Suppose a Bosnian exchange student who didn’t know an Arapaho from an alligator wanted to learn as much as he could about the diversity of American Indian life with some degree of accuracy and watchability. What movies and or documentaries would you recommend?
The list I’ve started includes
LITTLE BIG MAN (Cheyenne)
LAST OF THE MOHICANS (the Day-Lewis Iroquois)
ATANARJUAT (I haven’t seen it, but there haven’t been a lot of movies about the Inuits since Nanook of the North)
SMOKE SIGNALS (again, haven’t seen it but it comes highly recommended)
I wish there was something more on the southeastern tribes, but they’re dreadfully overlooked considering how important and urbanized they were.
PS- I’d prefer movies that don’t indulge in the “beautiful people” myth or the John Wayne stereotypes. I’d also be interested in what movies you’d recommend against.
Nanook of the North (1922), a documentary about an Inuit hunter and his family in northern Quebec. The Silent Enemy (1930), filmed in Ontario. The title refers to the famine that stalks the Ojibway band portrayed in this drama.
Smoke Signals is really pretty good. The book it’s based upon is worth reading as well. Skins is good, and I have The Fast Runner on my gonna rent someday list. Skinwalker (it’s based on a Tony Hillerman book, right?) I just heard about but haven’t watched. My friend says it’s good. All I can remember besides these are two older movies, Thunderheart and well, Dances with Wolves.
I’ll second Smoke Signals and Powwow Highway in the event you’re ranking for popularity, and add
Dance Me Outside, which features Adam Beach, the actor from Smoke Signals
and
Incident at Oglala, a documentary that Michael Apted directed at the same time he was making Thunderheart, about the real life events at Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s that form the loose basis for the Thunderheart story.
Dances with Wolves … a good friend of mine, a Sioux , loves it and found it very authentic. Apparantly for large portions Costner is talking in the Sioux woman’s dialect which is funny to him (not that I entirely get it). Anyway that he approved (& was able to nitpick at that level of detail) impressed me.
Let me say that he found two things in the movie offensive: the Pawnee are depicted as savages out of a John Wayne movie (not quite but close) & it was a bit off putting that they used Mary McDonnell, a white woman “adopted” by the Sioux as the love intrerest (Heaven forbid that it be a real NA ++ the old white woman captured/endangered by NA overtones – which are very subtle here it is well done)
Having Mary MacDonald play Lt. Dunbar’s love interest also had a couple of practical storytelling functions. Lt. Dunbar needs a way to rather quickly be able to communicate with the Sioux so that the story can proceed. It is extraordinarily difficult for an adult to learn a foreign language without an instructor who knows both. Stands with a Fist, being a white woman raised by the Sioux, is able to learn English quite quickly as that was her first language, and she then serves as a bridge for Lt. Dunbar to communicate with the others. Second, being a white woman adopted by the tribe, it might be seen as more acceptable for her to hook up with a white dude than a native woman. Third, by already having accepted a white person into their group, the Sioux have already demonstrated a tolerance for others that the whites in the movie for the most part don’t, and this makes their acceptance of Lt. Dunbar more beleivable.
Thunderheart, starring Val Kilmer, was surprisingly (IMO) very good. He plays a half-Sioux FBI agent in denial about his roots, forced to come to terms when he is assigned to investigate a murder on a South Dakota reservation. Apparently it is based on a true story and there’s also a documentary about the real version of events, Incident at Oglala , but I can’t comment on that one. I’d like to check it out, though.
How about Son of the Morning Star? It was a made for tv movie about Crazy Horse and Custer and the events surrounding the Little Big Horn. I haven’t seen it in many years, but I recall it being fairly good.
Number Six handled the second part of it well. As for the first part, you need an enemy right? And IIRC, the Pawnee were very warlike and not too nice to wasichu (whites) or other native tribes. It was also a good foil, ie, not ALL natives are nice and peaceful and good… there were some violent groups out there… made it more believeable (I wouldn’t have liked it all that much if it was just an ‘all Indians are so much better than whites’ story :D).
I forgot to mention that South Park episode a few months back about the Sars epidemic and those unfeeling, money grubbing Native Americans. Very informative.
Also, Drew Hayden Taylor may be Canadian and Ojibway, but his books are very readable and funny and paint a realistic portrait of a lot of modern First Nations people, especially Gen Xers.
Isiddiqui and number 6 he liked the movie as I said. He felt (as a 3/4 Sioux who lived for a while on Pine Ridge) those were two offensive parts to him … He had no great love of Pawnee but hated seeing them depicted as '50’s era Redskins … I agree w everything you said about the need for evil foils & story facilitators – Also if an attractive NA woman feel in love with Costner, over the tribe braves like Pochantas, he would have been OK w. that? … just reporting what he said/how he felt & wanted to offer that caveat to Sampiro as he put his list together
It’s hard to believe that Disney’s Pocahantas is on this list, but there it is.
Has anybody ever seen the movie “CHIEF DAN GEORGE SPEAKS”? It doesn’t seem to be in print at the moment but I’ve heard it’s great. It’s strictly the Chief Dan George recalling his life and times.
My mother was 1/4 Blackfoot, and studied anthropology, eventually becoming head of “Native American studies” at University of Lethbridge, in Alberta. She spoke internationally at conferences on aboriginal people. A few years back, while she was visiting, I rented Black Robe, and she begged me to shut it off less than half an hour in. She was deeply offended by the depiction of the Indians (her preferred and very informed term for North American aboriginals).
And IIRC, the Pawnee were very warlike and not too nice to wasichu (whites) or other native tribes. It was also a good foil, ie, not ALL natives are nice and peaceful and good… there were some violent groups out there… made it more believeable (I wouldn’t have liked it all that much if it was just an ‘all Indians are so much better than whites’ story :D).