Godzilla Is Red: An American Indian Reading of the King of Monsters

Misshipeshu by Carl Ray (1943-1978)

When I saw Godzilla in his latest movie swimming quickly under the ocean waves, leaving behind a flotilla of U.S. Navy ships, I immediately thought about American Indians in the Northern Plains.

Godzilla in his city-smashing battle with a pair of radiation-guzzling monsters reminded me of Mishebeshu, “the great underwater monster.” That is what Theresa Smith calls him in her book The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World.

(The Anishinaabe territory lies on both sides of the central U.S.-Canadian border. They are known to most Americans as the Ojibwe or Chippewa.)

Mishebeshu also is a reptile who lives between the waves and who battles a creature from the sky, the Animiki -- known variously as Thunderer, Thunder being, and Thunderbird and generally imagined in the form of an eagle or giant bird of prey. This struck me as interesting because the male MUTO can fly with his enormous wings.

Mishebeshu and Animiki are in perpetual battle with each other, and humans are at times caught between them – a lot like the people of San Francisco in the movie. The humans and their city are not the target of Godzilla and the MUTO; they are merely the collateral damage.

There is a big difference, though, because the moral poles are reversed. Mishebeshu is the “bad guy.” Animiki is the “good guy.” The Thunderers (actually, there are many) can come to the aid of the humans if Mishebeshu comes after them.

In the first Godzilla movie, Gojira (1954), and the American remix, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1956), the monster more closely resembles the Anishinaabe version. Mishebeshu rules all of the creatures of the water and even the waves themselves, and he “frequently was asked simply to allow humans to travel on the water in safety” (Smith 97). In the Japanese original, Godzilla destroys several ships at sea before he is ever seen. And though he emerges to stomp and chew on Tokyo, the final showdown is beneath the waves, where he is destroyed.

Gojira (1954)

Since the original Godzilla serves as a metaphor for the atomic bomb, seeing him as the bad guy is quite easy – even if the film suggests that humanity created him by playing with natural forces that it should have left alone.

However, the Japanese did not wait long to resurrect Godzilla as a hero (albeit no friend to the insurance industry) who would rise from the waves to save humans from various monsters from Earth and elsewhere.

Although the character roles seem switched between the Japanese and Anishinaabe narratives, the dynamics in them are similar.

Smith suggests the battles between Mishebeshu and the Thunderers “are not experienced as contests between good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but between the forces of balance and imbalance, as embodied in powerful persons” (129). Mishebeshu is chaos; Thunderers are order.

Thunderbird by Carl Ray

This latest Godzilla reboot suggests a similar assumption. Although the film’s designers have made sure the MUTO look menacing and, to some degree, demonic – like red-eyed gargoyles come to life – they are not described by the humans in the film as evil. They are not shown attacking, torturing, or eating any people. But the humans do describe them as a chaotic force that must be countered, and the scientist played by Ken Watanabe articulates Godzilla’s role in this way: “Nature has an order, a power to restore balance.”

Like the Anishinaabeg in their stories about the battles between the Thunderers and Mishebeshu, the humans in Godzilla are stuck between contending forces that must do battle if order is to be restored to the world. Although the film gives Godzilla the physical attributes of Mishebeshu, it gives him the character of an Animiki.  In doing this, Godzilla suggests an epistemology consistent with the Anishinaabe stories.

In her book, Smith suggests that the Anishinaabe world defined bad behavior not as many people imagine “sin” – the transgression of a divinely ordained rule – but as “the failure to keep up one’s side of a healthy relationship” (105). However, the relationships that are to be maintained are not limited to other humans. Important relationships are everywhere and include those between humans and “other-than-human persons.” That is, plants, animals, and other things that are alive in various ways.

Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster

This view of the world resonates with the latest Godzilla and other entries in the canon. For instance, in Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster (1971), our scaly hero comes from the deep to save humanity from a monster of its own making. Humans had once again thrown the world out of balance, and Godzilla must come to fix it. (The film was released two years after the pollution in Lake Erie caught fire, and the same year as the “Keep America Beautiful” commercials that featured an Indian crying about roadside trash.)

In this regard, I am puzzled by the central role that radioactivity/nuclear energy play in the recent film. I understand its role in the first films – Japan was barely a decade beyond having two large cities destroyed by atomic bombs.  Worldwide, radioactivity remained a potent demon for years after that, as nations experimented with atomic energy and as the Super Powers threatened everyone with the fallout from a nuclear war. But I do not know that atomic energy remains today a potent symbol for the folly of man.

We have not knocked ourselves back to the Stone Age with a one-day blitz of nuclear missiles – instead we are doing it a little bit at a time, with each year’s incremental increase in global temperatures, with droughts and floods, and hurricanes, and all the trappings of an unstable climate.

Rather than have the MUTO awakened by a nuclear energy plant in Japan, perhaps it would have been more symbolically powerful to have them awakened from beneath a melted ice shelf in the Antarctic, awakened by humanity’s refusal to cooperate in reducing greenhouse gases.

This would have given more resonance to the statement by Watanabe’s character from the “Let Them Fight” clip: “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around… Let them fight.”

That would have made the film even more consistent with an Anishinaabe vision of the right relationship among humans, each other, and the world that surrounds them. The MUTO would have come because of the failure to keep up our side of a healthy relationship with our planet, and Godzilla would have come again to save us.

Perhaps in the next film he can attack Washington, D.C., and destroy a certain NFL franchise. 

* * *

Most people have not heard of the book I am goofing on for my title here, but I will use it anyway. God Is Red is an important book in American Indian Studies, published by Vine Deloria Jr in 1973. In it he explains some thoughts on the divine and humanity's relationship to it from an American Indian perspective.

In Canada, the Natives are Restless

"Idle No More" in Ottawa (The Toronto Sun)

There is something going on in Canada that most Americans are not aware of.

Of course, that is true about most of the things going on in Canada.  But this one involves my First Nations friends up there -- First Nations in Canada are what is known as American Indian tribes in the United States.  And these events involve two ideas that I think are important to keep in mind here, South of the Great White North.

1. The legal and Constitutional obligations that exist between those groups in the United States and Canada and their federal governments.

2. The importance of environmental restraints on industrial and commercial development.

My Canadian friends have been waging a campaign called "Idle No More," a grassroots protest against C-45, a bill recently passed by the Canadian government that makes some sweeping changes in environmental protections of the many, many waterways in Canada.  Many of those rivers, streams, and lakes are on First Nations land.  (You can watch a CBC report on "Idle No More" here.  There have been demonstrations in the United States, too.)

In The Mall of America (lastrealindians)

By "sweeping changes," I mean the Canadian government is removing hundreds of waterways from the previous oversight that limited industrial and commercial development.  These changes were made without consultation of the First Nations effected, and many First Nations people feel those changes are a violation of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982.  That act states, "The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed."

If a treaty between the Canadian government and First Nations group recognizes its right to a river and, for example, the salmon resources in that river, then that First Nations group needs to be included in any regulations that will impact that river.  If rights to that river are unilaterally reduced or removed, then the government has failed to recognize and affirm those legally binding treaty rights.

Although this issue is immediately impacting First Nations, it should be important to all Canadians.  If a government cannot be trusted to keep its word, to obey its own rules, then no group of citizens is safe from abuse or injustice.  

Sometimes my students and friends in the United States express surprise or puzzlement at this idea of "treaty rights."  At times they object to the idea that a group of Americans will get "special treatment" from the federal government.

This is because they are misunderstanding the situation.  They are understanding the situation in terms of ethnicity rather than the rule of law.  They think a group of people are being "granted" special privileges because of their ethnic status.  (This is an easy mistake to make, and I am not criticizing them for this.)

But the rights accorded to federally recognized American Indian tribes are based upon legally binding agreements between the federal government and the governments of those tribes. Those legally binding agreements arise from the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."  This grants tribes a status rivaling foreign nations -- or at least the states.  

Those rights recognized in treaties extend to the citizens of those tribes, as defined in part by the tribes and by federal government.  This definition is based largely upon descent; one must be descended from a member of that tribe to be a citizen of that tribe -- in much the same way that American citizenship is extended to the descendants of American citizens.  (A major difference is the lack of naturalization for tribal membership.  Someone might be "adopted into" a tribe -- such as Johnny Depp was recently adopted by the Comanche Nation -- but the rights of citizenship are not extended to that person.)  

I say that citizenship is defined by the tribal government AND the federal government because before those treaties membership in a tribe was often not contingent upon descent.  A person could have been accepted as a participating member of that tribe regardless of descent.  The notion that the rights of tribal citizenship depended upon descent was enforced by the federal government -- as a way of limiting its obligations to the tribes with which it signed treaties.  However, today those tribes have exercised the right to determine the degree of descent required for citizenship.

Actor Adam Beach joins Red Hand Singers in Los Angeles

That is how I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Most of my ancestry is white, but I am descended from someone (my mother's father) recorded on the federal census for the Cherokee in 1907. Therefore, certain rights and privileges are extended to me that are not extended to other American citizens.  (Since I live in California, I generally cannot take advantage of those rights and privileges.)  The key is not whether I am ethnically white or Cherokee (or Choctaw on my father's side), the key is my legal status as a Cherokee citizen.  

Some people believe it unfair for me to have certain rights and privileges not available to others.  But this is not that much different from the varying rights and privileges available to citizens of different states.  For example, a same-sex couple in Massachusetts can be legally married, whereas a same-sex couple in Oklahoma cannot.  They are all American citizens, but they have differing rights according to their states.  

In Alberta (photo by Blaire Russell)

My friends in Canada are fighting for what they believe to be their Constitutionally guaranteed rights as Canadian citizens AND as First Nations citizens.  These rights are not "special treatment" nor some kind of "welfare" or "charity" extended to First Nations by the federal government.  The treaty rights are real, and they are legal, and they are important so long as Canada wants to be a nation governed by the rule of law.

As for the importance of restraints on "development," which can be another word for "rapid exploitation and degradation of an ecosystem"....

I like to believe that each of the many cultures that compose the United States has an important contribution to make.  I believe the most valuable contribution from American Indian cultures is the respect for the world that surrounds us and from which we are made.  This world includes the land, the sky, the water, the plants, and the animals.  This world is not just something that surrounds us, it is something that feeds us, and therefore it is something that quite literally makes us.  Our  bodies are made up of those things.  The water you drink, the air you breathe, the plants and animals you eat -- they become you.

And when correctly appreciated, this relationship leads to a reciprocation.  Those things contribute to making our lives, and so we should contribute to making theirs.  In this way, we can mutually support each other and contribute to our mutual health.  

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)

American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. stated it this way in an interview: "If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it.  Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design."   

"Idle No More" is fighting for that vital relationship between humans and the world.  "Idle No More" sees that C-45 opens the way for the industrial and commercial exploitation of the land and the water. 

During the recent presidential election in the United States, there was much debate about the kinds of economic policies and  philosophies we should have in government.  There was much simple-minded discussion about socialism vs. capitalism, and there was a lot of chest-thumping from the talking heads on CNBC and Fox News about the virtues of free-market capitalism.

But someone is being truly naive about capitalism (and the industrialization that supports it) if he speaks about its power only in the positive.  Capitalism IS powerful, but capitalism is neither good nor bad; that is determined by how and to what ends its power is used.  The industrialization we have seen unleashed by capitalism in North America has destroyed ecosystems, poisoned rivers, drained aquifers, demolished mountains, wiped out species, and blackened the skies.  Capitalism is too powerful to run loose in the land.  Restraining it is a sign of respect for that power.  I believe capitalism can work with a conscience; but that takes some restraint and humility.

The type of capitalism practiced in North America has too often emphasized immediate, maximum exploitation of a resource -- which ultimately destroys that resource and deprives future generations of its benefits.  It violates that sense of mutual support and respect that I mentioned.

"Idle No More" fears that C-45 will clear the way for the destruction of waterways, especially as corporations work feverishly to exploit the Tar Sands oil reserves. Canada is blessed with many, many rivers, and that means many rivers will need to be crossed by the pipelines needed to get that Tar Sands oil to markets.  "Idle No More" fears that the people behind the Tar Sands see only dollars and not the people and the land that are threatened.