness or portray how, as a Native person, these stereotypes are harmful.” (Sage Deal)
Figure 1: Artwork - Sage Deal
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
1 Introduction
“One might have believed Indianness was of little relevance today. What use after all does a nation locked into a black/white model of race and racism, waging a war on terror, obsessed with Islamist outsiders, vexed by the rise of China, and panicked over porous border and the purported threat of immigration from Latin America have for American Indians - real or imagined? Beyond entertainment and the articulation of identity, indignity continues to constitute a powerful symbolic reservoir, a tool kit, valued since at least the Boston Tea Party, for the manufacture of meanings and messages?” (King, 2013:8)
Indigenous culture and its portrayal in US popular media are a topic largely ignored over other race issues within the USA, but still play a vital part with respect to white supremacy and the way Western culture views the consequences of colonialism. May it be the mascots of sport teams or Disney’s Lone Ranger and Toto (2013), Indigenous culture and its heritage are still largely viewed from a white, Eurocentric perspective within mainstream cultural discourse, which means that colonialism and imperialist ideas generated by it, still impact cultural representations. Movies, as a form of identity expression, are a medium of mass culture that enhances and supports the expression of Native American identity, sovereignty, and cultural self- representation in the 21st century.
For this Master thesis, I want to analyze how movies which were created by Native American directors in the 21st century and which feature Native American struggles and identity, work in terms of such self-representation and how they decolonize the Western lens and re- visualize Native American identity from a Native American lens. The main questions asked are the following:
1) Given that film is a medium of cultural identity expression, how is Native American cultural identity, collectively as well as individually, expressed and portrayed in the 21st century when in the hands of Native directors? 2) How can film as a medium of identity expression enhance the understanding of cultural identity?
To answer the questions to full satisfaction and to support the thesis statement, this Master thesis will be structured as follows:
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
First, I want to give the reader an insight into the current relevance of the topic and summarize recent research. The following two chapters and subsections will be theoretical introductions to inform the reader about the theoretical approach of the thesis. Postcolonial theory and its approach to and relevance for the study of Native American film will be introduced. Since the main aim of this thesis is an analysis of Native American identity representation in film, past images generated by the Hollywood industry will be investigated, as it was those that were most widely distributed and influenced not only Western perception of Native American culture, but also Native American self-perception. Before the main analysis, the relevance of film for the expression of cultural identity and the importance of on-screen representation for such will be explained. The main analysis will consist of a close observation of the structural and stylistic features of the following movies:
1) RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS/2013/dir. Jeff Barnaby 2) BARKING WATER/2009/dir. Sterlin Harjo 3) MEKKO/ 2015/dir. Sterlin Harjo
Those three movies will then be analyzed from a postcolonial perspective to answer the questions raised above. What will be observed in the process of this analysis are content and characters as well as how, in the process of decolonizing the Western lens, stereotypical images of Native American culture are deconstructed and visualized through a Native lens. Such analysis of content and character will not only take into consideration the historical moments portrayed in the movies and their relevance for Native culture, but also focus on the expression of cultural traits that are to be ascribed to Native culture, such as storytelling, and the focus the movies set on it. Further, it will be analyzed how the shift from the Western gaze functions in terms of identity expression and cultural representation in the movies listed above when being directed by Native directors. It goes without saying that the characters portrayed are exclusively played by Native actors. The last chapter gives insight into future paths and perspectives of Native American moviemaking and includes current relevant projects and observations from moviemakers and researchers.
It must be acknowledged that all research is done from a Western, outside perspective.
2 Relevance
“Nearly a century after American Indians began protesting their depiction in film, directors, producers, and writers still have not gotten the message. They have failed to listen to them or
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors act on their concerns. To be sure, much has changed in how television and film represent American Indians. Nevertheless, as much as things have changed, more often than not the stories and stereotypes have persisted. More importantly, and arguably a key cause of the continuing misrepresentation of Native American cultures and history in Hollywood, American Indians remain on the margins of the television and film industry, all too often excluded from creating and controlling images.” (King, 2006:29)
Misrepresentation of Native American culture persists. The film industry, similar to museums or other kinds of cultural institutions, still portrays Native American identity and Native Americans as images of the past, failing to give them neither a role nor a voice that centers their cultural self-perception in 21st century culture. Mass culture movies, mainly produced by large Hollywood studios, are very affected by such misrepresentations and misinterpretations of contemporary Native American culture. Such misrepresentations, as pointed out by Raheja (2010:1), however, do not only influence Western awareness of contemporary Indigenous culture, but as well influence Native self-perception and the way they represent themselves within contemporary culture: But these representations have also been key to formulating Indigenous people’s own self-images. Spokane and Coeur d’Alene writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie recalls watching western films on television as a child: “I hated Tonto then and I hate him now. However, despite my hatred of Tonto, I loved movies about Indians, loved them beyond all reasoning and saw no fault in any of them.” For many Native people, it has been possible to despise the numerous abject, stereotypical characters Native Americans were forced to play and deeply enjoy and relate to other images that resonate in some way with lived experiences of tribal peoples or undermine stereotypes in a visual field that otherwise erased Indigenous history. (Raheja, 2010:1).
The images that are being referred to by Raheja and which, as Sherman Alexie also recounts here from his childhood memories, are images that have been created by Western mass movie productions, clearly disadvantage Native American roles through visual representations as well as through linguistic features. In And the Injun goes “How!”: Representations of American Indian English in White Public Space, Meek (2006) studies what is being referred to as HIE - Hollywood Indian English – a linguistic feature mainly observed in Native American roles that reduces common speech patterns and is considered as “ungrammatical”, hence automatically portraying the American Indian as less important and/or less educated as compared to the white person playing the counterpart. King (2006:22) also notes such linguistic misrepresentations and their effects: “The entertainment industry has often silenced Native Americans, representing them as stoic, unspeaking, aloof individuals. Equally common, these media have underscored the supposed inferiority of American Indians through their use and control of the English language: Indian characters regularly have spoken in broken English, marked by improper conjugation, fragmented phrases, and cliches.” As King realizes, the Western gaze on Native Americans is not only exhibited through the way Native Americans
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors speak English, but as well through the refusal of Western filmmakers to let Native Americans speak their Native languages. Raheja (2010) and King (2006) both point out that the misrepresentation of Native Americans can not only be noted on an obvious, visual level, but as well in terms of subtle linguistic changes or the refusal of white directors to expose the audience to Native languages.
Such misrepresentations created and distributed by Hollywood productions have a long tradition within film history, as Peter C.Rollins and John E. O’Connor already identified in 1998 in Hollywood’s Indian - The Portrayal of the Native American in Film by capturing the history of Hollywood’s cinematic misrepresentation of Native American culture and history. Throughout the years, the Native American persona created in Hollywood mainly relied on their relationship to white men and served the purpose of their heroism in representation. As an effect, cinema molded history around the white man's well-being and heroic reception rather than around given facts or historical truths. The Native American was either depicted as the warrior or the noble savage, both serving the image of the white man being the rational male hero. Rollins and O’Connor do not only illustrate how Native Americans are depicted in Western film, but also explain the historical backgrounds of such depictions, as well defining the central role of John Ford and his misrepresentation of Indians in historical movies about conquest that sparked numerous stereotypes that persisted well into the 1990s. One would think such images should have been overcome by the 20th century, but the 2013 performance of Johnny Depp in Lone Ranger and Tonto has once again proven that American film directors are still far from creating sovereignty for Native American culture within mass productions since the Native American persona portrayed in the movie re-enacted all of the stereotypical images and linguistic limitations that have been listed above.
Literature mentioned above frames the central problem that most movies that enter a mainstream audience in the West are Hollywood produced and thus, they represent an image of other cultures that mainly categorizes them as the other and makes the Western audience a spectator of different cultures. However, the American Indian Movement (1968) and the claims of the civils rights movement induced considerable change in terms of cultural acknowledgement and sovereignty - change that as well entered the consciousness of the film industry, empowering Native filmmakers to create and distribute films that guarantee cultural sovereignty. Apart from all misinterpretations Hollywood confronted Native American identity with, John Mihelich already in 2001 addressed how Sherman Alexie as a Native American director used the medium of film to react to such misrepresentations of Native American culture in popular American film with the movie Smoke Signals (1998), written by him and based on his short story collection Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors directed by Chris Eyre, in Smoke or Signals? American Popular Culture and the Challenge to Hegemonic Images of American Indians in Native American Film. Mihelich filtered the most common misrepresentations that continue to shape Native American character portrayal in Hollywood produced movies. What is very rarely discussed as well are the possibilities and great creations that Native American cinema has already achieved. In Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens - Native American Film and Video (2001), Beverly R. Singer explored Native American cinema and directors as well as the Native institutions that create and support Native film and video art, naming numerous examples and important works to illustrate the accomplishments of Native filmmaking. Moreover, Singer highlights the role of cinematic works in the continuance and persistence of Native American culture in the 21st century since it is movies and visual culture that mainly influence today's society in their perception of the surrounding reality. One of the major works in terms of deconstructing the Western lens and focusing on the works of Native Americans and their achievements in moviemaking was Kerstin Knopf’s Decolonizing the Lens of Power - Indigenous Films in North America from 2008. Knopf focuses on the deconstruction of the Foucauldian Gaze of Power in film and analyzes how already existing movies are able to deconstruct Western stereotypes of Native culture and open doors in moviemaking to a Native American lens. Numerous works that were written, directed, and produced by Native Americans, such as Smoke Signals (1993) or Big Bear (1998), are analyzed according to their role in giving voice to Native American cultural self-perception.
The overall effects negative misrepresentations by Western mainstream media can have on Native American self-perception and cultural identity were addressed by Eason et al in 2018. In Reclaiming Representations & Interrupting the Cycle of Bias Against Native Americans, what is argued through the culture cycle theory is the idea that the cultural representations created by institutionalized power shape daily interactions that further support the bias against Native Americans. Since movie productions are part of such institutionalized power relations and create an influence that goes far beyond simple consumerism and entertainment - “The culture cycle framework demonstrates the power of cultural ideas and representations in shaping Native Americans’ experiences. Prevailing harmful and limiting ideas and representations of Native Americans fuel a cycle of bias and reinforce disparate outcomes for Native people.” (Eason et al, 2018:77). To break this harming cycle, Eason et al (2018) suggest that institutions, those of the state and those of cultural and academic importance, open the sphere to representations informed by Native American themselves. Such institutions also entail the film industry.
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
Similar to Knopf’s (2008) and Eason’s et al (2018) approach, the aim of this Master thesis is to find ways how Native American directors work with the medium of film to create and visualize portrayals that achieve an accurate representation of identity and sovereignty of contemporary Native American culture in cinematic works. Three contemporary films directed by Native Americans have been chosen for analysis with focus on collective and individual identity expression through the Native lens.
3 A Postcolonial Approach
“Postcolonialism is a term with multiple meanings and political associations, cutting across and implicated within theories of imperialism, modernity, racism, ethnicity, cultural geography and postmodernism.” (Darian-Smith, 291:2010)
To analyze a movie within a postcolonial approach, which is a main aim of this thesis, a definition of postcolonial theory and its central claims, but also its status within the history of the USA and Native American culture, will be given first.
While decolonization can be regarded as the “undoing” of colonization on a political and cultural level, a postcolonial study rather looks at the legacy and aftermath of colonialism in today’s world. How does the legacy of colonialism still influence 21st century politics and policies? Such legacies are as well analyzed on the level of culture and art since these fields are influenced by the imperialist ideologies that were part of the Western colonization strategies. As an academic field, postcolonialism covers numerous approaches and examines the connections of colonialism in today’s world in fields such as politics and culture. Young (2003:2) provides the reader with the following explanation of what postcolonialism is - Since the early 1980s, postcolonialism has developed a body of writing that attempts to shift the dominant ways in which the relations between western and non-western people and their worlds are viewed. What does that mean? It means turning the world upside down. It means looking from the other side of the photograph, experiencing how differently things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather than Berlin or Boston, and understanding why. (Young, 2:2003)
For Young (2003) it is central to understand that throughout history, or ever since the rise of Western colonialism and the connected imperialist mindset, a Western gaze on experiencing the world, the gaze of the dominant culture, has been taken for granted. Hence, it can be regarded as one of the central aims of postcolonialism to deconstruct the Western viewpoint and to open up academic fields to a broader variety of knowledge and knowledge production - “It attempts to reform the intellectual and epistemological exclusions of this academy, and
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors enables non-Western critics located in the West to present their cultural inheritance as knowledge.”(Gandhi, 1998:2) Since the development of postcolonialism as a field of study, numerous additional questions have been raised, and questions of climate change and ecocriticism, as well as diasporic and migrant communities and the reasons for as well as history of their current situations have become central to research (Ghandi, 1998:3).
Historically, the foundation of the USA is being given a special status within postcolonial theory since European imperialists did not only colonize foreign land, but while doing so, set up a whole new country based on an idea, which is also true for Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. Basic imperialist ideas, however, can be regarded alike and persist in contemporary Western culture; ideas displaying power structures that have been maintained. European colonists regarded those civilizations they had contact with, that did not follow the existing European model of society and civilization, as “uncivilized” or “wild”. Imperialist culture led to a distinction between the West and the rest - the rest, so mainly the colonized cultures, being given a role in that power structure that is inferior to colonist culture. Postcolonialism questions and deconstructs such power structures. What postcolonial theory as such aims at, however, is not just the deconstruction of colonial patterns of hierarchy, but also the acquisition of a better understanding and knowledge of the colonized cultures; not just in terms of accessing different epistemologies, „but different kinds of knowledge, new epistemologies, from other cultures.” (Young, 2009:15) Hence, a postcolonial approach targets the understanding of fields such as history and art, which were predominantly looked at from a Eurocentric perspective, from a perspective and lens of those cultures that have not been given a viewpoint in such discourses due to imperialist ideas in those academic fields. Of course, postcolonialism does not only operate in academic fields. It also seeks to contest structures that have persisted since colonialism on a political and cultural level - “In the face of the complex forces of globalization, postcolonialism will continue to articulate active challenges to the impoverishment of global power. Its radical agenda will always be to reject the unbearable conditions of inequality and poverty in the world today and to demand equality, dignity and well-being for all the peoples inhabiting all the continents on this earth.” (Young, 2009: 25) The postcolonial approach seeks to challenge the Western imperial mindset that still centers its approaches and epistemes within a globalized world and hence change perspectives, opening discourse to become more culturally informed - “Postcolonial Theory involves a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west. It is concerned with developing the driving ideas of political practice, morally committed to transforming the conditions of exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the world's population live out their daily lives.” (Young, 2003:6)
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
According to Young (2003), postcolonial theory is also “morally committed” (2003:6), which needs to be taken into consideration given the fact that the foundation of the USA was based on an imperialist, European idea, an idea that included genocide to obtain land, rather than legal purchases. Defining the term Native, one already encounters the very idea that America is a manifestation of European imperialism rather than a country. The term Native in postcolonial theory generally entails those societies who inhabited land before colonists arrived. However, the term was not neutrally connotated at early times of its use - “(...) the term Native was employed to categorize those who were regarded inferior to the colonial settlers, or the colonial administrators who ruled the colonies. Native quickly became associated with such pejorative concepts as savage, un-civilized or childlike in class nouns such as “the natives''.” (Ashcroft et al, 2000:142) The establishment of the USA as a nation was built upon the brutal colonization not only of land that was already inhabited, but also on the attempted genocide of a culture. Not only is it only very little land that has not been stolen from Natives, but it is also the systematic genocide and historical trauma that remain unresolved, that US politics have not managed to resolve. Still in the 21st century, Indigenous peoples all over the USA need to fight for fundamental rights such as land rights. Also, until present day, Indigenous culture within the USA is met with hegemonies and policies that fail to include or voice the Native experience and tradition. Cultural life also includes film, a cultural sector in the USA that has been mainly shaped by Hollywood - “Since Hollywood cinema clearly upholds Western supremacy, the export of Hollywood films throughout the world ensures the dissemination of Eurocentric ideologies and the cultural export of US imperialism.” (Knopf, 2008:52) Within a postcolonial approach, there hence is a need to not only question political structures and hierarchies influenced by colonialism, but also elements of cultural life such as film which are deeply influenced by the legacies of colonialism and its ideologies. The next chapter will explain how to approach films within such a postcolonial approach, to theoretically explain how the movies, that are part of the main analysis, will be analyzed in terms of structural and stylistic features.
3.1 A Postcolonial Approach Towards Film
“The next major development in the representation of the Hollywood Indian depends largely on the contributions of Native American screenwriters, directors, and producers like Loretta Todd and Mohawk Michael Doxtater, Miwok Greg Sarris, Cherokee Valerie Red-Horse, and Makah Sandra Sunrising Osawa, among others. These artists are in the position to bring Native American voices, stories and viewpoints to the media mainstream from which they have been historically excluded.” (Rollins&O’Connor, 1998:134)
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
Having presented a short introduction to what a postcolonial approach is, this chapter will deal with a postcolonial approach towards film to give an insight into what the main analysis of the three movies presented in the introduction will focus on. Mainly, when approaching film through a postcolonial perspective, one is trying to uncover the Western gaze of looking at the world, specifically other cultures and the other that is thereby created: Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and racial taxonomies, depicting natives, in documentary or fictional films, as savages, primitive, and outside modernity. More recent cinema genres such as border cinema, transnational cinema, accented cinema, haptic cinema, migrant cinema, diasporic cinema, and world cinema can be considered affiliated with the postcolonial paradigm as they all embrace ethnic, immigrant, hyphenated counter-narratives. (Ponzanesi, 2018:15)
While, for example, feminist theory in film tries to explore the male gaze at the world, postcolonial theory wants to critique the colonial gaze - “The influence of postcolonial studies on film theory, however, has allowed for the creation of a series of theoretical concepts that foreground issues of racial and national difference and acknowledge the role that race and ethnicity play in looking relations. “(Columpar, 2002:26) The theoretical concept of the gaze, so the dominant way of looking at certain things that is put forward by the culture in power, plays an important part when considering the role of postcolonialism in film studies. This dominant way of looking is mainly influenced by those in power in a society. Taking into consideration that the dominant culture is the Western one, the gaze is to be considered as an ethnographic/colonial one - “Contemporary film scholars have traced the historical collusion between visuality, anthropology, and colonialism by discussing, alternately, the ethnographic gaze and the colonial gaze as the mechanisms by which the nonwhite subject has been and continues to be fixed in his/her otherness.” (Columpar, 2002:34) Movies in the 21st century that have been successful and were most vastly distributed are movies created by European or North American cinemas. Hence, it is the Western view of race and history that up to this point in time was most vastly distributed. This also means that a viewer of mass media is automatically put into the position of the culture in power, experiencing the world presented in movies only from one perspective - “(...) the interpellation of the film spectator into a hegemonic viewing position, in which the Western, white, male identity is normative.” (Columpar, 2002: 40)
Thus, a postcolonial approach towards film mainly tries to deconstruct the colonial/ethnographic gaze that is forced upon the viewers when watching mass produced movies in the Western sphere, a gaze that is mainly Western, male, and white. Referring to Young (2009:25), contemporary postcolonial scholars not only try to demask the dominant gaze, but at the same time try to establish epistemologies and methods that are informed and
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors determined by non-Western cultures. Hence, this Master thesis wants to focus on movies that are directed by Native Americans and advance the focus on a non-Western, a Native gaze.
The movies that have been chosen for analysis for this Master thesis have two things in common: 1) They portray Native American culture in the 21st century 2) They are all three directed by Native directors
Both features matter in the analysis and interplay since Native American culture in the 21st century and the cultural identity of Native Americans are portrayed differently when directed by a Western person, as cultural background and understanding produce a different outcome in terms of representation. Watching, interpreting, and analyzing movies that come from the described context and were created as such will, taking into consideration Young’s (2009) claim for a postcolonial approach that centers learning from the non-Western, hence open new perspectives and further develop a distribution of knowledge and view of the world that shifts the Western dominance towards an equal distribution of knowledge production and value systems. Watching films that are created by Native Americans opens a new world to the Western eyes that have been blinded by stereotypical images of Indians that seem to have frozen in time since the ages of colonialism.
4 Native American Identity in Film - From The Vanishing American to Smoke Signals
The following chapter and its subsections will provide an insight into the history of the Hollywood produced Indian identity that, for centuries, shaped public, Western perception of Native American cultural identity and as well into the importance of an on-screen representation that is culturally informed and explain how the mass medium film creates and shapes cultural identity.
4.1 The Hollywood Produced Indian Identity
“Native Americans, as shapes shifted by the national unconsciousness, are forever trapped in the history of film.” (Rollins, 2007:71)
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors
It is crucial to analyze the Hollywood produced Indian identity for the context of this work since it is Hollywood movies that are most widely consumed and distributed in the Western world. The American Indian identity established in such movies is not only an identity that is produced, but also an identity that strongly influences the perception of a given culture, in this case Native American culture, since presented identities are often taken as a stated truth rather than an invention of film directors. The fascination with Native American cultural identity can be dated back to Wild West shows that exhibited a staged and Westerly organized view on Native American identity to European onlookers in the late 19th century. Those Wild West shows established an image of Native American culture that very much shaped the early portrayal in Hollywood movies –
This image stressed wildness and bellicosity, suggesting that indigenous peoples were best understood as historical artifacts, bypassed by progress. At the same time, they rendered Indian/white relations, underscoring not merely violent clash of cultures, but the just conquest and subjugation of the Native nations of North America. In many respects, Wild West shows shaped the content of the film industry, influencing the characters and narratives of the western for much of the century. (King, 2006:12)
Thus, since the early days of film, the Indian as portrayed by the Hollywood industry has always been depicted the way the white man sees him. This “seeing” was in many ways influenced by judgements made of Native culture that can be traced back to Columbus and by a generalization of the other culture as a homogenous mass of Natives. The Native American that one could find in movies was always on one of the two ends of a scope - either completely savage, or a noble, friendly Indian connected to nature –
In 1936, for example, when most screen Indians were the essence of cruelest savagery, Twentieth Century-Fox made the fourth screen version of the idyllic Indian drama Ramona, starring Loretta Young. Even in the very early days, when small production companies churned out two-reel westerns weekly for the nickelodeon trade, a patron might leave one movie house where he had just seen a sympathetic though not necessarily accurate - Indian drama and walk into another theatre where the natives on the screen were totally inhuman. (Rollins&O’Connor, 2003:28)
What this generalization on two ends of the scope reveals is that in the history of Hollywood, filmmakers and producers did not research tribal life and culture for creating an accurate image of a Native American, but invented Native American culture for the interest of the dominant culture on their own terms. Of course, it is the movie genre of the Western, also one of the earliest genres in film in general, that from the beginning onwards had most depictions of Native Americans in it. Whether or not Native Americans are to receive the viewer’s empathy as part of the plot or not, similar to the most humorous figures in the drama tradition of comedy, Native Americans are presented as one-dimensional characters with almost no development on any level - “But little time has been spent in developing the screen personalities of Indians. They become flat characters, relatively nondescript evil forces that help establish an atmosphere of tension within which the cattle ranchers, townspeople, the stagecoach riders,
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors the outlaws (...) and the barmaids can relate to one another.” (Rollins&O’Connor, 2003: 32). Most importantly, it is a fact that in the modern Westerns, particularly popular from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Native American is the one who is almost always triumphed over by the white man. One is already able to realize that the Indian identity created in Hollywood, from early depictions to Western classics, were characters that mainly served the presentation of the white man. Created as a homogenous mass and through flat characterization, the sympathy hence lay mainly with the white man. Especially since the decolonization efforts and the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, that also resulted in the Native American Movement in 1968, more efforts were made to address injustice and systemic inequality in all political fields, but also in the arts, literature, and film - “As a consequence, the major films released in the late 1960s and early 1970s presented novel stories, ones that reworked the cinematic image of Indians. Whereas Little Big Man (1970) sought to retell American history, offering more progressive representations of Native Americans, other films used the Indian as an allegory for other social issues.” (King, 2006:21). Thus, due to such developments, Hollywood introduced a different kind of portrayal of Native Americans throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Turning away from the enemy of the white settler, what was produced was the identity of the noble savage that still, as opposed to his white counterpart, does not live a life as civilized as society expects it to be, remaining an image that can only survive in past times, such as the characters portrayed in Disney's Pocahontas - “Such representations suggest that Native nations were static and unchanging. In contrast to Indians who are stuck in time as symbols of the past, whites are dynamic, embodying change, progress, and the future. In only rare instances have these media told stories about Indians as individuals who live in the present.” (King, 2006:23) Similar to ethnographic museums, the Indian presented to the mainstream viewer was the Indian as seen by the white man and how, ever since white settler culture, the other was interpreted.
Past representations of the Native American in film, representations largely influenced by Hollywood’s interpretation of Native American culture and cultural identity, are tremendously uninformed and created a Native persona mainly to fit the needs of the white hero. Even if in the past decades, efforts were made to create an image that is more nuanced and a Native American identity that does not only reflect upon the white hero or white savior complex, stereotypes seem to be frozen in time and persist in Hollywood’s cinematic representation. It is hence more important to give Native American communities the power over their own representation in film, not only to eliminate the Western gaze, but also to further establish anticolonial/postcolonial media and representations. Three movies that attempted such a revisualizing of the postcolonial Native American identity, directed by Native Americans, will be presented, and analyzed in the next chapter. The main focus of said analysis will be the
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors question of how movies that employ a Native gaze enhance the understanding of contemporary Native American culture and identity in postcolonial society.
4.2 Why On-Screen Representation Matters
“Nearly a century after American Indians began protesting their depiction in film, directors, producers and writers still have not gotten the message. They failed to listen to them or act on their concerns. To be sure, much has changed in how television and film represent American Indians. Nevertheless, as much as things have changed, more often than not stories and stereotypes have persisted.” (King, 2006:29)
Most movies featuring Native Americans that have reached a mainstream audience in the past few decades were mainly Hollywood productions, portraying a rather hegemonic image of Native Americans that has formed and shaped Western perceptions of Indigenous people and supported the stereotype of the cultural other and “wild savage” well into today. According to Mihelich (2011:130), there are, generally speaking, three different types of Native Americans that are represented in most movies in Western popular culture: These stereotypes are reinforced by the images created by popular films spanning classic westerns and contemporary films of the American West. The images range from the warrior and the shamanic representation to the ignorant drunken depiction. The warrior image includes the all-too-common savage warrior, usually shown in stereotypical Plain’s form, and the heroic and noble warrior/hunter, depicted as stoic, in touch with nature, and peace loving but willing to fight when necessary. The shaman profile represents a deeply religious and mysterious character. These images are most often contextualized in some historic past with the major theme in the lives of the Indians being the confrontation with encroaching peoples of European descent. The warrior/hunter, the religious leader, and the confrontations with whites were undoubtedly important aspects of much of the experience of American Indians historically, and even the savage warrior image probably resonates to some degree with actual experience within tribes as they perceived their enemies-whether Indian or white. The image of drunkenness, too, has its parallels in historical and contemporary Indian experience as Indians, as well as a plethora of other Americans, struggle with alcohol problems.
The way Natives are portrayed in popular and mass media influences Western perception tremendously. The three typical stereotypes described by Mihelich still happen to be very true within today’s mainstream movie productions featuring Indigenous people. Although one might argue that the stories told about Indians, the frontier, and America are simple entertainment, such false, stereotypical renderings, so central to movies and television for so long, are far from harmless. Indeed, what makes televisual and cinematic representations of Native American cultures and histories so important is that they have shaped perceptions, practices and policies. They have encouraged misrecognition of American Indians, warping understandings of their lives, capacities, values and cultures. (King, 2006:28)
Thus, according to King (2006:28), Hollywood and other mainstream media sources have a tremendous influence on the vast majority of its viewers and are the major forces in shaping the Western image of Indigenous people, presenting the viewer with only a very limited and
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Westerly shaped view on other cultures. Images created in popular culture are images that are most widely consumed and perceived to state a truth. Through shifting the lens of power in movie making, not only a different view of other cultures will be achieved, but, in the process of the decolonization of the Western gaze, it is as well the world of art and filmmaking that will shift its Eurocentric perspective. Having now explained that movies generated by mass culture do shape one’s perception of the surrounding reality the way they do shape self-perception, the next chapter will further this claim by clarifying in detail how movies shape cultural identity.
4.3 Movies as a Medium of Cultural Identity
“Those texts themselves have a history, but they also contain an idea of history, and of the West as history, which is itself legend rather than fact - mythology. The subject of my enquiry is mythology rather than history; to be more precise, it is the history of a mythology which masquerades as history but, like the Senator (Stoddard, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), knows itself to be lying.” (Rollins & O'Connor, 2003:76)
What is argued in this thesis is that movies are an important mass medium in establishing cultural identities in the 21st century and its mechanisms of pop culture and hence an important medium in revisualizing Native American identity in a postcolonial society. Images one is exposed to in movies are perceived to be facts and one tends to categorize reality according to images pop culture exposes one to. Movie productions are perceived to mirror the reality and social circumstances they are produced in. Ever since Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), movies have been part of American mass culture and a mirror of political, social, and cultural happenings of the given production time. The Vietnam war and its aftermath, which forms a central part of American identity perception, for example, persists to be the theme and major topic of numerous movie productions that produce everything on a spectrum, from American war heroism to the trauma ridden soldier that cannot face life after war. Similarly, movies, especially mass-produced ones, inform the public's perception of a certain culture and cultural identity –
Because it foregrounds processes of identification through relations of visuality, cinema is one of the most explicit systems of suturing, the operations of which can be explained effectively through the simple acts of seeing. Meanwhile, cinema also offers a homology with the dominant culture at large, in that the latter, too, may be seen as a repressive system in which individual subjects gain access to their identities only by forsaking parts of themselves, parts that are, moreover, never fully found again. (Bowman, 2010:87)
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“Suturing” in this context refers to the binding of the subject, so the movie spectator, to basically the signifier, so the dominant culture, or in the case of movies, the makers of such movies that mainly put forward the perspective of the dominant culture: “The crucial theoretical concept informing psychoanalytic interpretations of identity is “suture.” In the context of cinema, “suture” refers to the interactions between the enunciation of the filmic apparatus, the spectacle, and the viewing subject—interactions which, by soliciting or “interpellating” the viewing subject in a series of shifting positions, allow it to gain access to coherent meaning.” (Bowman, 2010:87) May those movies state the truth as a fact or simply make up the image of a culture as it is perceived to be from the mentioned dominant culture, or Western gaze, a broader public informed by such perception will perceive the viewed cultural identity as a fact and be influenced by it. As compared to the Hollywood image of mentally handicapped people being a blessing to those who are not handicapped, such as in Radio (2003), or the fetishization of the Orient, as according to Edward Said, also the Native American identity that is projected in Hollywood movies can mainly be read from what the other culture means for the white man. Bowman describes the phenomenon of the otherization of cultures/genders that are not white, Western, or male for the cinema spectator the following way: Once identity is linked to spectatorship, a new spectrum of theoretical possibilities opensup. For instance, critics who have been influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism can now make the connection that orientalism, as the system of signification that represents non-Western cultures to Western recipients in the course of Western imperialism, operates visually as well as narratologically to subject “the Orient'' to ideological manipulation. They point out that, much like representations of women in classical narrative cinema, representations of “the Orient'' are often fetishized objects manufactured for the satiation of the masculinist gaze of the West. As a means to expose the culturally imperialist assumptions behind European and American cinemas, the spectatorship of non-Western audiences thus also takes on vital significance.” (Bowman, 2010:87)
What Bowman (2010:87) suggests in terms of the fetishization of the Orient or women according to the Western, male gaze can easily be translated to the representation of Native Americans and the imperialist/ethnographic gaze of the West. Native Americans have also been made objects to a gaze that operates in terms of a colonial mindset that assumes the West encountered a culture different from their very own. The Western gaze of other cultures, so especially those colonized by the West, has a prominent role in the history of cinema and can be traced back to the early days of film throughout cinematic history - One of the most infamous indictments of cinema’s role in the visual oppression of racial and, more specifically, colonial Others occurred in 1965 when the so-called father of African cinema, Ousame Sembene, charged Jean Rouch, his counterpart in French ethnographic film, with the following crime:”Tu nous regardes comme de insectes.” In making this accusation, Sembene pinned Roouch down as the direct inheritor of a visual pathology whose cinematic conception dates back to the cross between science and spectacle that characterized the chronophotographic and cinematographic encounters with French colonial. Others were made by figures like Felix-Luis Regnault and the Lumiere brothers. It is not difficult to find examples from their zoological specimens. (Amad, 2013:49)
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Portraying white privilege and the otherization of the colonized on-screen parallels real life circumstances and influences the ways in which Western people perceive Native cultures, further supporting a misinterpretation of those. Making another culture incomprehensible on screen and reducing it to songs and costumes without factual, historical backgrounds, unknown to a broader public, will ultimately lead to a rejection of Native sovereignty by those who are informed of cultures through TV and cinematic representations - Consequently, films and television encourage Native Americans to misrecognize themselves. On the one hand, they may come to applaud the Hollywood Indian, seeing it as an acceptable representation of themselves. Some Apaches praised Ron Howard's reborn western The Missing for its portrayal of their culture, despite the fact that the film reduced Apache life and customs to violence, magic and transgression, embodied in the villainous antagonist who takes pleasure in and makes a fortune raiding homesteads and enslaving white women. On the other hand, cinematic and televisual images injure the self-image and self-esteem of indigenous youth. In fact, some have suggested that the ubiquity of such stories and stereotypes contributes to the frequency with which Indian youth attempt suicide and drop out from high school. Ultimately, movies and television programs with Indian themes have distorted and disempowered Native Americans. (King,2006:29)
It is important to understand that film does not only, as King suggests, influence the Western perception of Native Americans through a colonial lens, but moreover as well has effects on Native American self-perception: “Likewise the self-perception of the colonial subject is channeled through this colonial gaze; Indigenous people have often appropriated the image of the ideological and imaginary Indian, which has resulted in confusion, self-denial, cultural alienation, and identity crisis.” (Knopf, 2008:11) Such understanding is necessary since it affects Native American cultural sovereignty and their understanding of self in a postcolonial society. Thus, according to King (2006) and Knopf (2008), movies do not only shape Western perception of non-Western cultures, but, due to the dominance of Western mainstream media, also the self-perception of those represented or colonized, with effects that might be harmful for Native images of self. Also, Eason et al (2018:72) suggest that misrepresentations concerning Native American cultural identity lead to “biased institutional understandings of Native people” negatively affecting, for example, encounters between Native youth and the American legal system, as well as influencing, on numerous levels, Native Americans’ understanding of a cultural self - “(...) Stephanie Fryberg and colleagues demonstrated through multiple studies that negative stereotypes of Native Americans (...)decreased perceptions of their Native community’s worth, and made them less likely to envision successful futures.” (Eason et al., 2018:75) A revisualization of the Native identity through the medium of film that finally represents Native Americans through a Native American lens and gives them the power over spectatorship and the gaze and their very own understanding of their histories and contemporary life is all the more significant.
Having discussed how the Hollywood-produced Indian identity has impacted how the West viewed Native Americans, but more importantly, also Native American self-perception and
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors how movies operate in terms of cultural identity expression, the next chapter will analyze Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Mekko and Barking Water to see how cultural identity is represented when it is Native Americans that are given the chance to visualize their own culture and identity.
5 Main Analysis
“(...)Native American filmmakers have many stories to tell about themselves and their culture. If they can be given opportunities to share their work, we just need to sit back, watch and listen.” (Singer, 2001:13)
In the following chapter, the three movies introduced in the first chapter will be analyzed in greater detail, structurally and stylistically, regarding the content, characters, and the meaning of the filmic representation for Native American cultural identity through a Native lens. The chosen films are works by Native American directors created in the 21st century, portraying Native culture in this temporal frame.
As discussed in the preceding chapters, the movies will be evaluated within a postcolonial approach and it needs to be noted that, according to Knopf (2008: 53), since in modern times, technical film practices in Northern American are mainly informed by Hollywood productions, it is not so much the film technique that this Master thesis will analyze, but rather how the movies manage to deconstruct the stereotypical images of Native Americans that have been created by mass media productions and Hollywood and create movies that are informed of and by Native American culture and values in the 21st century, shifting from an imperialist to a Native American lens. The main analysis will center themes that appear within the movies and that influence, shape and redirect Western understandings of Native culture and experience in a society that enhances a postcolonial view.
5.1 The Native Lens - Native Identity Visualized by Native Directors
As the title indicates, the main focus of this thesis will be the analysis of Native identity visualized by Native directors. For this purpose, the movies introduced in the section above will be analyzed according to their interpretation of contemporary Native American identity through the Native lens. Hence, it is important that an understanding of the Native lens within
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors a postcolonial approach is established before the main analysis that will focus on the different parts of contemporary Native culture, identity, and religion that the movies address in greater detail.
To address the concept to full satisfaction, an understanding of the gaze according to Knopf (2008), who based her thesis on Michel Foucault's concepts, will be established. Foucault's Gaze of Power in theory basically claims that - “the gaze becomes speech which becomes discourse, which becomes power.” (Knopf, 2008:2). Knopf (2008:4) connects Foucault’s principles of the gaze and discourse production, which claim that power is exhibited and produced via institutionalized hierarchies (such as school, state etc.), with colonial discourse in North America and further with the dominant Western lens in film. She claims that discourse produced during colonialism, on the side of settlers as well as England, created the binary opposition between the West and Native America that is still experienced in contemporary times - “The basic constructed opposition in North American colonial discourse, on which discursive exclusion, marginalization, and objectifications rest, is that of self/other and center/margin, from which other binaries derive. This discourse defines from and in opposition to the colonized group (...)” (Knopf, 2008:3). The opposition Knopf mentions can, for example, be seen in the perceived opposition between Native and Western belief systems that is still visible in today’s commonly held Western perception that frequently associates or even synonymously uses the term Western with Modern, whereas Native cultures are perceived to be regressive and opposed to progress in terms of economy, technology, and lifestyle. When further applying Foucault's concept to postcolonial studies of film, one is to observe “the visual modalities of colonial discourse represented by photography, movies, videos, and TV broadcasts, one can indeed speak of a lens of power, the representing Foucault`s “speaking eye”.” (Knopf, 2008:5). There hence is a connection to be drawn between what Foucault refers to as the Gaze of Power and what has been referred to, within the course of this work, as the Western gaze, so the gaze of the dominant culture within a discourse system. As already mentioned in chapter 4.1, such viewpoint of the dominant culture, or Western gaze, on other cultures and a practice of othering can be observed in the Hollywood produced Native American identity that further reinforces Western concepts of self/other through visualizing the Native American identity to be in direct opposition to the “progressive, Western one” and hence still creates an image of Native American identity that is influenced by the discourse of colonialism.
Native American filmmakers creating own movies respond to this dominant, colonial gaze by decolonizing the Western gaze - “They decolonize the Foucauldian lens of power by quoting, discussing, and subverting such colonialist images of Indigenity and by projecting through this
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors lens self-determined images free of stereotypization and objectification. In this sense, the decolonized lens of power is a second, self-controlled gaze, an anticolonialist one.” (Knopf, 2010: 7). Thus, the work of Native American filmmakers does not only decolonize the dominant culture’s gaze through which colonized cultures have been viewed before, but as well opens new perspectives and epistemes within those creations, ones that only Native Americans are able to tell. This again responds to Gandhi’s (1998:2) demands of a postcolonial theory that - “enables non-Western critics located in the West to present their cultural inheritance as knowledge.” What Gandhi refers to as “non-Western critics” (1998:2) in terms of academic work can be understood to be Native filmmakers in the cultural sector, given the effort, work and knowledge of Native Americans in the fields of film and art. As in Hollywood discourse, the dominant film discourse in the Western world, the cultural identity of Native Americans has been portrayed as viewed by the West, contemporary Native American filmmakers - “see themselves as responding to this colonial cinematic discourse, which developed a tradition of stereotyped, objectified, romanticized, and homogenized representation of Indigenous people.” (Knopf, 2008:8) Such decolonization of romanticized representations, will as well be encountered in the analysis of Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Mekko and Barking Water.
The three movies analyzed in the main analysis decolonize and deconstruct the imperial gaze and work towards a Native lens, which as a response to the long history of misrepresented Native identity through Hollywood’s discourse, expresses Native American cultural identity as experienced in contemporary times and presents their very own “cultural inheritance as knowledge.” (Gandhi, 1998:2)
5.1.1 Smoke Signals - A Breakthrough
Numerous scholars in the field of Native American film, such as Singer (2001) and Knopf (2008), give a special role to the movie Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre in 1998. Hence, as an introductory part to the main analysis, it will first be clarified why, in terms of its achievements for a postcolonial understanding of Native American culture, this movie is to be considered as exceptional and a breakthrough for Native American film. One of the reasons for this movie’s huge success is that the director of Smoke Signals, Chris Eyre, was basically the first Native American director in public consciousness to direct a movie production of larger distribution, but also that the movie could persist before the elite of film, being distributed by Miramax, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival and even receiving the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy (Singer, 2001:61). Smoke Signals (1998) is hence a milestone for Native American film because it proved the potential of Native American filmmakers and entered the mainstream.
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Smoke Signals is based on Sherman Alexie's short story This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona from his story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Rollins&O’Connor, 1998:208). Based on a story from a Native American writer, the movie is of great significance for the way Native Americans are portrayed. Whilst, as discussed in chapter 4.1, the Native American identity created in Hollywood and for mass audiences was rather an identity that can only be understood in relation to the white man's understanding and interpretation of Native American culture, Smoke Signals is regarded, next to Powwow Highway (1989), one of the first movies to reach a mainstream audience that gave rise to the idea that Native American culture and identity should be represented and portrayed by Native Americans. Thus, instead of focusing on the Indian’s relations to the white man, Smoke Signals - “does not center on Indians and white conflict, but instead focuses on Victor`s internal struggle with his feelings about his father. In fact, white characters play a very minimal role throughout the film.” (Rollins&O`Connor, 1998:210) This expression of a cultural identity as well as individual identity that is not visualized through a relation to the white man, as it used to be in the Hollywood tradition, can be considered a breakthrough in Native American filmmaking and thus makes Smoke Signals a landmark movie in the Native American tradition of filmmaking - “This is Indian people telling an Indian story, and that is the heart of the matter. What sets Smoke Signals apart from other films (...) is an issue of self-definition and self- determination: for the first time in a feature film, a Native American was on the other side of the camera.” (Rollins&O`Connor, 1998:211).
The three movies selected for analysis for this Master thesis also operate within this tradition of Native American “self-definition and self-determination” as mentioned by Rollins and O’Connor (1998:2011) and thus create a shift from the Hollywood determined Western gaze to a lens that can finally be ascribed to and described as Native American.
5.2 Movie Introductions
Before analyzing the movies within the context of Native American identity visualization by Native directors, the movies will be introduced.
5.2.1 RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS/2013/ dir. Jeff Barnaby Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a movie directed by the Mi’kmaq director Jeff Barnaby, released in 2013 and has a historical narrative as its main feature. The movie digs deeper into the history of what is referred to as First Nations - the Native population of Canada, south of the
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Arctic cycle. A thriller set in contemporary times, the movie still refers to the governmental abuse of First Nations in past times and puts a contemporary filter on the historical Native lens.
The historical issue of abuse of Natives in residential schools is an issue broadly discussed and known. Most movies, documentaries and history lessons informing the West about it, however, still present the historical trauma from a Western gaze. In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Jeff Barnaby not only approaches the issue as a Native director, but as well tries to give voice to a specific issue in the temporal setting of the 20th century, since the main plot is set in 1976.
5.2.1.1 The Canadian Situation In contrast to Barking Water and Mekko, Rhymes for Young Ghouls portrays a story of colonial crime against Natives set in Canada, not in the USA. In the movie, the abuse of Canadian Natives, the First Nations, through boarding schools aiming at the Christian missionization of Natives, is addressed. First Nations are considered the dominant Indigenous group within Canada. Despite being connected through a colonial history of being forced to assimilate to Western imperialist ideas, the policies imposed on the colonized peoples by the USA and Canada still vary. Even if both countries, in terms of their foundation, established departments for Indian Affairs with operating agents that aimed at a forced assimilation of Natives, on both sides achieved through means such as boarding schools, Canada, as opposed to the USA, was less aggressive in their policies and never officially called out for a war on Natives, as was the case for the USA. In terms of media support, the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada also proves to be different from the US. Similar to the US, Canada also failed to implement Native matters in mainstream media when first providing satellite TV for Aboriginal communities. However, resistance was successful: So Aboriginal communities in the North, with the assistance of Canadian field researchers, conducted their own study about the impact of mainstream television on Northern Aboriginal peoples. Inuit leaders used the data from the study, which revealed negative impacts of English programming in their communities, and challenged the Canadian government's cultural policy against broadcasting foreign language programs, which prevented culturally relevant programming being made available to them. Their challenge resulted in the successful implementation of three satellite projects between 1976 and 1981: Naalakvik, Project Inukshuk and Naalakvik 2. These projects provided the technological infrastructure to link Inuit communities and train staff who began to experiment with programs specific to their community needs. (Singer, 2001:57)
One is to realize that, regarding the information provided by Singer (2001:57), in Canada, opposed to the USA, Native communities were provided with more support in terms of media representation. Also, according to Singer (2001:58) in the following years, Native filmmakers in Canada were guaranteed more support and “recognized for their talent for storytelling in their films. They have greatly benefited from government policies that financially supported filmmakers in Canada.” (Singer, 2001:58) Even if the USA and Canada differ broadly in their
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors policies towards Native American media access, access that guarantees a self-determined cultural representation, Native filmmakers on both sides are still connected through a colonial history and misrepresentation in mainstream media, but even more, connected through the art of filmmaking that offers the option of re-telling and re-shaping public awareness concerning Native cultural identity - “Filmmaking has reconnected Aboriginal and Native Americans in new ways It has been responsible for bringing us into contact with other indigenous peoples.” (Singer, 2001:60)
5.2.2 Barking Water/ 2009/ dir. Sterlin Harjo What director Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation/ Muskogee heritage) did in Barking Water is as simple as it is complex - a love story. Hence, the plot and theme would function for each culture. It is subtle details and words that recreate myths that make Nativeness not the central feature of the movie but add an extra layer of meaning that is to be analyzed through a postcolonial perspective.
The focus of analysis will be the portrayal of contemporary existence of Native Americans as well as the dual relationship between Native American belief systems and Christianity, which is a main element of the movie.
5.2.3 MEKKO/ 2015/ dir. Sterlin Harjo Mekko is Sterlin Harjo’s third feature film and a thriller that revolves around the protagonist Mekko, who has just been released from prison, and the homeless Native American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mekko can see things before they happen and after his release from prison is only haunted by one future event - his very own death.
The movie does not only capture the story of Mekko, but also tells the story through a Native American gaze that gives room to a technique of narrative that presents and represents a part of Native American culture and the practice of storytelling. Besides, through Mekko’s surroundings, one is confronted with the economic precarity the consequences of colonialism have left Native Americans in.
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5.3 Analysis
5.3.1 Native Culture, Native Gaze
Historically, Native representation in movies has been heavily influenced by the Western gaze and white cultures’ perception of Native life. However, especially since the 1960s (Singer, 2001:61), several landmark movies were produced that proved that moviemaking is not a white man's craft and that film is a medium able to document “the social and cultural reaffirmation among indigenous people that has taken place since the mid-1960s.” (Singer, 2001:61). It must be understood that the inclusion of Native American perspectives in American filmmaking was largely influenced by the civil rights movement and its major concerns, opening up the field of movie making to non-Western perspectives -”It wasn’t until the seventies that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a mandate requiring local television stations to offer broadcast time to underserved populations such as Native American tribes.” (Singer, 2001: 35) Hence, one is reminded that it was not until the 1970s that Native Americans were given the opportunity to contribute their perspectives and opinions through larger public media within the United States of America.
Considering Native Americans finally being acknowledged in positions of moviemaking, such as directors or producers, the meaning of the gaze as a concept in film must be examined in the analysis. Having demonstrated the concept of a decolonized gaze according to Knopf’s approach to Foucault's Gaze of Power in chapter 5.1, the following part will analyze how the mentioned films use Knopf’s claim of the decolonization process of the gaze in practice - “(...) they decolonize the Foucauldian lens of power by quoting, discussing and subverting such colonialist images of Indigenity by projecting through this lens self-determined images.” (Knopf, 2008:7)
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Figure 2: Barking Water (1)/ Frankie’s close friend crying
Barking Water gives an insight into a dramatic love story whilst at the same time portraying Native American culture in the 21st century. The movie plays with stereotypical assumptions and ideas about Native culture and puts a Native lens on them, such as the commonly used saying “crying Indian tears”, which is used to refer to the act of crying for no real reason in many Western cultures and can be translated, for example, with the Austrian saying – “Indianer weinen nicht/Ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz”. When Frankie visits one of his friends for the very last time and they part, the camera zooms into his face and the viewer can watch his emotion unfold. Also, the focus is put on one tear coming down his cheek. Thus, the commonly held saying of “crying of Indian tears” that manifests stereotypes, is addressed and reversed in this scene.
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Figure 3: Barking Water (2)/ Frankie and the white man looking at the scenery
Figure 4: Barking Water (3)/ Frankie and the white man smoking
When Frankie is in pain, Irene stops the car, lays him down in the grass and tires to soothe his pain. The land she lays him down on land belongs to a white man who then comes to check who is on his property. The interaction between Frankie and the white man addresses stereotypical notions of Native American culture and history and converses them. It is the notion of opposition between white men's culture and Native American culture that is still
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors perceived as valid in contemporary society that is played with in the scene. When Frankie and the white landowner first interact with each other, the white landowner points a gun at Frankie and Irene for “being on his land”. After learning about the critical state Frankie is in, his temper softens, and he offers Frankie marihuana to soothe the pain. As they both smoke marihuana, they enjoy the view of the land and while the white man tells the story of how he inherited this land from his father, Frankie tells him how his ancestors are related to this land. Both stories and the view of the land seem to have a rather forgiving character - Frankie does not mention the genocides or land stolen from his ancestors by white settlers, the white landowner does not particularly claim that this land is his very own. Also, the symbolic act of the white man passing the joint to Frankie can be taken as a reference to the idea of the pipe of peace that, in numerous tales, Native Americans have been passing on to white men.
Figure 5: Barking Water (4)/ modern agriculture destroying Native land
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Figure 6: Barking Water (5)/ three friends watching the sun go down
Land and stolen lands are central themes when Native American culture and history is present in film. The Western lens on how Natives perceive their relationship with the land of the USA is of course different from the Native American perspective and the lens moviemakers put onto it. In Barking Water, the Native American relationship to land is portrayed as multi-facetted and mainly takes on two viewpoints - first, that of grief over the loss of it, but also that of appreciation and value. Image 5 is taken from a scene where the viewer can follow Frankie and Irene driving through the land, philosophizing about what the contemporary way of living is doing to land and how it disrupts the balance between nature and mankind they both have grown up to believe in. While Irene holds on to values taught to her by her ancestors, Frankie wants her to accept the change that has come along and not mourn over the past, even if both are aware that modern agriculture is in fact destroying nature. Image 6 shows how Frankie, Irene, and a friend of theirs watch the sun go down over the land they grew up on. Barking Water, in many scenes of the movie, addresses the opposition between valuing the land one is on as opposed to mourning over the land that was stolen and exploited to meet the needs of modern agriculture.
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Figure 7: Barking Water (6)/ Irene washing Frankie’s face
In most cultures, death is addressed through rituals and certain belief systems, and so it is in Barking Water. Throughout the movie, Frankie encounters horses. Those horses symbolize death and relate to a meeting with friends, where Frankie is told - “If you see a white horse, you need to hurry.”, suggesting that the white horse symbolizes the coming of death. Also, when he dies, in the middle of a story Irene is telling him, Irene, after a moment of shock and terror, stops the car and washes his face. The symbolic washing of the dead body is a ritual that is common in most cultures and not necessarily attributed to Native American culture. Such scenes demonstrate, especially to the Western viewer who tends to see an automatic opposition between the Native culture and his/her very own, that there is, in the face of death, a certain connectedness between different cultures.
Resume An understanding of Native American identity in the 21st century is as well an understanding of the mechanism of a past colonialism that led to contemporary cultural hybridity. Such an understanding of an ambivalent cultural identity that is marked by a blending of the Anglo- American cultural influence and the Native American cultural heritage is also one of the central claims of postcolonial theory (Kerner, 2012:125). In Barking Water, this notion of postcolonial theory is supported through, on the one hand, a display of religious hybridity as an outcome
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors of colonial missionizations, but as well through a play with Western stereotypes portrayed through a Native lens, as opposed to the Western gaze the Western viewer is used to, which supports Knopf’s (2008) notion of a decolonization process of the Western gaze through which a Native lens is established.
5.3.2 Give Back History
Decolonizing history entails the opening of historical discourse to a non-Western perspective. While history books in the Western world, for example, used to glorify Christopher Columbus for “finding” America, it is very clear that land that was already inhabited cannot be “found”. If the story were to be told by Natives, one would surely encounter a different account of Columbus and 1492. The history that is to be encountered in the Western hemisphere is a history shaped and framed by imperialism and colonialism. In this recounting, America has taken a special role by defining itself through a belief system in which their right to land is God- given and by presenting and living the idea of Manifest Destiny, by calling itself a city upon a hill, all eyes upon them: The American experience, as Richard Van Alstyne makes clear in Rising American Empire, was from the beginning founded upon the idea of an imperium - a dominion, state or sovereignty that would expand in population and territory and increase in strength and power. There were claims for North American territory to be made and fought over (with astonishing success); there were native peoples to be dominated, variously extraminated, variously dislodged; and then as the republic increased in age and hemispheric power, there were distant lands to be designated vital to American interests, to be intervened in and fought over - e.g. the Philippines, the Caribbean etc. Curiously, though, so influential has been discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism, and opportunity that “imperialism” as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of United States culture, politics, history. (Said, 1993:8)
As Said suggests, a notion of imperialism in US history only became present very lately, which means that before such notion, the discussion of how America got to be America historically was not based upon the brutal genocide or stealing of the land, but rather centered the “heroism” of the colonizers. In the representation of such historic events in movies, there has been a tendency of making the American the hero, who, according to the idea of Manifest Destiny, is destined to inhabit the land he is on. The Native American perspective and/or trauma, on the other hand, has not been written into American history books and has not been part of Western historical discourse. That Thanksgiving has been declared a national mourning day for Native Americans gets very little presence in US media as opposed to the celebration of the American holiday, for instance. Native American history, within the U.S context, used to be systematically excluded from American historical discourse.
To demonstrate such problematic historical discourse with an example (Edmunds, 1995: 721): The American Historical Review, an American academic history journal which was founded in
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1895, did not include Native American historical matters in the first ten years of its existence. Also, when historical inclusion of Native American contributions to U.S history slowly started to begin, what was reflected on was mainly American ideas of a destined right to land rather than a Native American stance on the events that led to the foundation of the country. Taking the American Historical Review and its reflection upon the Native American part in American history as an example, it becomes clear that history is always framed by the perspective of those in power of writing it. It was not until the 1960s, informed by the civil rights movement, that considerable change came (Edmunds, 1995: 724). Interest in minority groups and those groups’ different takes on history, a history that was colonized all through and through, sparked. It was then that an eager interest in Native American history, pre-Columbian and post-Columbian, became central to scholarly discussions, mainly encouraged by the Red Power Movement. Up to that point, and even today, most writing that produces knowledge is Eurocentric writing, writing that is informed by and based on Western ideas and thoughts (Said, 2003:18). Hence, Edmunds (1995:726) suggests that to understand Native American history, there is the urgent need to as well change methodology and epistemology, since unless one changes those principles, the history that is written will again be the white man's history of Native Americans. One such approach to history emerged in the 1950s and was referred to as ethnohistory, which according to James Axtell (in Edmunds, 1995:725) is - “the use of historical and ethnological methods and materials to gain knowledge of the nature and causes of change in a culture defined by ethnological concepts and categories.” The aim of such an approach is to give voice to Native American perspectives on history and to employ an understanding of non-European cultures to historical analysis. Methodologies of ethnohistory are as well employed in the approach of New Indian History that seeks to center the uniqueness of Native American culture and cultural patterns (Edmunds, 1995:725). The point that such a new approach to history proves is the need to not only let non-Western voices enter the recounting of history, but as well the need of a change in methodologies and epistemologies in doing so. A change of the current patterns of knowledge production, may it be history or other fields of institutionalized knowledge, also supports the general claim of a knowledge, or rather knowledges, that shift away from the Eurocentric production of discourse - “Postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the long course of the anti-colonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both within and outside the academy, should take such other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west.”(Young, 2003:20). Postcolonial historical writing as suggested by Reinhard (in Kerner, 2012:43), aims at, first of all, not only the reflection of Eurocentrism in historical discourse, but also at the creation of a discourse of history that displays the complex relationships and demands of colonial as well as postcolonial historical writing, and takes those colonized seriously in history, as subjects with agency. Also
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Said (1993:3), in Culture and Imperialism, supports the idea that an understanding of the present is very much influenced by how history, or the past, is formulated.
The mentioned knowledge production and discourse of history in terms of postcolonialism that was examined above cannot only occur within academia or scholarly discussion, but as well in movies which as a medium of mass culture are able to transmit different insights into historical discourse. A painful momentum in Native and Indigenous history that is specifically addressed in Rhymes for Young Ghouls is that of boarding schools that Native children were sent to fully assimilate to Western culture. History is very often mainly represented by the dominant culture, hence, the genocide or forced assimilation of Indigenous culture by Western imperialists is in many cases left unaddressed or looked at from the historical Western lens. If one watches, for example, a typical movie belonging to the genre of the Western, one will be immersed in a world where the Indigenous person is dangerous to the white man but will not be able to partake in the pain of Native Canadian history.
Figure 8: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (1)/ flashbacks of missionizations
Rhymes for Young Ghouls tells the painful story of such schools from two perspectives. The viewer will, on the one hand, watch memories of Joseph unfold, but also see how, through Aila’s situation, the colonial past still affects the present. Since Aila’s parents both use drugs and alcohol to cope with their painful past, Aila’s current situation is as well affected by the coping mechanism her parents opted to use in trying to deal with their traumatizing past in Christian boarding schools.
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Figure 9: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2)/ Flashbacks of Aila’s father being abused in the monastery
Two ideas stand in opposition when one is to talk about the complexity of boarding schools on reservations - the Christian will to convert others against the Native American/Canadian perspective that is told only with rare frequency in popular, Western culture. As history is mainly informed by a Western perspective in Western discourse, what remains unaddressed is the pain colonialism inflicted upon Native cultures. Rhymes for Young Ghouls reflects upon this pain by presenting the viewer the past of Joseph who has survived the brutality of boarding schools. The brutal missionary approaches of the Christian church are hence portrayed from a Native perspective, showing how Joseph was forced to believe in Christianity and punished if he did not act according to the rules of the Christian church.
Not only does Rhymes for Young Ghouls show the painstaking moments the boarding schools put Native Americans into, but the movie also manages to articulate through its narrative that this past is still affecting the present, in the characters’ actions and choices and the situation of the main protagonist, Aila.
The discussion of the central theme of the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls, mainly the trauma caused by forced assimilation in boarding schools, cannot leave unaddressed the most current news concerning the historical discourse in the West, that made efforts concealing the Native lens on history. The very recent discovery of 215 remains of children being found buried near the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, again responds to the claim of historical discourse being a discourse influenced by the West. The death of those children, as mentioned in a statement by the Tkèmlups te Secwepemc community in British Columbia, was never documented, further affirming the claim that Western historical discourse leaves the
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors historical past and trauma of Natives unaddressed in historical discourse. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57291530)
Resume Movies are not only an option for presenting narratives or stories, but they also as well offer the opportunity of re-telling history, even a colonial history, through the Native lens. Since historical recounting has long only been told from the Western gaze, the Native lens in film confers the possibility of decolonizing such Western recounting, welcoming a Native view on history. Rhymes for Young Ghouls addresses the brutality of the forced missionization of Natives in boarding schools and by doing so offers the viewer a Native lens on a historical trauma that is left unsolved in mainstream Western historical discourse.
5.3.3 Native American Christianity
Christianity plays a key role in Barking Water and Rhymes for Young Ghouls and can, as a theme, not remain unaddressed. There are numerous scenes in which Native Americans practice Christianity, much to the wonder of the Western viewer to whom Native American religion and Christianity seem generally opposed.
Living in postcolonial times entails understanding the consequences colonialism in today's world. One of such consequences is the effect of missionaries who, during the time of colonization, set out to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Similar to African slaves who adopted the Christian religion and combined it with former religious systems, there are Native Christians as well. Native Americans have also taken their very own practices and stories and adapted them to Christian norms since colonial encounters. In a postcolonial understanding of society, what is needed, is a shift away from the idea that Christianity and Native American religious systems are generally opposed, towards an understanding that includes how Christian missionaries impacted Native American religion and how this becomes visible today, as McNally (2000) suggests. According to him, a shift of paradigm is needed, in a way that also allows contemporary society to understand the agency of Native Americans in the cultural change forced upon by colonization - “(...) acculturative studies by anthropologists, historians, and ethnohistorians drew needed attention to the very real violence of missionization, colonization and cultural change. But neither were they passive recipients of someone else`s historical actions, and herein lies the problem the structural forces of “cultural change” eclipse the historical agency of native people in their negotiation and renegotiation of culture over time.” (McNally, 2000:837). Also, McNally (2000) focused his research on hymn-singing to
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors demonstrate that Native American religions and Christianity do not necessarily oppose, but that a religious hybridity exists and is possible. Protestant hymns, for example, were translated into Native languages to forcefully integrate Christianity into Native religion and culture. The initial idea of such hymn translation was sparked by missionizations, but the translations persisted and remained - “But with time, the translated hymns took on a life of their own in the oral tradition. For many Ojibwe people today, the ritualized singing of those hymns, usually at all night funeral wakes, has become emblematic of they are as a distinctive people with distinctive values.” (McNally, 2000:841) Even if the example McNally provides the reader with, so how Ojibwe integrated Protestant hymn-singing to their tribe-specific practices, is rather limited to only one field, it demonstrates an important point in terms of a postcolonial understanding of culture and religion - mainly, that the traces colonialism left are still visible and responsible for cultural and religious hybridity. Cultural hybridity is an important focus of postcolonial research in Homi Bhabha, who suggests that within Western societies, a new understanding of culture needs to be established, one that focuses on the fact that national cultural identity, very much a consequence of Western colonialism, as a concept cannot be upheld and that contemporary cultural societies need to be understood as hybrid. (Kerner, 216:2012)
In Barking Water, Sterlin Harjo did portray ways of how Native Christianity is practiced today, without creating an opposition to the protagonists’ understanding of their Native identity. Much more, what is translated through central scenes of the movie, is simply that Western Americans live a different kind of Christianity than Native Americans. The viewer will learn to interpret Native American Christianity differently and reconsider the commonly held notion that Christianity and Native spirituality are opposed - a notion that as well fails to acknowledge the role of colonial missionizations in creating a religiously hybrid society.
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Figure 10: Barking Water (7)/ a Native man and a white man praying
Figure 11: Barking Water (8)/ Frankie and Irene silently praying
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Figure 12: Barking Water (9)/ Native symbols in the restaurant
Already at the beginning of the movie the viewer is to encounter a contact scene between Native American culture and Christianity. Frankie and Irene, right after escaping hospital, meet an old friend of theirs to be provided with dinner, since both struggle financially. With said friend is Mike, a white American man. As they are served dinner, the young acquaintances of Frankie and Irene suggest praying before eating - a typically Christian tradition. While the friends, however, seem to make fun of this tradition and exaggerate the prayer and its performance, Frankie and Irene sit in silence and fold their hands, which suggests a deeper connection to Christianity. What as well meets the eye of the viewer is Irene wearing a shirt on which the lettering Indigenous can be read. Irene hence marks herself as Indigenous, trying to transport her cultural identity to the outside, despite partaking in a Christian ritual. Also, during the performance of the prayer, the viewer is exposed to the surrounding of the diner which seems to be inspired by symbols typically ascribed to Native American culture, such as the rug on the wall that can be assumed to have been produced through Navajo weaving, one of the most important cultural traits ascribed to Native American culture. Already in this first scene that exposes one to a contact between Native American culture and Christianity, one is to experience no opposition but rather a hybrid form of how the two are in contact, by the way Christianity is lived by Frankie and Irene, but also by the way that the surrounding is structured and the Native American symbolism it holds.
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In fear or rather expectation of a death that is to come soon, as common in many cultures, also Frankie turns to spirituality to seek assistance. Again, in his turning to spirituality, the viewer will discover a hybridity of Native American spirituality and Christianity.
Figure 13: Barking Water (10)/ Irene practicing Native medicine
When in pain during a car ride, Irene tries to soothe the pain Frankie is in by using a ritualized healing practice, burning leaves over his body, and singing in their Native language that cannot be understood by the Western listener. The viewer will encounter that even if both are very familiar with Christianity, they also participate in their traditional, religious practices, hence supporting the idea that there is not necessarily an opposition between Native American culture and Christianity.
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Figure 14: Barking Water (11)/ Frankie and Irene visiting a Christian church
Shortly before Frankie dies, he begs Irene to take him to a church. He recounts the story of his childhood in which he tells Irene that his father always knew when one of the tribe members had died, even long before the church bells rang. This makes the viewer question the role of Christianity and the church in the Native American tribe Frankie grew up in. The question that is being raised by the recounting of such a story, is whether the church Frankie is referring to is still an aftermath of the missionaries during the colonial period. Also, the church that Frankie and Irene are visiting by his wish, is a church where Native Americans are holding the service in, again raising a similar question.
A central claim of postcolonial theory is that within contemporary society there is a need to shift from the concept of a homogenous national identity to an understanding that, as well due to the aftermath of colonialism, centers a hybridity of cultural identity and that cultural identities need to be understood as boundaryless (Kerner, 2012:127). Barking Water raises this question of a hybrid cultural identity, a consequence of Western colonialism, in terms of religion. Through portraying Frankie and Irene as the central characters, both participating in rituals of Christianity as well as of Native American culture, the viewer will be forced to question his/her own notion of opposition in terms of Christianity and Native American culture and will understand that in contemporary society, those two forms do not only co-exist but form a new hybrid as a consequence of the colonial past.
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Figure 15: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (3)/ Aila in the monastery
As opposed to Barking Water, Rhymes for Young Ghouls portrays the trauma that residential schools, whose main aim was conversion to Christianity, left upon Native Americans who were forced to visit such schools.
Anna and Joseph, parents of the main character Aila, are shown to use drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism for the trauma the abuse left upon them. Such coping mechanisms that affect Aila in her life as well again portray the complex situation of the aftermath that colonialism left upon Native Americans and how past abuse still affects present generations.
Resume In both movies, Barking Water and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, religion, both Native and Christian, is central for creating an understanding for the hybridity of culture and religion that exists due to colonialism. The demonstration and representation of this blending of both religions due to the colonial Christian missions sets focus on one important part of a postcolonial understanding of identity - the fact that, within the context of colonialism's long history, it is hardly possible to encounter contemporary Native culture untouched by imperialism and colonialism – a claim that Said supported already in 1993 - “(...) European imperialism still casts a considerable shadow over our own times. Hardly any North American, African, European Latin American, Indian, Caribbean, Australian individual- the list is very long - who is alive today has not been touched by the empires of the past.” (Said, 1993:4) Through displaying the ongoing influence Christianity has on Native cultures, a deeper understanding
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors for the still on-going effect of past colonialism on contemporary Native life and culture is generated and the colonialist past of the West is not simply abolished in media discourse.
5.3.4 Native Storytelling
As mentioned right in the beginning of this paper, a postcolonial approach does not only require a decolonized perspective, but rather or an opening of all spheres and fields of knowledge production to the practices and epistemologies of cultures that are non-Western.
Storytelling plays a vital part in Indigenous culture and spirituality and is, from the beginning onward, a key aspect to contemplate in Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls. In Native culture, stories are not just stories as in the Western understanding of the word but act out a leading role in knowledge production. Since some Native tribes were not literate until colonization, storytelling had a fundamental role for knowledge production and transfer. As there was no bible, to compare it to a similar Western example, there were, and still are, stories about the trickster figure that are passed on until present day and shape Native understanding of spirituality and the cultural self. Cultures that are not literate have a better remembering of stories since oral traditions are centered and details and chronology need to be remembered instead of being written down - At the heart of “oral transmission”—and perhaps the writing that grows from oral traditions, as well—is the story and the memory of the story, but also the memories that change the story. (Ballenger, 1997: 792) The oral passing and repeating of such stories is what draws an important connection between past and present in Native culture - “While most contemporary American Indian writers are literate and Western-educated, many of them say that oral traditions - especially the act of remembering and repeating heard stories - inform their literatures.” (Ballenger, 1997: 792) Similarly, also Native filmmakers and their products are informed by Native culture and its practices, such as storytelling. Mekko starts with the protagonist’s voice, telling a story that was told to him by his ancestors and that had been passed on from generation to generation. It is a story in which he sees his current situation explained and reflected - “The merging of the tribal and the personal memory also means that the reach of the storyteller’s memory extends beyond his lifetime, her own experience. This memory of a past never directly experienced can, in a sense, become lived experience.” (Ballenger, 1997: 793)
This phenomenon of a past that becomes alive in present situations and is only known from storytelling, as described by Ballenger, is central in Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, since the main protagonists seek an explanation for their present situation in the narratives passed on to them by their ancestors.
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In Mekko, both Native American language and the cultural tradition of storytelling are a central part in forwarding Mekko’s own story. The thriller is built up around the narrative Mekko was told as a young child by his grandmother. It is the story of Estekini, the witch that apparently came to Mekko’s hometown and brought illness. As Mekko was the one able to foresee this, he, according to his grandmother, had the ability to tell the future. This story forms the narrative around which the main plot of the movie is built, since Mekko, when leaving prison, has visions of his own death being caused by a witch. His connection to storytelling does not only reflect in Mekko trying to explain his present through past stories, but as well on a linguistic level. When Mekko leaves prison and resides in Tusla, the audience hears him talk in English, whereas when Mekko narrates his past and the audience is exposed to flashbacks to his early days and his grandmother, the language spoken is Muscogee. Storytelling forms an important part in Indigenous culture in terms of its persistence in contemporary society. With numerous of the Indigenous languages extinct, one will realize that the logical consequence is that much of the oral literature that has been produced is lost as well. Portraying storytelling and Native languages in a movie is as well revitalizing language and cultural values that colonization endangered.
Figure 16: Mekko (1)/ First words of the movie Mekko
Estekini, according to the oral tradition, is a witch that brings death and illness. When Mekko leaves prison, he joins a group of homeless Native Americans, one of whom is a friend of his from the past. Here, he again encounters what he considers to be the witch in the form of a man who is part of the group of homeless. More and more murders seem to happen among the group of homeless that Mekko is part of, aware of the danger that comes Estekini. Mekko
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors and his friend are then beaten up by the man who Mekko considers to be the witch and while Mekko hardly survives, his friend dies. Mekko, being influenced by the narrations his grandmother used to tell him as a child, uses the knowledge he obtained from those to assess and evaluate possible dangers in his life, which again proves the potential in terms of knowledge production of Native storytelling traditions.
Figure 17: Mekko (2)/ close-up of the witch
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Figure 18: Mekko (3)/ Mekko after killing the witch
As Mekko, as opposed to his friend, does not die after being beaten up by the witch, he is tracked down by him. In a final encounter, where he can kill him, he as well remembers that to fully destroy the evil forces of the witch, the heart needs to be cut out, something he eventually does as well, realizing that after leaving prison he did not see the foreshadowing of his own death, but that of the witch.
Figure 19: Mekko (4)/ Mekko imagining his friend who died
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Figure 20: Mekko (5)/ Mekko coming back to the house he grew up in
Not only for the interpretation of his personal life, but as well for his spirituality, his mother tongue as well as his vivid memory of the stories his grandmother used to tell him play a tremendously important role for Mekko.
Shortly after his friend dies, Mekko, who has become sober due to his time in prison, starts drinking again. Waking up the next day, he is desperate and goes to the river where he imagines his dead friend listening to him while he tells, in his Native language, the stories his grandmother used to tell him. He uses the stories here to make sense of his life and the tragedies that happened to him.
At the end of the movie, Mekko drives back to his hometown and revisits his grandmother’s old house where he again finds strength in her words. Storytelling and the use of Native language in Mekko serve as a source of strength and a portrayal of Native American knowledge production and persistence that Western cultures have not been aware of.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls centrals storytelling as a Native American cultural trait as well. Aila’s story is accompanied by her grandmother’s narratives that she passes on to her. It mainly revolves around the story of a wolf who walks through a deserted and polluted modern city, which as well critiques Western economy that puts profit above environmental ethics. The wolf then encounters a group of dead children hanging from a tree - this narrative refers to the children forced to go to residential school to convert them to Christianity. As the wolf then eats the children, before he ends his life by eating himself, this could as well be considered an “eating up” of Native spirit in such schools.
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Figure 21: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (4)/ animation of a story
Aila uses the idea presented to her by the narrative her grandmother told her, the idea of a world that is so polluted that no one can breathe, as an idea of how to mask herself when working in the business of drug deals. The idea of masking again refers to another important Native figure in storytelling - the trickster. Like Aila’s decisions, such as drug dealing, also the trickster figure is neither moral nor immoral in his decision making, but rather referred to as an amoral figure. The trickster figure, like Aila in the scene presented, is a master of shape shifting and masking, not to be recognized by anyone who is not familiar with his tricks.
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Figure 22: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (5)/ Aila covering her face during a drug deal
Figure 23: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (6)/Aila dreams of the past
When Aila is in residential school herself, she has visions of the narrative her grandmother told her and even encounters the dead children, whom she was told about, in her vivid dreams. The stories and narratives that are hence passed on to Aila, both influence her perception of her surroundings and give her a knowledge and interpretation of situations that is not to be understood for those who have not been passed the knowledge of certain stories. Thus, storytelling serves as a non-Western system of knowledge production that equips Aila with an understanding of the world and the situations she finds herself to be in.
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Resume As mentioned by Young, understanding a culture other than one’s own, does not only mean to be informed about it, but rather that, in postcolonial theory, different methods of knowledge production that are thoroughly informed by the culture in question will need to find their way into research. One such method of knowledge production and transmission in Native American culture is storytelling. Being viewed as a major vehicle of knowledge production, storytelling needs to be understood as a Native episteme that was used to transmit greater knowledge to future generations. Mekko as well as Rhymes for Young Ghouls use storytelling to display form of non-Western knowledge production, through letting both protagonists being shaped by those stories. Aila as well as Mekko, use the knowledge gained through storytelling to make decisions and as guidance in times of difficulty.
5.3.5 Native Language
It is estimated that by the time Columbus arrived in America, over 2000 Indigenous languages were spoken on the continent. Due to systematic genocide, only 175 of those languages survived in today`s American society. Without preservation movements, it is estimated that only 20 of those will survive until 2050, since up to seventy percent of Native society grow up speaking English only. Also, most of the Native languages that are spoken are spoken by less than 1,000 people. (www.babble.com) Hence, most of the languages are close to going extinct: The precarious circumstances of the world’s Indigenous languages are by now well known: of 6800 languages currently spoken in the world, not only are more than half at risk of extinction by the end of this century (Romaine 2006: 441), but approximately 95 per cent are spoken by less than five per cent of the world’s population (May 2001: 2), mainly Indigenous languages and speakers. Meanwhile, more than half of the world’s states are officially monolingual, and less than 500 languages are used and taught in schools. Not only the survival of Indigenous languages is precarious, but also especially the survival and economic viability of their speakers in national contexts where educational systems massively fail Indigenous people, closing them out and leaving them illiterate and oppressed in their own land (Kamwangamalu 2005). (Hornberger, 2008:1)
However, despite the precarious situation most Indigenous languages seem to face, Native languages and their active use as well as promotion are considered an important tool in expressing and preserving a culture and cultural identity and continue to be used and spoken. Franz Fanon, who is considered as one of the most influential theorists in postcolonial theory, considers Native languages to be one of the most important factors in terms of a cultural heritage that survives colonialism (Kerner, 2012:117). According to him, the use and survival of a language is also an act of resistance against the white colonial mindset, since through language one is able to express not only thoughts, but as well belonging to a certain culture and its epistemic community (Kerner, 2012:117).
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In each of the three movies, Native languages are used to signal a belonging to culture and ties to the past, but most of all to signal that culture is maintained and how the use of language is an act of resistance against complete assimilation to the culture of the colonialist.
Figure 24: Mekko (6)/ Mekko recounting his grandmother`s words
Figure 25: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (7)/ Aila talking to her grandmother
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Figure 26: Barking Water (12)/ a friend of Frankie passing on spiritual knowledge
In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, it is Aila’s grandmother who refuses to speak English and uses her Native language only. Thus, as being passed on to Aila, the Native language survives in a world where almost every Indian has gotten used to using English, even within the reservation. The use of English as a major language within the reservation also addresses the problem of why the numbers of Native languages are steadily decreasing, since they are only very scarcely passed onto future generations.
In Barking Water, both languages are used in every meeting along Frankie`s way. While English, however, is mainly used to talk about day-to-day business and concerns, knowledge and prayers are solely passed on in the Native language. Using the Native language to demonstrate cultural connection as well supports Fanon’s claim that the use of Native language helps to preserve a cultural identity that cannot be expressed through English.
In Mekko, Native language is used from the beginning onwards, mainly during flashbacks when Mekko informs the audience about his life and struggles and the knowledge his grandmother passed on to him. Mekko does not render his life in the English language, the language of the colonist, but in his mother tongue, which showcases the double identity that colonialism has forced him into individually and culturally, since, in his everyday life and among Native friends, it is the English language that is used.
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Resume In each of the three movies, language is a vital part in expressing the Indian identity. As already mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, according to Fanon (Kerner, 2012:117), the use of language is essential in terms of a colonial identity practice. Using a certain language as well means “to take a culture upon oneself, to carry the weight of a civilization.” (Fanon, in Kerner, 2012:117) In colonized countries, those who lost their language and used the language of the colonizer instead, lost a part of their cultural identity. Hence, using Native language means maintaining a cultural identity that would otherwise be lost. While in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Aila’s grandmother is the only one to talk to her in their Native language, in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Mekko and Barking Water, language is used to symbolize a cultural connectedness and used in situations where specific cultural traits are shared.
5.3.6 Social/Economic Situation
To portray Native American contemporary life, portraying the socio-economic status that the colonial legacy has caused is imperative. Native Americans are living under one of the harshest conditions of ethnic groups in contemporary USA society. It is a matter of fact that Native communities are among the poorest ethnic/racial groups in Northern America, just to name a few examples stated by Belcourt-Dittloff (2007: 3) - “American Indians and Alaska Natives have lower incomes than the general population (...). The average AI/AN household income is $19,897, compared to the average income in the United States of $30,056. The unemployment rates reflect this reality and are consistently high on many reservations. Indeed, the unemployment rates are the highest of any ethnic group in the United States.” Not only is it essential to understand that the socio-economic status of Native Americans is rather harsh, much more so, it is crucial to understand why this is the case. It is of central importance to postcolonial studies to as well consider the socio-economic legacy that colonialism left in those parts of the world that were colonized. In terms of the Native American/Canadian situation, such an analysis might be harder to draw since, as opposed to looking, for example, at the influence France had in Alegria, in the United States of America, one is confronted with a whole nation that was established on stolen land and forced its Native population to live on land with little economic perspective.
Eason et al (2018) call attention to the fact that the precarious situation Native Americans find themselves in, in contemporary American economic and political structures, is a structural issue. According to them (2018:72), US policies actively prevented Native Americans from creating their own economic systems, involving education and healthcare, until, only in 1972, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act was passed. Also, such failures
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors of governmental action are often blamed on Native Americans’ inability to care for themselves and hence, further reinforce biased stereotypes. Similar to the economic situation, it is the legal system in the USA that meets Native Americans with biased stereotypes that are reflected in their actions - “A study of Native American individuals from seven states and eight tribal nations revealed that even when interactions with police do not lead to violence, police often use racial slurs or derogatory language (...) Native youth are 30 percent more likely than white youth to be referred to juvenile court.” (Easton et al, 2018:72) In the movies Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the viewer will encounter the main protagonists in precarious living conditions that are presented to be a structural problem caused by failed colonial policies and unresolved social issues rather than personal failure. Thus, an awareness for the insufficient governmental action to resolve Native American trauma is created.
Figure 27: Mekko (7)/ Mekko telling the story of his youth
When Mekko leaves prison, he has no place to stay and meets an old friend living on the street whom he joins. The group he joins, is a group of Native Americans that live on the street. Right in the beginning, the viewer is informed, by a voice-over, about his life story and why he ended up in prison. Apparently, Mekko used to drink heavily before he went to prison for killing his cousin. Why and how Mekko killed his cousin is never revealed. The information the viewer is provided with concerning Mekko’s personal life is information that calls attention to the precarity of the living conditions Native American communities face on reservations and how problems such as unemployment or substance abuse arise from such circumstances.
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Figure 28: Mekko (8)/ Mekko talking to a fellow homeless
Figure 29: Mekko (9)/ a group of homeless men queuing in front of a job center
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Figure 30: Mekko (10)/ a group of homeless Native women
The viewer will be informed that Mekko is in Oklahoma and that the economic situation is precarious for the general population. However, it is even worse for Native Americans - all the Native Americans he encounters live on the street, most of them also drink or use drugs to cope with the precariousness of their situation, again addressing the little perspectives offered to Native communities in terms of prosperity and education if opting or being forced to live outside reservations.
Figure 31: Mekko (11)/ a group of homeless Native Americans
The group of Native Americans lives in some sort of camp in the streets. Even if a certain kind of connectedness due to the shared economic precarity is portrayed, what is as well acknowledged is one of the most held stereotypes Native Americans are confronted with - alcohol addiction and substance abuse. Mekko, at first, refuses to start drinking again but he later breaks this promise to himself and drinks to cope with the freezing cold in the Oklahoma winter. The situations the viewer is to encounter Mekko in, raise awareness for the mentioned
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors economic precarity Native communities have to face as well as for the structural problem of failed political measures that created this situation.
Figure 32: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (8)/ Aila`s uncle preparing drugs
Rhymes for Young Ghouls features the same problem on Native American reservations - alcohol and drug use. Each person in the movie seems to cope with life and the harsh living conditions for Natives through alcohol and drug abuse. Also, Aila, the main protagonist, is part of the business of her uncle who is a drug dealer. Not only does Rhymes for Young Ghouls draw attention to substance abuse as a coping mechanism, but as well as an economic chance for prosperity since drug deals seem to be one of the only ways to make money on the reservations. The drug deals are not morally judged upon but rather portrayed as a way of persisting in an economic system that does not see a place for one and hence, sharpens the viewer's consciousness concerning the double standards Native communities must face.
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Figure 33: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (9)/ a fight scene with the police of the reservation
Besides, Rhymes for Young Ghouls focuses on the brutality and harsh living conditions for those who live on reservations. In the opening scene, Aila’s uncle and his friends are confronted with police brutality while visiting a strip club. Instead of a verbal confrontation, the Natives are ultimately confronted with physical violence from the police. Police brutality against ethnic minorities is a large systemic problem within the Western sphere that once again entered collective consciousness after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer on May 25th, 2020. As mass protests sparked all over the USA and Europa, one problem remained unaddressed by mainstream media - the systemic racism that Native Americans, and especially Native youth, is confronted with when in conflict with the police or US justice system, as put forward by Eason et al (2018:72).
Resume All three movies reference the precarity of the economic and social situations for Native Americans, portraying daily struggles as well as systemic poverty. In Mekko, the main protagonist, after being released from prison, is confronted with homelessness and little perspectives. The hometown he grew up in is abandoned, while his Native American friends in Oklahoma live under the harshest conditions. Aila, in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, also faces social and economic conditions created by colonialism. Both movies create an awareness for the situation and raise consciousness regarding the fact that the precarious situation most Natives have to face in terms of economic perspectives is a structural issue, created by unresolved colonial policies.
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5.3.7 The Resilient Native American Identity
Mekko, along his way, meets numerous fellows that are facing enormous difficulties and challenges in terms of their social and economic situations. Nonetheless, they seem to gather strength through shared values and cultural practices such as storytelling. They seem to bounce back from each individual trauma.
As discussed in the chapter above, the socio-economic situation of Native Americans in the 21st century is still marked by precarity and needs to be considered within a context that unmasks the influence of colonialism. However, there is also an element in Native American identity experiencing that is addressed by numerous scholars as well as Native Americans themselves and that strongly influences the reason of the cultural and economic persistence of Native American life- namely that of resilience. Resilience is considered a way of “bouncing back” after trauma, which in the case of Native Americans is a historical as well as a contemporary one, a coping mechanism commonly associated with Native American identity, or a prominent idea of how vulnerable groups deal with trauma. Dvorakova (2017) investigated 40 Native Americans from 28 mainstream universities and their experience of identity in a bi- cultural world. It has often been argued that bi-cultural scholars have trouble trying to live in two different worlds, being at pressure to keep their roots whilst at the same time culturally adapting to the environment one is in professionally. Even if the group of contestants in Dvorakova’s studies is rather small, she came across an interesting finding - Instead of feeling pressure to identify with only one worldview, the contextual, dynamic identities associated with the inclusive and flexible self-concept of tribal participants allowed them to in turn take advantage of two divergent cultural meaning systems pertaining to their distinct socio-cultural contexts. These shifts were experienced as not endogenous but rather exogenous variables, which did not cause the historically theorized issues. Participants felt their tribal identities instead facilitated meaningful integration of existing incongruences, which resulted in unexpected resilient subjective experiencing. (Dvorakova, 2017:1)
Also, Dvorakova finds resilience a coping mechanism of Native Americans, something that in this case even assists them in dealing with contemporary life whilst pertaining to their cultural roots. Resilience is also considered to be of more importance to Native Americans than it is to the rest of the population - At its heart, resilience involves the endurance and transcendence of human suffering. Within an American Indian population, resilience is believed to occur in a similar manner as the population as in general. However, particular elements and factors of this process are believed to be of increased importance for American Indians due to the communal nature of tribal cultures. (Belcourt-Dittloff, 2007:19) Dvorakova as well states that, compared to the rest of the population, resilience is a concept deeply rooted in Native American culture, hence naturally attributing Native American identity
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors as resilient. Also, for Native American youth and their experiences, resilience is understood as a concept that strengthens them in facing contemporary challenges.
This notion of resilience is also displayed in Mekko, since the movie contains the message that Native American culture is marked by a sense of “never giving up” and, despite all the challenges, a will to survive and face such challenges. Throughout the movie, this will to survive is part of the character of Mekko, but also transmitted through Mekko recounting his grandmother’s words.
Figure 34: Mekko (12)/ the words of Mekko’s grandmother who believed in the persistence of Native culture
Right in the beginning of the movie, Mekko, in a monologue, will let the viewer know how his grandmother always believed in the return and persistence of Native American culture. This belief she tried to pass on to her grandchildren, Mekko and his cousin. An important part of resilience is exactly this idea - the idea that one can return to his/her old state of being, despite going through a crisis.
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Figure 35: Mekko (13)/ Mekko and his friend after receiving popcorn for free
Even if they are homeless, and this life might be harsh, Mekko and his friend do not seem to be suffering, but to have the ability to perfectly fit into each situation and be flexible. His friend, for example, shows him how to get popcorn for free at the local cinema and how to deal with the conditions that are part of living on the streets. There seems to be a certain idea that is transmitted by all of this - the idea that Native Americans, no matter which challenges they and their culture are forced to face, will always be able to “bounce back” into their state of being, further supporting the notion that Native American cultural identity is strongly marked by resilience. Given that the resilience of the characters as well derives from the support of the community system they find themselves in, Belcourt-Dettloff’s notion that resilience in Native American tribes is linked to the “communal nature of tribal cultures” (Belcourt-Dittloff, 2007:19) is supported.
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Figure 36: Mekko (14)/ Mekko talking to a Native man in his hometown
Figure 37: Mekko (15)/ subtitles of Mekko’s words that signal resilience
The idea of resilience, which includes the idea of people being able to bounce back to their old state of being after trauma, is not only attributed to a decolonized Native American cultural identity but gives Mekko personal strength as well. After his own trauma and the killing of the man he perceives to be the witch, he decides to go back to the village he grew up in, to revisit his childhood memories. It is there he encounters one man of Native American heritage who states that he too did not leave the village, which is marked by a precarious economic situation, but stayed, with a strong belief in a coming-back of Native American culture and strength. Also, Mekko then regains his will to fight and to stay resilient, no matter which issues he might have to face in the future.
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Figure 38: Mekko (16)/ subtitles of what Mekko says in his mother tongue
Resilience is, as proven by numerous websites or TedTalks by Native Americans, an important part of their decolonized identity. Mekko closes with the important words - “They will be back. I have faith.”, further supporting the idea of such resilience. Those words are spoken in Mekko’s Native language in a final monologue addressed to his dead cousin, a monologue that revolves around Mekko’s faith in the resilience of Native American culture. Hence, there is the message for the Western viewer to understand this resilience as part of Native American cultural identity.
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Figure 39: Rhymes for Young Ghouls (10)/ close-up of the main protagonist after a fight, signaling resilience
In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, resilience as part of Native American identity is personified through the main character Aila, who, despite economic as well as psychological burdens, always seems to endure what is imposed on her through the value and belief systems she grew up with, such as the narratives told to her by her grandmother. This personification of resilience again supports Belcourt-Dittloff’s (2007:19) notion that Native American resilience is a product of the persisting cultural values, such as community.
Resume Both movies showcase resilience as a part of the decolonized Native American identity. Mekko is a production that specifies numerous aspects of contemporary Native American cultural identity, but also the struggles that their cultural life has had to endure ever since colonization. It cannot be denied that the Native situation in the USA is marked by a certain economic precarity that makes Native Americans one of the most vulnerable groups within contemporary USA. Rhymes for Young Ghouls personifies resilience within its main character Aila. Having to take the psychological burden of her brother getting killed by her mother Anna and by Anna committing suicide and her father taking the blame, Aila remains a strong character who does not seem to be traumatized, but rather gains strength. Also, Aila seems
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors to be coping with the economic precarity and brutality she faces on the reservation through the belief systems she grew up in.
5.4 Findings
As suggested by Knopf (2008:7), the gaze of the dominant culture leads to further stereotyping and reinforces binary cultural oppositions. To decolonize such a gaze in film and visualize Native identity as seen by Natives themselves, Native directors interact with colonial discourse and demask stereotypes created in Western media discourse to express contemporary Native identity. Kerner (2012:115) assumes that to understand a postcolonial identity, an awareness needs to be raised that shifts the perception of cultural binaries and focuses less on coherent, cultural identities that are seen to be closed within themselves and more on hybridity and the transgression of cultural boundaries that are a result of past colonialism and its policies of forced assimilation.
All three movies express such contemporary understandings of the Native self through thematizing numerous cultural traits and systems of belief and knowledge production and thus create an awareness for different levels of Native American identity in the 21st century. First, Native American culture is represented through a Native gaze, playing with stereotypical images of the past, such as the passing of the piece pipe that is reversed by a passing of the blunt from the white man to Frankie in Barking Water. What is as well addressed is the decolonization of historical discourse since most public discourse concerning world history is influenced by a Western gaze and thus forwards a Western view on historical events. Film offers the possibility of addressing events such as boarding schools that aimed a forceful conversion of Native Americans to Christianity and retell those from a Native perspective. Within this discourse of Christian missionaries and their influence on colonized cultures, what is thematized is an understanding for the transgression of cultural boundaries as a side effect of such forced religious conversions. In Barking Water, the viewer is presented with two protagonists participating in both Christian and Native American religious practices and hence representing a hybridity in their religious and cultural identity in contemporary society, whereas in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the devastating effects of forceful assimilation in boarding schools on reservations are portrayed. In the expression of Native American cultural identity, specific cultural traits are being represented, with storytelling being of special significance. Storytelling plays a vital part in Native American culture and spirituality and is of main importance in Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Since, before colonization, storytelling,
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors and the oral passing of stories from generation to generation were systems of knowledge transmission, Mekko and Aila make sense of the world through the stories they have been told by their grandmothers and prove that it is not only the institutionalized Western knowledge production that transmits and creates knowledge. The use of Native language in all three films analyzed signals a survival and persistence of Native culture, despite genocide and its use as well as revival of use is also a statement interacting with the Hollywood produced imagery of the Indian that for years failed to give Native American languages a voice in their productions. Another aspect that is addressed within the representations of contemporary Native American identity are contemporary struggles such as the precarious economic situation they face in reservations, being among the most vulnerable ethnic groups in the United States of America. Especially in Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, homelessness and drug abuse are thematized but within the background information of failed colonial policies that forced such situations upon the colonized. The fact that Native American culture persisted, despite all obstacles, is mainly addressed through the term resilience in contemporary discourse. Personified through the protagonist Aila in Rhymes four Young Ghouls, but as well displayed through Mekko’s beliefs and words (“They will be back. I have faith.”), resilience can as well be said to be a major part of contemporary Native American identity in the movies analyzed.
6 Future Potential
“As Native filmmakers, we have faced many struggles in our attempts to make films, competing for limited resources and struggling to overcome popular stereotypes that present us as unintelligent and refer to us in the past tense rather than as people who inhabit the present What really matters to us is that we be able to tell our own stories in whatever form we choose. This is not to say that whites cannot tell a good Native story, but until very recently whites - to the exclusion of Native people - have been the only people given the necessary support and recognition by society to tell Native stories in the medium of film.” (Singer, 2001:2)
Film is a medium of cultural expression. Such cultural expression used to be mainly dominated by Western filmmakers, portraying the other from an imperialist Western gaze that is vanishing only slowly. Due to the status of Hollywood in the film industry, it is the images of Native Americans generated by this industry that have influenced Western perception and negatively influenced Native/Native American self-perception. Step by step, the Western world begins to question the history of Pocahontas and the portrayal of Toto in Lone Ranger and Toto (2013) and opens discourse to a Native perspective.
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Films such as Smoke Signals (1998, Sundance Film Festival) have played a major role in proving that Native film can withstand elite film audiences (Singer, 2001:61) and paved the road for self-determined cultural identity expression in mainstream media. To discuss the future of Native American film, in terms of a cultural identity expression in mainstream Western media that is not tied to the Western gaze but operates through a Native lens, for this chapter, Austrian-Navajo filmmaker, artist and CEO Stefan Herbet Yazzie, as well as Charles Richard King, professor and anthropologist at the University of Chicago, have been interviewed. Answers and findings will be analyzed and through it, future perspectives will be discussed.
Stefan Herbert Yazzie is a Navajo-Austrian designer, filmmaker and visual artist, who, in the years from his childhood to his career in Austria, experienced an increase in cultural awareness but also the stereotypes and internalized racism he is still confronted with, especially in Austria. He is cofounder of the artist collective “Paranormal Unicorn” as well as CEO and co-founder of the creative collective “House of Bandits”. To shed light on future possibilities of Native filmmaking and art, but also to integrate a Native perspective to the questions raised at the beginning of this work, Stefan Herbert Yazzie was interviewed. The interview was held via Skype, due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Would you like to explain, first of all, your career path and what motivated you to your work and art and current or future projects?
I am Austrian - Navajo, and I have been in Vienna for the past sixteen years, before I lived in San Diego. My mother is Navajo, so my grandmother moved to California with her when she was a child. I hence did not grow up on a reservation which I do consider important to mention since not everyone is informed about the “modern Native” and there is a lot of culture that is not seen. I started my education as an artist but then did light and stage design in clubs and for DJs and expanded as well to filmmaking and graphic design as well as advertisement. Currently I am working for two companies, House of Bandits and Paranormal Unicorn, on different projects and in different fields. Also, due to the Corona crisis, we are currently working on expanding our live streaming capacities in terms of film and animation. Also, I am involved in activist projects, such as a fundraising for the Navajo nation as a Corona relief, which enabled us to raise 12,000 Euros. This was tremendously important since people in the West tend to overlook the fact that there are modern Native Americans affected by the modern crisis as well.
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Do you feel your own work as a filmmaker and designer influenced by your Native background?
Yes, very much, because also in one of my companies, we are working according to a Holarctic approach, which means there is no hierarchy as you will find in American companies and I was told that this, also very unintentionally, reflects my Native background. Also personally I try to mix the Austrian side of commercials, the American purpose for money and very much, my Native side, my purpose of art and doing what I love.
Being Native American yourself, has there ever been a moment, when you have been watching a movie, and felt misrepresented yourself? Or felt that what you are currently seeing is rather a white filmmaker’s perception of Native American culture than Native American culture itself?
Very much so. Especially as a kid, I felt like there is very little good representation. As a child I saw “Fievel Goes West” and I remember seeing the stereotype of Natives dancing around the fire and my mum tried to explain to me that not all representations are reality and that was the beginning of me realizing what misrepresentations are. Also, many Natives would mention “Pocahontas”, a movie that for me, personally, manages a more positively attributed representation. Especially when Natives are not the focus of the story of only further the plot of the white hero, the misrepresentation is particularly strong. Living in Austria, I also encountered a lot of ignorance, but the situation is different than in America, since there is so much distance to Native culture. I remember watching “Der Schuh des Manitu” and I believe it is a terrific piece of satire, but I am not sure whether or not Europeans get the satire or just again a misrepresentation they do not understand.
As your career developed, did you ever feel like you did have to face different obstacles or prejudices due to being Native American?
I am white enough to be recognized as what I call “cultural camouflage”, some believe I am Asian or Thai or even Turkish. In Austria, they have a lot of cultural fetishism concerning Native American culture and it's okay for me, since I do believe that, as opposed to the United States of America, people simply do not know better. In general, I have found that people are incredibly excited when they find out that I am Native, but I am also exposed to questions such as, and this was asked by a P.h.D - “Do you live in tipis?”. Also, the little understanding in the European world, I attribute to the fact that Karl May, for example, is still one of the most sold authors and his perception very much influenced this understanding of Native American
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors culture. Here, people have fallen in love with an idea or a concept of tribe that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. This also became very clear again during the Corona crisis, when Native tribes tend to be overseen by Europeans as a concept of the past.
Do you feel that over the past twenty years, due to increased cultural awareness, there has as well been a change for Native American art and film? A change in terms of a more inclusive industry of production (art and film)? Do you see more avenues open where Native American culture can flourish, as opposed to being undermined by Western approaches?
The internet and the reduced barrier entry to promotion and creation have greatly improved cultural representation. If you really want to understand a culture, you should use TikTok or closely observe the memes and references they are making. A lot of Native Americans have used TikTok to show culture without the white lens, created by themselves. The challenge where they first dress normally and then in their traditional clothing also shows their Western self, which is important for a cultural understanding in postcolonial, hybrid culture, since nowadays the culture is both. White people need to understand this. Not all Austrains wear Tracht all the time too.
Also, I am part of “IndigiDesignCollab”, where we rely on our system without the institutionalization of white men. The democratization of content creation is, however, of main importance. More traditional movies, you can see that the cultural conception has improved and it is slowly entering the minds of all that one thinks of other cultures informed by TV and movies.
What is it that you personally wish to see in terms of a more inclusive film and art industry in a postcolonial society? Where do you see Native American art and film in the future? Which doors are already on the verge of being opened and in which direction do you feel this will go?
For me, there are two main parts to this - 1) curation, 2) the democratization of distribution. Movies that tackle the more complex topics need funding, as they are not Blockbusters, so someone is deciding which movie gets this funding and which one does not and this is a problem for most minorities, as most of the panels that make such decisions consist of old, white men and this is, finally, now beginning to change and we are seeing more inclusive juries and festivals, such as the SUNDANCE festival. Who makes such decisions is affecting the future, it is a big decision - selecting the stories that are to be told. If you are looking at the
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The Native American Lens – Native American Identity Visualized by Native American Directors output of a festival, for example, over the course of ten years you can easily say who is making such decisions.
The second is the democratization of distribution. Most Native Americans have had problems with internet access and access to instruments needed for filmmaking. TikTok, as already mentioned lowers such barriers and gives us our own voices and the feeling that this voice can make a difference. Native Americans don't get lost anymore, especially young ones feel like now they have an avenue and a stage and this is going to inform others about a culture more and more. Instead of a movie at an independent festival, a TikTok video will have up to 1mio views. This is a new chance to make films and inform about diversity.
Is there any advice you can give to people who would want to follow a similar path?
I don't want to say something too cliche, but - Take racism with humor. The only way to achieve something is not to get offended. In America, you can say “You should know better”, but it's not that way in Austria. Lower one’s sensitivity so that you can play the role of the friend and informer. If one does so with humor, the other is more likely to learn.
When being asked about the future paths of Native American filmmaking, Yazzie mainly named one thing - the possibilities the internet, especially social media, have to offer. The internet and the free access as well as distribution of creations that it allows, opens numerous future paths for Native American filmmakers and artists in terms of a representation of 21st century Native American identity. Even if, as Yazzie also points out, TikTok might not be moviemaking in the traditional way we understand it, or are used to, it is still a diverse way of giving stage to Native American concerns and presenting their cultural identity, a way that develops to be a predominant tool for medial identity expression to younger generations. The latest trend on TikTok that Yazzie is referring to as well is a trend known as “Pass the Brush”, where Native American women, mostly in their teens or early twenties, show a transformation from their everyday outfits to their traditional dresses. This challenge underlines the hybridity of Native culture in the 21st century that cannot be understood without understanding the influence of colonialism and globalism. Since TikTok is a free social media platform and everyone can use it, not only for its entrainment effect but also to raise awareness on certain issues, Yazzie refers to this as the democratization of distribution that the internet and social media play create, since access is not limited according to race, class or gender and each concern is to be heard or seen.
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Also, curation is an important aspect to mention in terms of future developments. Those who are in power of deciding which movies are shown at a film festival or which objects are on display in a museum contribute largely to the non-Western embedding of cultures in an art world that is still largely dominated by Western values and aesthetics. Via the use of social media, a tool where access and distribution are not limited to curation processes determined by those in power, artists, film makers and those seeking to express contemporary Indigenous identity are freed from the limitations that usually go hand in hand with such processes.
Professor Charles Richard King from the University of Chicago is an anthropologist focusing on the topics of Race, White Supremacy and Gender as well as on contemporary uses and understandings of Indianness. King also agreed on the idea presented by Yazzie that for future discourses and expressions of Native American cultural identity, or cultural identity in general, social media will have a tremendous influence:
Social media provides a powerful portal for American Indians. Twitter and Facebook have intensified movements for social justice that have called for greater control over imagery and environment. Consider who protests the Dakota Access Pipeline used these networks or how opponents of mascots have used the hashtag #notyourmascot to mobilize many thousands of people, indigenous and otherwise, to call for change. Similarly, think about how the comedy troupe, the 1491s used Youtube to question stereotypes and offer alternative visions of indigeneity.
While in the past, cultural identity expression for Native Americans in mainstream media and film was largely dependent on curation and financial options, also regarding support concerning equipment, the variety of options the internet offers in terms of free distribution and medial expression lays future paths for Native Americans, especially for Native youth, to freely express and raise awareness for contemporary cultural identity. One of the best examples, as already mentioned by Yazzie, is the popular TikTok challenge “Pass the Brush”, a challenge where Indigenous women and men show themselves in their everyday life and then, in a picture swipe, in their traditional clothing.
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Figure 40: TikTok - "Pass the Brush" Challenge/ A Native woman changing into her traditional clothing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsI0gFuz3Lg)/)
Social media challenges like “Pass the Brush” aim at displaying and representing a contemporary Native and Native American character that is marked by, as Kerner (2012:125) points out, a certain degree of hybridity and deconstructs the Western perception of cultural hegemony, a cultural hegemony that since the rise of colonialism opposes the values of settler communities to those colonized. Eason et al (2018: 76) also support the notion that the internet and videos/images of cultural identity freely distributed through it have an enormous future potential in revisualizing Native identity: Similar video campaigns (including Buzzfeed`s “I am Native but I am Not…” and Arizona State University`s “Native 101”) and websites (WeRNative.org) showcase Native Americans resisting negative cultural ideas and offering more positive contemporary representations of Native people. Native-defined representations offer accurate, nuanced understandings of Native Americans that have always existed but have been obscured by biased portrayals created by non-Natives. As accurate images of Native Americans take hold they have the power to challenge harmful stereotypes and ideas about Native Americans and illustrate what is possible for them, breaking the cycle of bias and disparate outcomes.
Just like film productions, such short films/video clips express identity as being influenced by colonialism and cultural traits and costumes are presented without the influence of a Western gaze. Through the decreased need of curation and the democratization of distribution, however, the internet and online challenges as the one presented have the future potential of opening discussions of cultural identity and further initiate a Native American lens in popular media discourse. Especially Native youth, having been under the negative influence from
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Hollywood generated images and stereotypes for the past centuries, is profiting from this increased potential and is motivated to raise awareness towards their culture.
7 Conclusion
“As such, our films are more challenging to program on public television and are not programmed by commercial television stations largely due to the political nature of our stories, which force viewers to listen and watch “Indians” who are thoughtful, educated, provocative and funny. These images do not conform to the stereotypes that persist in films about Indians that have remained the norm.” (Singer, 2001:32)
Eason et al (2018) suggest that ideas and images about how a minority group is are always generated by the dominant culture - white America. Hence, a bias against Native Americans (Eason et al, 2018:71) is created, one that does not only influence Western understandings of Native American culture, but as well the culture’s self-perception. To overcome such biased ideas, Eason et al (2018:71) suggest the following - “(...) breaking this cycle, as Baldwin contends, requires that new ideas and representations defined by Native American people accurately reflect who and what Native people are, not who others imagine them to be.” Such understanding of change in representation that focuses on the value system of those marginalized also aligns with Young’s (2009) understanding of a postcolonial theory that, culturally informed by those cultures non-dominant, creates access and understanding of non- Western epistemologies and knowledge and as well with Knopf’s understanding of a Native lens that decolonizes the Western gaze through challenging such Western gaze by integrating its very own systems of knowledge.
For centuries the public, Western perception of Native American culture and identity has been influenced by broad generalizations created by mainstream culture, such as Hollywood. Such portrayals and misrepresentations of Native Americans that were little informed by contemporary Native experiences and interpreted Native American culture as stoic, past images, had negative effects not only on the Western understanding of Native American identity, but as well on Native American self-perception. Eason et al (2018:75), for example, pointed out that biased representations of Native Americans in mainstream media influence Western, institutional understanding of Native people as well as Native Americans perceptions of themselves, which results in Native Americans’ decreased self-esteem and “self-fulfilling prophecy that renders Native American accomplishments as invisible.” (Eason et al, 2018:147)
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The three movies analyzed reflect upon different historical moments and contemporary cultural practices in a way that the viewer contemplates mainstream cultures’ ideas of Native American culture and identity. A revisualizing of Native American identity that answers past representations and represents own understandings of Native American identity and contemporary cultural sovereignty is offered in all three movies, through the following representations and visualized cultural ideas.
First, in all movies there is a focus on the Native gaze that obscures the Western gaze of the past centuries and reflects upon contemporary Native identity and thus decolonizes biased understandings of Native Americans that have been popularized through mainstream media. Such a Native lens is reflected in the representation of historical events from a perspective that is not Western, as it is the case in popular historical discourse in the West. In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Christian missionaries in Native communities and their forced attendance of boarding schools is addressed and voiced through a Native narrative, being largely unaddressed in Western historical discourse. Also, cultural hybridity as a result of century- long colonial influences is addressed through the portrayal of religious practices that represent the contemporary Native experience as being influenced by Western understandings of religion, even if being part of and actively practicing Native American culture. While in Barking Water the protagonists identify with a blending of Native and Christian religious practices, in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the negative effects of a past that tried to force Natives to assimilate are portrayed. Furthermore, cultural practices principal for Native American identity, such as storytelling, are crucial in all movies. Storytelling as a form of knowledge production has been replaced by the Western culture of writing. Hence, addressing such an important cultural practice and its vital influence on the personal lives of protagonists, such as Aila and Mekko, conveys an understanding for the role different kinds of epistemes have for knowledge production. In all three movies, the protagonists’ Native language is used in situations of cultural identity expression which supports the notion of Fanon that the active use of Native languages is a main principle in preserving cultural identity. Since most Native languages within the Western hemisphere are endangered and in mainstream Hollywood productions, most Indians were either silenced or only given little to say in HIE, the active use of Native language can as well be considered an act of cultural resistance. It is a matter of fact that Native American tribes are within the most socially and economically vulnerable communities of the USA. This situation and vulnerability are, however, to be understood a result of colonialism that has forced Native communities to live on economically deserted lands for the colonizers’ very own profit. Mekko and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, in portraying the precarious situations of their main protagonists, build comprehension for the complex mechanism that forced Native communities into such precarity. Since, despite the numerous challenges,
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Native culture persists and resists, there is a strong tendency in self-identifying as resilient. The resilient Native identity is part of Mekko’s and Aila’s personality but is also reflected in their actions.
Even if film, as a medium of mass culture, that broadly influences our perception of the surrounding reality, has proven as a powerful medium in generating ideas of cultural identities, further research has shown that the future potential of a re-visualization of Native identity in film is the internet, especially social media. The rise of identity expression through social media also influences the expression of contemporary cultural identity and offers numerous people the possibility to publicly inform others about their culture - needing no equipment but internet access and a mobile phone - and thus furthers a deconstruction of the Western gaze. Both Stefan Herbert Yazzie and Charles Richard King state that the internet, especially social media, will influence the future of cultural identity visualization and change how information about a culture is accessed. Through the democratized distribution of visual material, such as images or short films published on the internet, the former burden of Western curation is abolished. Especially Native youth is benefiting from such possibilities of identity expression since it allows them to clarify that contemporary Native identity is not binary, not either assimilated or Native, but rather a hybrid cultural identity that has developed since colonialism. Thus, the stoic image of the Native American who is trapped in the past that has been created and distributed by Western media and broadly influenced both Western and Native American perception of Native cultural identity is challenged, and Native Americans are given new options of re-visualizing their own cultural identity from a Native American lens and deconstructing stereotypes. The active use of social media lays hence future paths to further develop and distribute such Native American lens and demonstrate the hybridity of contemporary Native American cultural identity and experiences.
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8 Bibliography
Movies
Barking Water (2009) Directed by Sterlin Harjo. Indion Entertainment Group. Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) Directed by Jeff Barnaby (Film). Les Films Seville. Mekko (2015) Directed by Sterlin Harjo (Film).
● Amad, Paula (2013). Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory`s Gift to Film Studies. In: Cinema Journal,52, No.3, Spring 2013, pp.49-74
● Ashcroft, Bill et al (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge: London and New York.
● Ballenger, Bruce (1997). Methods of Memory: On Native American Storytelling. COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 7, NOVEMBER
● Belcourt-Dittloff, Annjeanette (2006). Resiliency and Risk in Native American Communities: A Culturally Informed Investigation. University of Montana: Missoula.
● Bowman, Paul (2010). The Rey Chow Reader. Columbia University Press: New York.
● Cheyfitz, Eric. (2011). The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies. in: Interventions
● Columpar, Corinn (2002). The Gaze as Theoretical Touchstone. Women's Studies Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Looking Across the Lens: Women's Studies and Film (Spring - Summer, 2002), pp. 25-44
● Darian-Smtih, Eve. Postcolonialism: A Short Introduction. University of California, Santa Barbara.
● Eason, Arianne E. et al. (2018). Reclaiming Representations & Interrupting the Cycle of Bias Against Native Americans. in: Daedalus Vol. 147, No. 2, Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century (Spring 2018), pp. 70-81
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● Edmunds, David, R. (1995). Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995. The American Historical Review Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 717-740
● Emelobe, Emeka Dibia (2009).Filmic Representation in Postcolonial Discourse: A Study of Selected Film Texts. Department of Media Studies and Mass Communication : Western Delta University Oghara, Delta State, Nigeria.
● Hornberger, Nancy (2008). Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Macmillan: New York.
● Gandhi, Leela. (1998). Postcolonial Theory. A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press: New York.
● Gillig, Kelsie (2016). Representation of Native American Identity in the Films of the 21st Century: Is their portrayal authentic? Texas Linguistics Forum 59: 49-59 Proceedings of the 24th Annual Symposium about Language and Society-Austin April 15-16, 2016 (researchgate.net)
● Karp, Ivan and Steven D. Lavine (1991). Exhibiting Cultures. Smithsonian Institution: Washington D.C.
● Kerner, Ina (2012). Postkoloniale Theorien - zur Einführung. Junius: Hamburg.
● King, Charles Richard (2006). Media Images and Representations. Chelsea House Publishers: New York City.
● King, Charles Richard (2013). Unsettling America - The Use of Indianness in the 21st Century. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers: Maryland, USA.
● Knopf, Kerstin (2008). Decolonizing the Lens of Power - Indigenous Films in North America. Rodopi: Amsterdam-New York.
● Lonetree, Amy. (2003). Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native Americans in National and Tribal Museums. University of North Carolina Press: North Carolina.
● Marubbio, M. Elise, and Eric L. Buffalohead (2013). Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory. Lexington: University of Kentucky.
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● Barbara A. Meek (2006).“How!”: Representations of American Indian English in white public space: Language in Society, Volume 35, pp. 93-128
● McNally, Michael D. (2000). The Practice of Native American Christianity. in: Church History Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec. 2000), pp. 834-859 (26 pages)
● Mihelich, John (2011). Smoke or Signals? American Popular Culture and the Challenge to Hegemonic Images of American Indians in Native American Film. Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, Film and Video, pp. 129-137
● Pozanesi, Sandra (2018). Postcolonial Theory in Film. Oxford Bibliographies → https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo- 9780199791286-0284.xml
● Raheja, Michelle H. "Reservation Reelism" (2010). University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters 59
● Rollins, C. Peter & John E. O`Connor (2003). Hollywood`s Indian. The Portrayal of Native American in Film. University Press of Kentucky: Kentucky.
● Said, Edward (1993). Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Random House: London.
● Singer, R. Beverly (2001). Wiping the War Paint off the Lens. Native American Film and Video. University of Minnesota: Minnesota.
● Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Routledge: London; New York.
● Stoddard et al (2014). The Burden of Historical Representation: The Case of/for Indigenous Film. in: The History Teacher: Vol.48, No., pp 9-36
● Young, Robert J.C (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
● Young, Robert J.C (2009). What is the Postcolonial? in: A Review of English Literature, 40:1, p. 13-25
8.1 Online Sources
Koyfam, Steph (04.10.2017). What was and what is: Native American Language in the US. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/native-american-languages-in-the-
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BCC ONLINE (30.5.2021). Canada mourns as remains of 215 children found at indigenous school. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57291530 (31.05.2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsI0gFuz3Lg (05.04.2021)
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