Film and First Peoples

Creating Space for Change

by Cara Morton

There are many facets to the oppressive and racist colonial systems that exist in Canada and the United States. Guns, police, soldiers, laws, policies and economics can all be seen as tools of racial/cultural domination. More insidious weapons to this end are the mass media and the cultural products of Euroamerican society, such as painting, literature and more recently film. In their representation of Native peoples, these subtle tools construct images that misinform the general population and feed colonial mandates.

Ward Churchill states that literature - and I would say film - "replaces troops and guns as the relevant tool of colonization" (Churchill 1992, p.2). It does this subtly, through stereotypes and misrepresentations, until North American Native cultures have been

reduced in terms of cultural identity within the popular consciousness...to a point where the general public perceives them as extinct for all practical intents and purposes. Given that they no longer exist, that which was theirs - whether land and the resources beneath it, or their heritage - can now be said, without pangs of guilt, to belong to those who displaced them." (Churchill 1992, p.239)

The unequal relations between power sources and Natives "constitute an order which must be maintained, first, foremost and at all costs, because they more than any other definable factor constitute the absolute bedrock upon which the U.S. [and Canadian] status quo has erected and maintains itself." (Churchill 1992, p.9)

The perpetuation of stereotypes contributes directly to these unequal relations. As Maureen Mathews puts it, stereotypes are "the ideas that power up the system...they shape bureaucracies, and they make good-hearted people into destructive puppets" (CBC IDEAS, p.11). They "serve to maintain the status quo, maintain the position of the ruling elite, maintain the positions of the powerful over the powerless" (Winowna Stevenson in CBC IDEAS, p.22). This is achieved in two ways: firstly, stereotypes provide justification to the dominant culture; secondly, they push the already battle-weakened culture further into subordination.

Stereotypes begin with the construction of a general category to describe all of the members of a particular group. Hundreds of diverse groups of Native peoples have been lumped together into one general category: the Indian. This category denies the cultural diversity and erases the history of the hundreds of different Native groups within North America.

Most of us are aware of some of the stereotypes of Native peoples in film. Two of the most common images are the "Good Indian" and the "Bad Indian." (I have chosen to use the pronoun "he" due to the emphasis in film on the Native male). The "Good Indian," also known as the "Noble Indian" is characterized by the following qualities: he is courteous and hospitable; he is brave and noble. In short he "lives a life of liberty, simplicity and innocence" (Berkhofer 1979, p.28). It is his simple innocence and lack of modernity, however, that make his downfall inevitable. There is no place for him in the modern, civilized world. He is often noble and brave enough to see this and will let the wheels of progress roll right over him. The "Bad Indian" is characterized by his thievery, his untrustworthiness, his love of "fiendish revenge" and his unpredictability (Berkhofer 1979, p.28). He can turn at any moment into a blood-thirsty savage, ready to mutilate innocent whites; he is a threat to white civilization. He is most commonly seen in images of the "Savage Warrior."

Native women are rarely seen in strong positions in film; they are relegated to the background. M. Annette Jaimes points out that "contrary to those images of meekness, docility, and subordination to males in which we women typically have been portrayed by the dominant culture's books and movies...it is women who have formed the very core of indigenous resistance to genocide and colonization"; women have "formed the backbone of indigenous nations on this continent" (Jaimes 1992, p.311).

Perhaps the most insidiously harmful aspect of these stereotypical portrayals of Native peoples is that they are almost always set in the past, in the context of American frontierism.

"We have seen the tipi and the buffalo hunt, the attack on the wagon train and the ambush of the stagecoach until they are scenes so ingrained in the American consciousness as to be synonymous with the very concept of the American Indian" (Churchill 1992, p.232). In this way, the Native North American has been constructed as a creature of the past, even while s/he lives and breathes in the present. The "real" Indian in the public consciousness is often the long dead Indian of the Wild West, of the "Western". Maureen Mathews asserts that perhaps Native culture needs to be dead "so that the reality of Indian peoples' lives won't clutter up our fantasy" (CBC IDEAS, p.17).

As Stuart Hall notes, the West tends to "normalize and appropriate" colonized culture "by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive unchanging past" (Hall 1990, p.231).

We like to see native peoples as traditional and mystical beings, as illustrated by many films and other cultural artifacts. By confining Native identity to the realm of "traditional" we pit their culture against "modern" Western culture. In this way, images of Native people become part of a dialectic that defines the West, Native and non-Native alike.

The Western notion of "progress" deems the dissolution of Native culture an inevitable human tragedy. It may be difficult to see how the social myth of progress is harmful to other cultures, as "the material and sociopolitical benefits of modernity represent their own emancipation from the domination of `traditional' economies, polities and world views" (Tomlinson 1991, p.154).

Not only have the dominant regimes of Canada and the U.S. imposed Western institutions and politics upon Native cultures, they have imposed their own definition of a Native identity. Al Hunter was affected by the stereotypes of Indians he saw in the movies as a child. "I grew up not knowing anything different. I thought that was my history...You know - of attacking innocent settlers crossing the prairies...? I was ashamed of who I was - and that's not even who I was" (CBC IDEAS 1991, p.2). James Axtell says that children often suffer the most from these stereotypes. "If the surrounding dominant society is filled with stereotypical images of Indians that are both unhistorical and ridiculous, then Indian children have to grow up with that kind of image as one of the few images that they have against which to measure themselves" (CBC IDEAS 1991, p.11).

Maureen Mathews points out, "the stereotype is insidious. It not only typecasts Indians, it dictates the parts they can play in the drama of everyday life" (CBC IDEAS 1991, p.2). In a sense, stereotypes become self-fulfilling: "Each time those roles are reconfirmed it gets harder for individual Indians to break the mold and harder for us all to see Indians in new ways" (CBC IDEAS 1991, p.5). The stereotype of the warrior Indian promoted in Western movies and novels was reconfirmed again and again in the events at Oka in 1990. Rayna Green talks about the warrior stereotype: "It always forces us to make war, in that mode, it forces us to take on personalities and traits that may not belong to us" (in CBC IDEAS, p.5). Native culture becomes stunted, frozen, unable to move forward, to break out of the stereotype.

Native film: a site for resistance

"For aboriginal people, gaining control of media is a matter of cultural survival" (Marks 1990, p.21) The role of Native film production in Native cultures is vastly different from the role of mainstream film in the dominant society. Many native filmmakers recognize their role in the resistance against colonial politics and culture. Shelley Niro speaks of her position as a Mohawk filmmaker in the strengthening of Native cultural identity:

Film is pretty powerful. Think about all those Westerns and the stereotyping of Indians. It's affected a lot of Indians to a point where they almost became non-existent to themselves...I think, in a small, small way I'm trying to reverse that role. Rather than being the object, I'm trying to take control. It's important to start telling your own stories the way you want them to be told.

Stuart Hall points out that cinema allows misrepresented people the forum to "constitute [themselves] as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enables [them] to discover places from which to speak" (Hall 1990, p.237). The discovery of this place is the discovery of ethnicity. Ethnicity includes a knowledge of history and of one's position in that history.

Film can be used to create history, to uncover "those histories that have been appropriated and rewritten by the dominant order until they no longer reflect the reality of Native peoples. The unveiling of hidden histories has "played a critical role in the emergence of many of the most important social movements of our time - feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist" (Hall 1990, p.224).

Native filmmaking is often an action of political will as well as artistic expression in that it promotes cultural survival, a deeply political issue. "Repairing the effects of a culture thus damaged brings to culture-based media production a political dimension which does not exist for the dominant society" (Downing 1987, p.303).

If we consider Native filmmaking to be a matter of cultural survival, the distinction between film and video becomes an issue of accessibility rather than aesthetics. Studio One, a branch of the Canadian National Film Board (NFB), is a major producer of films by Native people in Canada. As accessibility is a major priority, films are transferred onto video to aid distribution and cost efficiency. Studio One also promotes the use of these film/videos with groups. "Films/videos are a good way to bring people together. Discussions seem to get off the ground more easily following a film/video screening and tend to be deeper and often more personal" (NFB 1991-1992, p.6).

Indigenous peoples the world over are experimenting with communications technologies. The Amazonian Kayapo have appropriated camcorder technology for cultural preservation and political purposes. This technology is helping forge, to use Benedict Anderson's term, an "imagined community" amongst tribes separated by miles and linguistic differences, yet united in their common struggles against loss of land and culture (from Tomlinson 1991, p.80). In North America video and broadcasting technologies are also contributing to the construction of these types of communities.

Native filmmakers Alanis Obomsawin and Gil Cardinal feel their films can play an important role in educating the public at large. Obomsawin's films "advocate social reform and change of attitude from government officials and the public at large" (NFB 1991-1992, p.3). Cardinal asserts that film/video allows work to be done in attempting to "build a new relationship with the non-Native community," yet "more importantly film/video grants the opportunity to forge ties within the Native community" (McCrea 1993, p.3). The construction of the imagined community is a recurring mandate for Native filmmakers.

Most of the non-Western world is fighting a battle against the West's cultural imperialism. Native North Americans face an immense challenge in that they must combat the colonialist structure from within; there are no national boundaries to be closed. A unified community of resistance must be created if Native groups are to survive as peoples. The visual media of film and video have a clearly defined role to play in the construction of this community and the strengthening of Native cultural identity.

Bibliography

Berkhofer, Robert F. 1979. The White Man's Indian. New York: Vintage Books.

Castillo, Edward D. 1991. "Dances With Wolves" Review in Film Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1:14 - 23.

Chan-Marples, Lan 1992. "Our Own Stories and Our Own Realities: Canada's First Nations Speaking Out Through Films" in Canadian Journal of Native Education Vol. 19, No. 1:123 - 137.

Churchill, Ward. 1992. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians. Maine: Common Courage Press.

Downing, John D.H. 1987. Film and Politics in the Third World. Brooklyn: Autonomedia Books.

Hall, Stuart. 1991. "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," in King, Anthony D. (ed.). Culture, Globalization and the World System. London: MacMillan:19 - 39.

Hall, Stuart 1990. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Rutherford, Jonathon (ed.). Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart:222 - 237.

Jaimes, M. Annette, ed. 1992. The State of Native North America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Boston: South End Press.

Marks, Laura A. 1990. "Ritual and Resistance" in Afterimage Vol. 17, No. 6: 4 +

Morrison, Karen 1993. "A Feeling for the Authentic" in Western People, October 28, 1993: 4 - 5

National Film Board of Canada 1991-1992. Our Home and Native Land: A Film and Video Resource Guide for Aboriginal Canadians (3rd ed.). Winnipeg: NFB.

Onodera, Midi 1993. "It Starts With a Whisper" in the LIFT Newsletter: 3 - 8.

Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Shulevitt, Judith. 1991 ."Native American Film and Video Festival" in The Village Voice, April 23, 1991: 64.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge.

Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural Imperialism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.