Kidnapped in America's Time Machine

We have all seen it in movies.  A person, perhaps our protagonist, is walking down the street when a speeding van pulls up, the door flies open.  Masked men jump out and pull a hood over the person's head.  The victim is tossed into the van and it speeds off.

Kidnapped!

American Indian authors and artists must feel that way at times.  They may be doing their work, representing their lives in the United States in the 21st century when BAM, out of nowhere, they are snatched away -- driven off not in a van but, more appropriately, in a DeLorean with a functioning flux capacitor.

Kidnapped!  And taken back in time!

Even Sherman Alexie, the most famous American Indian author at the moment, has been snatched off the street this way.  In The Los Angeles Times, no less.  But even The New York Times is not immune to this time banditry.

Alexie is a writer of poems, short stories, novels, and films that are by turns inventive, funny, angry, poignant, and ironic.  His autobiographical novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007.  War Dances, a collection of stories and poems, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2010.

He is perhaps best known for exploding stereotypes of Americans Indians and mainstream America's desire for natives to fulfill mythic roles in everyday life.  What is he NOT famous for is representing tribal customs and traditional lifeways in his fiction; he famously avoids doing that.  If anyone wears feathers in his stories they are either acting like a fool or they are updating some notion of traditional culture with contemporary flavor.

For instance, a character in "St. Junior" takes his college entrance exam while wearing his grass dance regalia, reminding himself that a native warrior in modern society fights for his people with a pencil rather than a bow and arrow.  In "Do Not Go Gentle," the father of an ailing newborn creates a new healing ceremony in the hospital by beating a drum with a dildo.

Nearly all of his stories are firmly established in modern, urban, media-saturated America.

That is why is was so odd to see this sentence in the Los Angeles Times review of Blasphemy, Alexie's new short-story collection:  "Reading Alexie is like listening to a man tell stories by a campfire."

Out of nowhere -- kidnapped!

Campfire?  What about his fiction -- in style or subject -- suggests a campfire?  There is nothing rustic or unsophisticated about his stories.  His stories are more like those told in a crowded kitchen at a house party -- loud, profane, and funny.  Or perhaps told in a quite booth of a brew pub -- the confessions of someone puzzled by life and love in the big city.  Or maybe while seated beneath the basketball hoop between pick-up games -- Alexie loves basketball and refers to it many times in his prose and poetry.

The reviewer's campfire statement seems very much out of place in a review of Alexie's work, but I can guess where it comes from.  There is this impulse in the United States to confine American Indians to the past, some region that is pure and simple and enviable to the stressed and disillusioned American.  (I have written about it in relation to contemporary American Indian art (and here) and in images of the "stoic Indian.")

That notion of the Indian as pre-modern is so firmly established within the American national mythos and psyche that it can emerge when there is no evidence to support it; in this regard, reality must conform to the assumption.

These thoughts were further impressed upon me when the same writer, a week later, reviewed a new book about Edward Curtis and his famous images of American Indians from the early days of the 20th Century.  I have written before about the conflicted relationship Indian Country has with Curtis.

On the one hand he created important archival images of American Indians intended to depict them as they would have appeared before being inundated by the tidal wave of Americans, their military forces, their religions, and their material culture.  This was remarkable when you consider that not many years before his photographs, the U.S. government was waging genocidal warfare against the same people Curtis photographed.

On the other hand, he altered the appearance of many of his subjects to more closely resemble his assumptions about American Indians, assumptions that confined them to a disappearing past.  An example is when Curtis altered this image to erase the clock his subjects had posed with.  (This image accompanies an essay, "Taking Identity," by my friend Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair about the current conflict between the First Nations and the Canadian government.)

When Curtis was taking those pictures, he was hurtling into the 20th century, adapting to a rapidly changing world, just like his subjects.  But he didn't want to record that intriguing experience of American Indians adapting to new conditions, forging new relationships and identities -- just as they had always done, long before the Europeans arrived.  Instead, perhaps with a kind of envy, he wanted to photograph them NOT changing, NOT entering that new century.

The LA Times reviewer says this about Curtis's photographs: "His portraits, especially, have a timeless quality."  Timeless is an appropriate word here, not because Curtis's photographs transcend the interpretative limitations of historical moments (time), but because they try to stop time, to erase the process by which American Indians entered the 20th century.

He wanted to toss them into a time machine -- just a decade removed from H. G. Wells's novel that gave us that concept.  That was a century ago, and a lot has changed since then, but, with the LA Times as evidence, apparently Curtis's DeLorean still has some gas in its tank.

Symbolic Indians vs. Smiling Indians

Classes have begun again at the university where I teach, and I asked students in my American Indian literature to talk about their impressions of American Indian cultures and the source of those impressions.  At least one person mentioned this famous public service announcement, which I vividly recall from the 1970s:

Famous Sicilian-American

It features an actor who is known widely as Iron Eyes Cody (1904-1999), but he was named Espera Oscar de Corti by his Sicilian immigrant parents.  That is, one of the most famous Indians of the 1970s was not an Indian. 

The students said such images helped produce their impression that American Indian cultures and mainstream America related to the natural world differently.  That led to an interesting discussion of how something true can be communicated through something false.

His presence on the screen was insulting to many American Indians, yet it wasn't surprising.  Cody was part of a long tradition of non-Indians appearing on the screen as Indians -- and taking work away from American Indian actors in the process.  Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, and even Audrey Hepburn have played American Indian characters.

The Unforgiven (1960)

I repeat.  Audrey Hepburn.  American Indian.

I played the commercial for my students and we agreed that however much we laugh at the commercial today, and however problematic is the casting of Cody, the commercial was effective.  Summoning the iconic image of the Indian as protector of nature was effective.  Showing a lone tear running down the face of the iconic stoic Indian was effective.

The student who is tempted to dismiss the commercial because it makes use of stereotypes is missing the interesting discussion about how icons and signs work.

In the real world, it does matter that Cody was not an American Indian because there was an American Indian actor quite capable of filling the role, and he had a family to feed and a career to build.

But within the world of the commercial's message and within the world of the dominant American culture that was communicating to itself with this commercial -- that is, the public service announcement was not targeting Indian Country -- the race of the person playing an American Indian did not matter.  His symbolic function overruled that.

It is like Rene Magritte's famous painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images.  On it is emblazoned the message (in French) "This is not a pipe."  Of course it isn't.  It is a painting of a pipe.  Cody's PSA could be titled "This is not an Indian."  Of course it isn't.  It is a someone pretending to be an Indian.

Cody was playing the very familiar role in American culture of the Noble Savage.  In American culture, the Noble Savage's relationship to any actual living Indians is irrelevant.  He says more about the people using him to communicate than he does about American Indians -- as does mainstream America's inability to distinguish a real Indian from a fake one.

Understanding the symbolic/iconic function of Cody's stony face is not to say that such representations are OK.  They have real-world implications other than stealing work from American Indian actors.  The viewers of such representations are not aware that they are viewing signs and symbols; they think they are looking at real Indians and then expect Indians in the real world to behave in the same ways.

Two Strikes by Edward Curtis

As an antidote to Cody's stony face, I showed my students a wonderful short film, Smiling Indians.  It is made by two young men from Oklahoma, Ryan Red Corn (from the Osage Nation) and Sterlin Harjo (from the Creek Nation).

The film is ironically dedicated to Edward R. Curtis (1858-1952), a very famous American photographer who did much to create the whole tradition of the stoic Indian that made Cody's career possible.

The faces in Smiling Indians do NOT function so clearly as symbols or icons.  The faces are not participating in various narrative conventions of how American Indians relate to mainstream American culture.  They are images of Indian people being... people.

Human beings.  Not symbols.

Watch it and smile.

Dances with Cubism

Spirit Warrior on Horse

I am tempted to not write anything about Anishinaabe artist Frank Big Bear. His images are dense enough, it seems. My attempt to describe, explain, or somehow narrate would just get lost -- and justly so -- in the energy and color of his work.

But this is my blog, so I should write at least a few things. His images interest me in their own right, but they interest me also because they probably go against what many people assume American Indian art to be. If I told most people that I was going to show them a painting called Spirit Warrior on Horse, I do not think they would expect a work of Indigenous Cubism.
 
The images of American Indians that most people in the United States are familiar with derive from three sources: the photography of Edward Curtis, the paintings and drawings of George Catlin, and Hollywood movies.

Bull Tongue

Curtis was not an American Indian, but he left a legacy of famous and influential images of American Indians. His stoic faces, sometimes proud, sometimes tragic, still dominate the popular visual imaginings of American Indians. They even influenced the work of American Indian artists, and Curtis's photographs can be found in the homes of American Indians today. 

Some native artists have followed Curtis's lead, while others have challenged his notions of the stone-faced Indian, trapped in the past. For instance, look at this portrait by Curtis of a man named Bull Tongue.

Contrast this with a portrait by Big Bear. [In an earlier version I incorrectly described the painting as a self-portrait.]

Autumn's Wind

Both images feature an American Indian man staring at the viewer. Neither smiles. Bull Tongue appears as he might have before the white Americans ever moved into his neighborhood. (Richard Throssel photographed him in his day-to-day clothes.) Big Bear represents his subject (Autumn, one of his daughters) with some similar ready-made signs of Indian-ness: the long hair, the bear-claw necklace, the piercing eyes. A question mark rises from her head, and one eyebrow is raised. Is she asking us, "What are you looking at?" Is she asking herself, "What am I doing here?"

Despite some superficial resemblance to Curtis's portraits, Big Bear's painting is dominated by his Cubist tendencies. Whereas Curtis's images can be considered elegiac, Big Bear's are energetic.  Every inch of canvas is filled with vivid colors, dynamic patterns, and images of birds, animals, and landscape. The face may be stoic, but the canvas, if it reflects the interior of the American Indian artist's mind, is alive with pleasure, anxiety, movement, and meaning.

Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor wrote that Curtis's images seem like an attempt to record American Indians at the moment before they were conquered and colonized. But those black-and-white photographs also were an attempt to erase those people and cultures, according to Vizenor.  The images trap those people in the past and deny their presence in modern American society. The past they are trapped in is ultimately not their own but the imagined past of the dominant culture of the United States. Images such as Curtis's became popular souvenirs of American history and mythology. Vizenor described them as "a cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia and social sciences evidence."

Images such as Big Bear's refuse to be trapped in that nostalgia. They are alive in the present. An image such as Spirit Warrior on Horse remembers a past before conquest, but it is not trapped in that past. It embraces the styles of Cubism, introduced long after the Indian Wars had ended. American Indian artists continue to evolve and explore new expressions, just as they always have. Big Bear's work is a testimony to that.

And his work just looks so darned cool.

I was introduced to Big Bear's work recently at the Native American Literature Symposium in Albuquerque, N.M. It is an annual gathering of people who study, teach, and/or create fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, and art from Indian Country.  Big Bear's work was part of a presentation by Heid Erdrich, a terrific poet who has turned her talents to curating the work of American Indian artists.  You can see more artwork at the All My Relations Arts website. [A nice video about Big Bear can be seen here.]