A Reflection on Native Cinema and Manifesto for My own Works (First in a Five-part series)

By Ernest M. Whiteman III

The Pledge:
I have always wanted to make movies ever since I was in high school.  While every other classmate was contemplating a Marine Corps stint or per capita lifestyles, I was dreaming of Star Wars,  of Batman  comics, and of meeting U2.  I am a Northern Arapaho born and raised on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming during one of the coldest winters in my father’s memory. 

No movie I ever dreamed of making ever involved my Native identity.  I grew up watching the standard Hollywood fare, reading comic books, and watching too much television.  I had thought that every kid in America grew up in the splendor that I did.  I always believed I was no different from the kids I saw on TV and in movies. 

I can recall two moments when I first had an inkling to make movies.  One was in Mrs. Collin’s freshman English class at Saint Stephen’s Indian High School.  We were watching Truffaut’s movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  Having read the Bradbury novel prior our imaginations were the better version. During one scene where the firemen raid a house a classmate turned to me, “This is fucking boring, man. With what they can do with movies now, they can make a fucking kick-ass version.” 

This was the Eighties era of movie making with the likes of Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi.   In the industry it truly seemed that the imagination was limitless.  Yet why were we were straddled with a French Art House “Film” (Capital “F”)?  I did not know the answer to that and I could only say, “Yep.” 

But then my mind was cranking.  I thought, why couldn’t some one make a cool Blade Runner-esque version with armored firemen, exploding houses and black, shiny, transforming beetles; a movie sleek, bleak, and dark?  My next thought was, why couldn’t I make the new version?  The second moment is spectacular only in its banality. 

In the year before high school I discovered the band U2.  While every other kid was into heavy metal, I really wanted to be the Edge during my high school years.  I even dressed the part, the black dress jacket, the black fedora, the torn jeans (The Joshua Tree Era.)  I wanted to play the guitar very badly (And I do play the guitar very badly.)  I once traveled 100 miles to Casper, Wyoming to see the movie Rattle and Hum  in a theater.  So, while in high school I simply figured that making another movie about them would be the best way to meet my heroes.   A truth I am now revealing for the first time publicly. 

Those two moments were when the seed of my movie making career was planted.   Out of genuine concern that movies look cool and that I can meet U2 by doing so.   My first, best destiny discovered I pushed on through high school.

 -o- 

Since the beginning of the medium, Native Americans have been portrayed in films.  Native American dancers were among the first and common feature in the first coin-operated cine-scope viewers of the late 1800's.  

Yet, it was the image of the regalia outfitted Indians, clad in beads and feathers and buckskin, prominent in that time that has endured the longest.  Assimilation and Termination policies very nearly rendered Native American people into a “vanishing race” and film companies never hesitated in promoting Natives as such. 

For colonization to have worked it is needed to portray the targets of civilization as something not human, as the other,  as a primitive species.  This way, the cruelties inflicted are no more than clearing out mice to make space. 

Which is why it remains the Native of the “Old West” that has endured for so long.  This image continually renders the Native American voice powerless as it perpetuates the idea Native Americans are still less than, are still the other.   Early cinema reflected this ideology.  Whereas many early westerns never focused on the Native American, Natives were placed in movies as part of the western American mythology.  Similarly, this was Armando José Prat’s conclusion in his book Invisible Natives—that the Natives are continually made present to be made absent. 

Indeed, almost from the beginning of the craft, the control of the imagery of Native Americans has been almost exclusively in the hands of whites.   Nearly all portrayals of Natives were as blockades to progress, as a vanishing race that must be let go of in order for American society to move forward.  From early films such as The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch  to more progressive films like Soldier Blue  and Little Big Man,  the control of these images were never in the hands of Native movie makers themselves. 

But in the 1970s, a change happened in cinema that turned the movie making industry on its head and could open a window of opportunity for Native cinema. 

-o-

There is absolutely no film industry in Wyoming.  (Even a recent film set in my own hometown of Riverton was filmed in Canada!)  So, I started out an Art major. Eventually, I shifted to an Anthropology major in the hopes of fulfilling my mother’s wish.  I graduated with an Associate’s degree in Native American Studies.  About this time my mother began prepping me to take her place. In her later years she had become a storyteller for the tribe.  She would be invited to classrooms to talk about early Northern Arapaho life.  She was telling classes that she spoke to that after she was gone that I would be the one to replace her. 

This scared me on two fronts.  First, I did not know one fraction of what my mother knew; old stories, myth, tribal life ways, old times gossip, and her own experience in the changing Arapaho world.  There would be no way I could ever measure up. Secondly, I never thought as my mother as ever being gone.  I suppose we never do. 

Since a Northern Arapaho with a degree in Native American Studies is of no practical use in Wyoming, I decided that taking Radio/TV Broadcasting was the closest I would ever come to making movies that I could find in Riverton, and I earned a second Associate’s degree.  Still today, there is no film industry in Wyoming. 

After my mother passed away, I felt unmoored; adrift.  My dream of becoming a movie maker also seemed further away in regard to my mother’s wish.  I worked many jobs in the meantime.  I would come to work for the only public television station in Wyoming before I left for Illinois.  Now, this experience was not without gaining insight into film.  It showed me the hierarchy one must ascend to even produce a program, and, not only that great rifts between the executives and the staff existed, but also one between the sexes.  I learned a lot there about friendship and how fragile it can be in the arenas of moving ahead in media. 

The station manager at that time was a great guy named Greg Ray. A cool, straight-forward guy who was able to get me a position with NASA at the Dryden Flight Institute in California.  I was to be a Media Coordinator there.  At that same time I applied to Columbia College Chicago for admission.  It was because it was considered a cheap film school.   My adopted brother Joey lived in Chicago at the time and recommended applying there or Northwestern University. 

You see, this was the only way I could make my dream of being a movie maker a reality.  In today’s independent film making world, it is as easy as deciding to do it and buying the equipment.  But like most Indians on the reservation, I had not saved up enough to do that.  I never worked a job that afforded me that luxury.  I lived paycheck to paycheck and this was the best way, I could figure, with no film industry in Wyoming; for a Northern Arapaho Indian to get started making movies as well as getting certified by a film school. 

Once I got accepted there at Columbia College, I was suddenly faced with a difficult choice to make.  One I never expected to have. 

-o- 

In the 70s, Melvin Van Peebles broke onto the scene with Sweet Sweetbacks’ Baadasssss Song  about a black prostitute helping a Black Panther member run from the police.   From this, the new “Blaxploitation” genre was born and with it came an empowerment for black filmmakers, actors, and performers.  They took control of the stereotypes—the pimps, the Panthers, the prostitutes, the dealers, the gang members and used them to take the power out of the negative stereotype.  From this sprang an entire cadre of black filmmakers tackling real world issues. 

The genre went through its birthing pains of the B-grade flick to a new empowering mechanic; Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers now making what are considered genre pictures; Inside Man, 2 Fast, 2 Furious,  and From Hell,  respectively. They have spread their wings after regaining power over those images held over African Americans. 

In the years since then, the industry has seen other racial groups taking control.  With the success of Robert Rodriguez and his $7,000 film,  El Mariachi,  Mexicans, Latinos, and Hispanics have surged to the forefront of the movie making scene.  Having three Mexican movie directors interviewed by Charlie Rose is a bigger deal than people realize. 

Can Native American movie makers do the same?  Can we go through those birthing pains of the B-grade and genre films to breakthrough in the movie making field?  Or will we drown our chances in the heavy expectations of Art? 

-o- 

Suddenly I was facing this choice; financial security and quick employment or following my dream.  In either respect meant one thing; leaving the Wind River Indian Reservation; leaving my home, leaving my family.  I was in touch with such a nice lady from Dryden who assured me I could start right away and need only find housing once I was there. 

My family, my friends, my co-workers all told me to go for it, a good job with a major company.  (I mean NASA, for God’s sake!)  But deep in the recesses of my imagination a dark, ominous figure that I had created years before, that invincible Indian hit man kept pushing into the light on my mind.  I wanted to see this story on a movie screen, to see this character come alive, to see the theatrical posters and attend its screening, to make my Oscar ©®™ acceptance speech (Don’t let them lie to you. Every filmmaker, no matter how artistic or eclectic or independent, always has their Oscar Speech planned,)  to roll cameras on my huge film set.  That was my dream. 

I talked with my little sister Elvira.  She simply said to go to Chicago.  Go make my movies.  Get rich and famous.  Then come back and make all of them rich and famous.  You see, either way, I was leaving her.  That was hard enough for her. Besides, she said, at least Joey will be there with me.  In Chicago, I would not be alone. 

So, in the end, I made the selfish choice, the “un-Indian” choice, and essentially, placed my dreams ahead of financial security and quick employment.   Either way, I left my sister, my family behind.  On September 15, 1999, with my brother Joey giving me a lift, I packed up and headed East. 

-o- 

Because of the new youth movement in film during the seventies, film such as Easy Rider  were changing how movies were made and by whom.  It also followed a shift in film companies beginning to market toward the youth of America.  The seventies also saw the rise in a more conscientious view on Natives in films.  Movies such as Little Big Man  and Soldier Blue  took a more sympathetic view of Indians, portraying them as tragic victims of oppression. 

While these portrayals garnered accolades for their sympathetic views; the romantic, idealized view of the Indian in the beads and feathers and buckskins was the portrait that was placed at the forefront and films such as Tell ‘Em Willie Boy is Here  and  Billy Jack  attempted to portray Natives according to the contemporary, early-seventies Native Zeitgeist.  Still, they continued to portray Natives as less than, and with something very important missing from these portrayals—a Native voice. 

No matter how much Billy Jack went berserk in the name of Peace, Love and Understanding, no matter how heartfelt Chief Dan George’s prayer of thanks for being a human being is, it is still a non-Native putting words in their mouths, their deeds to action.  No matter how affectionate, sympathetic, and progressive the portrayal, this took the power out of the Native American voice and locked them into that romanticized past. 

That is the image that continues to this day.  It would be these images that Native American filmmakers would have to overcome to find success in the industry.   So what can Native movie makers do to breakthrough this and succeed in the film industry?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coming later this week…

Part Two: "The Turn"
Ernest discusses the "commodification of culture" and how he believes that film is not an "art" but a business…