ALL THOSE WIND-INDIAN MOVIES

“Windwalker,”  “Windrunner,” “Windtalker” -- we seem to have an inborn idea that the wind and the indigenous population of these American continents are connected.  If you google “movies about native americans” you’ll get a banner across the top of your screen that notes a long sequence of various kinds of movies from cartoons to serious indie films by and about indigenous people:  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/11/28/11-essential-native-american-films-you-can-watch-online-right-now-158052  They come and they go, stirring our hearts and our hair, leaving us with impressions that are unique or stereotypical or mixed.  Some capitalize on nakedness so there’s always a little thread of sex running through it.  Sometimes there’s the equivalent of dietary fat and sugar -- movie violence justified by revenge.  No one shuts that off.  Then there’s the red meat of combat when warriors get to be warriors again.

“Windstalker,” “Windmocker,” “Windwriter.”

In this windwelter of possibilities it would not be smart to show to kids a movie you hadn’t previewed, whether your own or someone else’s at school.  But here are two films, very different from each other, that are mostly valid and probably won’t make trouble.  

“Windwalker” (1980) is an earnest, idealistic, traditional story in which the only political complaint is that the main character, an old man tipping in and out of death, is played by a white man -- not just that but a well-known English actor, Trevor Howard.  Maybe he was thinking of Richard Harris in “A Man Called Horse.”  Harris was supposed to be a white man captured and assimilated by a tribe;  Howard was supposed to be a beloved tribal grandfather pre-contact.  Both Howard and Harris were highly honored actors, alcoholic, temperamental, and probably inclined to think of American tribal culture as more comfortable than their own constrictive English milieu.  “Windwalker” has all the elements of a primal, idyllic world that suffers and then recovers through heroic struggle with a Christian patriarchal god helping.   The scenery is glorious, though Hollywood can never resist displacing all tribes to SW red rock country. 

In Windwalker all the other actors, esp. the women and children, seem to be authentic enrolled people.  In fact, the comments on the sample on YouTube include a poignant memory from Marie Pratt:  “I'm so glad U posted this Movie. My dad was part of this Movie he played Crow-Hair. I was 7yrs old when this was made, we were on set the whole time.. My mom did all the translation for the Cheyennes.”  Around here, as  in much of the world, Hollywood is the Eden of the imagination and the ground of fulfillment.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afuTRJ89xTc

I think this is Ramus.

But the public is fickle and, anyway, Hollywood “Indians” are not much like the real people who have that legal claim.  The same people who embrace Sherman Alexie have never heard of the successful main figure in “Windwalker.”  Here’s his “wiki.”  “Nickolas G. Ramus (September 9, 1929 – May 30, 2007) was a Native American actor, best known for his appearances on television. He was a Blackfoot. He appeared as Chief Lost Eagle of the Arapaho in the miniseries "Centennial", Red Cloud in "Son of the Morning Star," the 1993 TNT film Geronimo.  He played Gus Nunouz in the soap opera "Falcon Crest" and Chief Black Kettle in "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." Other TV credits include: "Gunsmoke", "Little House on the Prairie", "Northern Exposure", "MacGyver" and "Walker, Texas Ranger".  He appeared briefly in the film "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and in the comedy film "Love at Stake" as Chief Wannatoka. He died on May 30, 2007, age 77.    

If he was Blackfoot, he must have been Canadian or from the diaspora, which is pretty likely on the Pacific Coast because of WWII relocation.  (Means is from that group.)  In Canada there is much better support for First Nations theatre so many fine actors begin there.  This is the debut movie for Bart the Bear, a grizz tame enough to act.  He’s gone now but his descendants still appear in films.

Russell Means, in old age

“Windrunner” (1994) about a contemporary boy who plays football, is never mentioned in any of the relentless publicity for “Smoke Signals.”(1998) (It included a sensational attack on Nasdijj who had nothing to do with movies.)  In fact, “Smoke Signals,” a contemporary account of a stigmatized tribal boy, echoes “Windrunner” quite a lot.  This is the flip of “Windwalker” since the people are all evidently white except for the mystical alpha Indian Russell Means.  In real life no one ever takes on Means, the real life American Indian Movement activist since 1968, who began acting in 1992.  He was a violent man with little restraint.  He published his autobiography “Where White Men Fear to Tread “in 1995.  His wiki is at variance with any notions of him being a wise and peaceful old man, but he was prominent enough to get a movie funded and very willing to participate in a glamorous version of himself as the wise ghost of Jim Thorpe.  It’s almost a version of “The Indian in the Cupboard” except that Means was no toy and he had no use for cupboards.  

Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder, an activist and good friend of Means, plays the mother in the film.  She’s also one who has struggled with stability.  In Montana we know her as part of the community around Peter Fonda and Tom McGuane in Livingston.  Her wiki is rather sensational but she remains appealing.The same is true of Amanda Peterson, the vanilla heroine of “Windrunner.”  After much tumult, including religiousity, she died young of an overdose of a prescribed drug.  The plot of this movie includes two fathers in prison, which is what draws the hero and his girl together.  Jason Wiles seems to have done well in real life, turning his hand to production and other backstage roles.

These two movies, so very different, address the conflicted and confusing lives of people who truly suffer and deserve both understanding and reparation, though their experience has sometimes made them so difficult to deal with that their actual careers -- outside the edited and idealized plots of movies -- have been roller coaster rides.  Those who are outside the communities of reservations and Hollywood, apart from political movements that are sometimes violent, can get very much misled about realities.  These two movies will not disillusion anyone, but neither are they disturbingly extreme.

Dutch Lunak, at left, with Bud Connelly, JC Augare and Scotty Augare 

on location north of Santa Fe, working on "Appaloosa"

This reservation has supplied stunt riders, notably Dutch Lunak and his crew.  This story in a local paper is a good reality check.  

http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/glacier_reporter/news/article_5b039cad-f685-58dd-affc-f9c2d74f3461.html?mode=story   These are people I know: practical, hard-working, raising families.  They’re only famous among the people who count -- friends, employers, co-workers.  I’ve known them a long time.  Maybe one of Dutch’s daughters will write a book.  People who work with large animals like horses can’t fake what they do and must know their limits. 

During the AIM years one of my Blackfeet students did a summer internship in Minneapolis with the main office.  That fall I asked her what Means was really like.  “Oh, he’s just a big old street Indian,” she said.  But he still needs to be part of the story because it’s about EVERYBODY.  Not just Indians, not just idealized heroes.

THOUGHT ARROWS LEAVE US QUIVERING

At one point it was suggested that we could reconcile cultural differences by making our central defining point the getting and spending like the fur trading posts so vital to the frontier.  After all, economics is what it’s all about.  (Too bad we can’t seem to figure out what economics is about.)  So now the Global Ferengi have us in their grip.  The pirates win.  The most important and reliable news source is “The Economist.”

The Internet was thought to be a way to get us all talking to each other, therefore understanding each other and transforming the world.  But what does a resentful snide little high-heel wearer with the mental equipment of a 7th grader have to say that isn’t the online equivalent of her slam-book?  (A slam book is one that assigns a coded page to a frenemy and invites other girls to write accusations on it.  It’s semi-anonymity.  Like the Internet.)

What I’m talking about is a phenomenon of print -- the line of the sentence is the shaft of the arrow.  Those who can write a piercing sentence that matches straight logic with a smooth rhetorical shaft are those that kill nonsense.  Of course, there are always the feathered fletchings of religion -- plucked from angels, no doubt.  And the nock of the author’s fingers on the pen.  I’d make up something cute about the “crest” but I don’t get what it is and don’t care enough to find out.  It’s just a simile and a bit of a parody.

The quiver contains “kinds” of arrows, usually relating to the academic history of nationalities.  Of course, those who have NO SUCH THING, because their language and heritage is oral, must resort to throwing rocks.  Nevertheless, there are interesting variations in the arrows:  The English ones are about the entitlements of hegemonies.  The French ones are about the suffering of the oppressed being bled to death.  (They admire de Sade and Saint Sebastian.  There’s also a strange cult about pelicans who feed their young from the wound on their side which is somehow connected to the crucifixion of Jesus.)  The German ones are about the sacrality of nature.  It’s hard to tell about the Italian ones because everyone is yelling at once -- or is that opera?

Now I’ll be a little more serious.  Many word arrows have been exchanged with North American indigenous peoples.  Most of them have become bent or broken by now.  The problem is that the peoples of any continent are not defined or shaped by their relationship to the whole continent, but rather by the various ecologies, which are the basis of the economies of survival.  This is true of everything from genetics to religion.  Fish-eaters to corn-raisers to bison-hunters.

The Big Empty

First Contacts with Europeans, who wrote everything down on their terms, was governed by “otherness.”  This was rooted in the unwritten native cultures, elaborated, definitive and place-based. Organic.  The Euros saw them as all alike -- a big mass called, mistakenly, “Indians,” who soon conveniently died and left an “empty continent.”  Everyone still thinks the prairie is empty.

These ideas are so potent that even teaching on a reservation in the Sixties one met whites who said, “Well, we only took the land because the Indians weren’t using it.”  (Using means exploiting.)  And only a few years ago when a law was passed requiring Montana schools to teach Indian history, a librarian said to me, “I don’t see why WE would have to study THEIR history.  There isn’t any anyway.”  It was again the hegemony of the written.  It was a puzzle to her how anything could exist if it weren’t in a book.  After all, her work was books, not stories told out loud.  (That was before the row of computers now in the library.)

The transition from oral to written has been a rocky one and often confused by the belief that certain cultures only write certain kinds of writing.  The early writing-down of Indian matters was done by helpful whites, often Victorian women or clerkly sorts of white men, who were influenced by Grimm and Anderson writing down the oral literature of Europe.  So “myths and legends” became the definitive genre of Indian literature.  But then the “scientific” -- well, “natural history” people -- came along, taking a great interest in material culture, and soon the whites had captured back through description the implements, the clothing, the shelters, in anthropological compendiums of the contents of museums or the paid reports of informants needing to feed their kids.

Young musicians playing for a wake.

In the meantime the “Indians” were going to government schools which intended to make them white, but instead created an underground Pan-Indian culture that is still carried along on the Pow-Wow circuit and the many political alliances of tribes, different as they can be.

You might know all this.  But have you considered the dilemma of a person who wishes to change cultures, the trans-culture person?  (Is that parallel to trans-gender?)  Adolf Hungry Wolf has an excellent Euro-education but a place-based lifestyle from the frontier between white and indigenous: a log cabin with a photovoltaic array to power his computer.  He is attacked from both sides, at least by those who cannot accommodate any sort of hybridizing, thinking of it as disturbing the order of the world.  Or maybe the diminution of their own power.  Remarkably, Adolf is peaceable about all this.  

Others are not.  One of the most interesting cases is Sherman Alexie, a bit of a misfit among his own tribe, who has managed to be on both sides by aligning himself with whites who romanticize Indians and believe they are a definable “something” in spite of being removed from the context that shaped their ancestors, but also aligning with the subcategory of Indians who resent having to conform to white hegemony and try to claim their molecular cell nucleus DNA trumps all environmental and cultural influences.  As time goes on, Sherman has to shift his target audience to a younger and younger demographic to keep his mockery from rebounding on himself.  

Sherman Alexie

Mocking whites who try to ennoble themselves by alliance with an imaginary “noble Indian” is to choose a soft target, mostly German, these days often female.  But Sherman has a hostage to the white medical establishment that tends to he and his son with their hydrocephalus.  They saved both brains.  But it means he has to keep the money coming and more whites have money than reds have.  Indians on reservations do not buy books, even his.  He gives respect and authority to whites and white publishing, enabled by political correctness, and dances to their organ-grinder tune -- not the drum.  

After all, his tribe bullied him and the other tribes only admire him now because he is a success in a white world, the way they want to be.  Wannabe-ing works both ways.  Dissolution of identity is not a happy thought, but the arrows puncture us right and left.  We are like the wounded buffalo, still running but destined to fall and rot.  The fish are dying in the drought the cities may cause, but everyone crowds into the cities.

Russell Means

There’s another influence: in the French-Algerian post-modern-influenced context, political correctness targeted governmental, academic and literary whites who soon discovered that the best way to avert disaster was to hire the troublemakers to be professors and actors.  Just don’t let them have any power.  In a while, they’ll discover what they thought was privilege and authority is nothing of the kind, and then they’ll go home.  

If you don’t dare fire popular individuals, in spite of claiming that the once accepted credentials are now worthless, don’t fund their department.  Native studies, queer studies, women’s studies, border studies -- whatever.   Asian studies . . .  are you kidding?  That’s where the MONEY is!  Do you want this university to survive?  And how do the now unemployed indigenous, mock or not, make their living?  What color was the parachute of the president of Harvard who was driven out of his job because he said that women were not like men, which enflamed the arrows of the hard-core feminists.

Is politics a living?  Is that quivering orgasmic?