Old Cowboys, New Indians Hollywood Frames the American Indian T.V.Reed

Old Cowboys, New Indians Hollywood Frames the American Indian T.V.Reed inds of change blew with cyclone force across the United WStates and across Indian country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the era when the most famous and infamous Red Power warriors, the American Indian Movement (AIM), had its heyday. These putatively “new” Indians challenged five hundred years of colonial domination by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for Native nations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation for the minerals exploited from reservations, and a renaissance of Native cultures. But it is important to say at the outset that, despite its name, AIM was not the Indian movement, but rather only one organization among many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other important Indian resistance groups preceded AIM by many years, ran par- allel to AIM, and continued after AIM’s rise and fall. AIM was far from universally loved in Indian country. To some they were true warriors offering a much-needed wake-up call. To others they were arrogant, disrespectful of tradition, and much too oriented toward white America. Their enemies admitted that AIM had a flair for getting the attention of WICAZO SA REVIEW 75 the mass media, and that attention is the subject of this essay. Specifi- cally, I want to examine how Hollywood has framed the American Indian Movement in a series of fiction films. As I consider the strengths and weaknesses of movies about AIM produced in Hollywood, I will be drawing information about the group SUMMER 2001 from various written sources, including primary documents, memoirs, and histories, and from two documentary films, all of which offer gen- erally better information than the fiction films. Indeed, I would not rec- ommend any of the films as the best sources of information about Indian radicalism. For that I would direct readers especially to the primary accounts given in Akwesasne Notes (newsletter) and to the sec- ondary analysis given in the first full-length history of the Red Power era, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior’s book Like a Hurricane.1 But the films are the most widely circulated texts about AIM, the ones reaching the widest audience of Indians and non-Indians. Thus it is important to examine what they have to say to folks who may not have access to other information on the Red Power era, especially young people who were not alive during the peak years of Indian radicalism in the sixties and seventies. My focus will be on three fiction films that deal to one degree or another with the AIM, and I’ll talk about each of them in order of release: Powwow Highway (1989), Thunderheart (1992), and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994).2 In addition to assessing and comparing each film’s strengths and weaknesses as a representation of the nature and aims of Indian radicalism, I will be asking some gen- eral questions about the possibilities and limits of insurgent groups trying to get messages across through mainstream media. While there is a small but thriving independent Native American documentary and fiction film community, no breakthrough to the mainstream has occurred such as that achieved to one degree or another by African-American, Latino, and Asian-American filmmakers.3 Racism and extremely high production costs have so far kept Hollywood-style films largely beyond the control of the economically poorest popula- tion in North America. This means that the filmed stories about AIM do not emerge directly out of the movement’s culture or even out of the Native community. AIM activists were involved to one degree or another in each of the three narrative films I’ll discuss, but in none did they have anything approaching full control of the final cinematic product. Given this fact, what occurred were various attempts by AIM members to influence a movie-making process in the hands of mostly sympathetic but culturally and politically limited white outsiders who were at best translating movement ideas and values, sometimes well, more often poorly. And these outsiders, mostly from that mythical land called Hollywood, were attempting this translation within a medium saturated with a history of racial stereotyping totally at odds with the 76 WICAZO SA REVIEW goals of the Indian movement. The AIM activists were trying to get their message out to a wider public whose political unconscious is, like that of the filmmakers, deeply shaped by the “cowboy and Indian” con- ventions of the Hollywood western. To further complicate this whole picture, I want to suggest that the real AIM activists and their real-life SUMMER 2001 opponents to a certain extent were acting out their own internalized Hollywood scripts from the beginning of the movement. And as we’ll see, from the start, for better and for worse, AIM was engaged in a battle over control of its mass-mediated image. AIM ING INDIANS IN NEW DIRECTIONS Before AIM was founded in Minneapolis in July 1968, with early leadership provided by Anishinaabe organizers like Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Mary Wilson, the leaders considered another name for the group. They were originally going to call themselves Concerned Indians of America. And while the acronym CIA certainly would have been a resonant one, the choice of “American Indian Movement” says a good deal about the genius and the presumptuousness of the group. Many observers and writers, including, most recently, Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith, stress the sense of drama and the orientation toward the mass media that was both AIM’s strength and its weakness. Warrior and Smith summarize the dramatic flair already apparent in AIM’s self-naming: [The name was] [p]erfect because it suggested action, purpose, and forward motion. Perfect because it was big, transcending the lesser world of committees and associa- tions and congresses and councils. Organizations had recording secretaries and annual dinners. Movements changed history. The initials—A-I-M—underscored all of that, creating an active verb rich in power and imagery. You aimed at a target. You could aim for victory, for free- dom, for justice. You could also, defiantly, never aim to please. Written vertically and stylized a bit, the acronym became an arrow. (127) Though they don’t say it here, it is clear from the rest of the book that Smith and Warrior also recognized that the name was more than a little bit arrogant. Imagine what would have happened if the Black Panther Party had tried to name itself the Black Power Movement, or if the Brown Berets had called themselves the Chicano Movement. AIM’s bold naming and equally bold actions certainly got it the attention it wanted, but in the process it did a disservice to those Indian resistors who came before it and those alongside whom it struggled in the 1960s and 1970s. WICAZO SA REVIEW 77 After initially focusing on providing various daily-life services to Minneapolis Indians and in working against widespread brutality against Indians by policing the police in a style inspired by the Black Panther’s campaign against police brutality, AIM extended its work to actions in white-dominated towns like Custer, South Dakota, that bordered SUMMER 2001 nearby reservations. In such towns Indians were routinely beaten, and sometimes killed, by local racist ranchers (an encounter with “real” cowboys that set a tone for later encounters). AIM successfully inter- vened in several of these disputes, forcing local law enforcement to work the cases and serving notice that Indians would not take such abuse any more. It was largely these actions that first built up an AIM following on the reservations. But it was AIM’s penchant for dramatic media events staged at sites of traditional, nationalist white power that spread the word of their brash style. For example, at Plymouth Rock, Massa- chusetts, AIM held an action challenging the Thanksgiving myth, offering evidence that white settlers were in fact giving thanks for a re- cent triumph in massacring New England Indians. A similar action was staged at Mount Rushmore, symbol of white desecration of the sacred Black Hills. Such well-publicized actions sparked AIM chapters all over the country, some totally unknown to the central leadership. AIM also played an important role, along with numerous other Indian activist groups, in the Trail of Broken Treaties car caravan that crossed the country from west to east in 1972. The caravan picked up various tribal contingents along the way and stopped at key sites representing the continuing impact of two hundred years of treaties broken by the U.S. government. The Trail of Broken Treaties ended in Washington, D.C., with an unplanned occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office. AIM members and others, with help from FBI provocateurs, sacked BIA headquarters, destroying and stealing documents and other government property. The trashing split the Indian community deeply, greatly increased the fame of AIM, and upped the ante of FBI surveillance and counterattacks against them. Whatever its limits as an action, the BIA trashing had great symbolic power to many young Indians who had felt themselves being trashed by Washington bureaucrats their whole lives. And to a nation whose most popular cur- rently circulating image of Native Americans was Indian actor “Iron Eyes” Cody weeping in a television commercial against littering, the image of young Indian warriors littering the BIA building with the bu- reaucratic detritus of two hundred years of broken promises was surely startling. But all this was soon overshadowed by AIM’s most (in)famous and dramatic action, the two-and-a-half-month armed standoff with law enforcement during the Indian occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in spring 1973.

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