Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film

4. Prophesizing on the Virtual Reservation: Imprint and It Starts with a Whisper

Prophesizing on the Virtual Reservation Imprint and It Starts with a Whisper The Keep America Beautiful Inc. public service announcement featuring Iron Eyes Cody and other visual artifacts circulate the image of the ghostly Indian as a figment of an American imagination invested in Native Americans as spectral entities of a tragic and mostly elided past within a broader field of historical amnesia. Drawing from Donald Pease’s assertion that scholars of American studies, including postcolonial critics, “have fallen into the ideological trap of American exceptionalism by concluding ‘that colonialism had little or nothing to do with the formation of the U.S. national identity,’” Ali Behdad argues that European American “anamnestic disavowal” of U.S. national origins and history of genocide against Indigenous peoples is both intentional and is “a crucial component of its national culture.”1 Native Americans become apparitional excesses in the dominant culture’s repressed imagination, which seems perpetually unable to confront the violence of its founding. “The ghost makes itself known to us through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of feeling of 4 a reality we come to experience as recognition,” Avery Gordon writes. “Haunting recognition is a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening.”2 Native American ghosts haunt the North American literary and visual cultural imagination to remind settler nations of the unspeakable, horrific past. Native American ghostly images remind the nation of its brutal past, but ironically also give lie to the concerted national effort to render Native American communities extinct. Speaking against these silences instituted by historical uses of the ghostly effect, Native American writers and filmmakers often employ the figure of the ghost as a means to draw attention to the embodied present and future. Two recent Native American films in particular perform this double function, at the same time they provide a way to represent Native American spirituality on tribally specific terms. In Chris Eyre’s Imprint (2007) and Shelley Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper (1993), gendered ghostly images invoke a violent past in order to trouble conventional readings of historical events but also to reconfigure temporality. Imprint offers a reading of the horrors of events at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890 as an allegory for a vibrant Lakota future rather than only as a melancholic elegy of an unsettled and unsettling past. Likewise, It Starts with a Whisper evokes spectral Tupelo tribal members as a means to engage with Mohawk aesthetics in the past, present, and future. As Bliss Cua Lim asserts, “The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles the boundaries of the past, present, and future, and cannot be written back to the complacency of a homogeneous empty time.”3 Images of Native American ghosts in dominant culture representations can compel audiences to an emotional economy of guilt and remorse, but this does not serve contemporary Indigenous communities invested in visual technologies 146 Prophesizing on the Virtual Reservation that reflect the creative, robust vitality of living people. I discuss the work of contemporary Native American filmmakers whose projects stimulate discourses that take the figure of the ghost and its attendant evocation of spirituality seriously, attempting not to fall prey to the kind of nostalgic, past-tense vision of Indigenous culture that bolsters the myth of the vanishing Indian. I do so by welding a discussion of Indigenous mass-mediated ghosts to discourses of prophecy in order to argue that film and other forms of new media operate as a space of the virtual reservation , a space where Native American filmmakers put the long, vexed history of Indigenous representations into dialogue with epistemic Indigenous knowledges. After contextualizing how the virtual reservation signifies in film and then how Indigenous prophecy works as an embodied discourse in visual culture, I examine two films that foreground the importance of spirituality as an enabling tool for combating colonialism and reengaging Indigenous epistemologies without attempting to explain particular aspects of specific tribal practices or inviting spectators to partake of Indigenous spirituality through commodification and consumption. Imprint and It Starts with a Whisper are two key films that create and intervene into discourses surrounding the supernatural. These films overturn the image of the static ghostly Indian through Indigenous manifestations of the spirit and conflations of...