Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising

2. “The Storyteller Is Part of the Story”: Making Smoke Signals

32 chapter two “The Storyteller Is Part of the Story” Making Smoke Signals In Smoke Signals, Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s joke that “the only thing more pathetic than Indians on tv is Indians watching Indians on tv” seems to function as the film’s defining moment , a cinematic statement of thesis that is worth returning to in contemplating the relationship between the film’s production and its audiences. The joke characterizes both televised Indians and the Native audience that consumes Hollywood’s images of them as “pathetic.” But Thomas’s blithe tone finds a counterpoint in moments of more understated pathos in the film, such as when the young Victor Joseph (played by Cody Lightning, Cree), Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s friend, occasional tormentor, and symbolic “brother ,” witnesses his mother and father fighting in the living room in front of a small television set playing an old black-and-white Western. “Indians watching Indians on tv” becomes part of Victor ’s household environment as he is presented with both televised and familial forms of psychological trauma at once, and his father Arnold’s abandonment of the family following this fight is linked metonymically and metaphorically to the screen tropes of military suppression and vanished Indians. The broadcast images assault and transform intimate spaces in the film, and the young Victor, as the “spectator” of both screen and domestic performances of conflict, absorbs and learns from the scripts and scenes he witnesses. The generic media images come to stand for the effects of colonization in the home and in Victor’s own psyche, while his parents’ domestic disputes take on the magnitude of genocide, war, and dispossession . Parallel with the characters—Arnold and Arlene fighting in front of the television screen, Victor watching—the Native actors are also performing what are to some extent scripted roles against the backdrop of the screen, communicating to, among other audi- “THE STORYTELLER IS PART OF THE STORY” | 33 ences, young Native viewers—a layered configuration that, in a media landscape saturated with stereotypes, raises complex issues of performance, spectatorship, and reception. The image of a young Native viewer making meaning from pop-culture symbols broadcast into the home is a central fixture in Sherman Alexie’s autobiographical anecdotes and in his poetry, fiction, and filmmaking. Alexie adapted the screenplay for Smoke Signals from his short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a title that refers to the staging of Indigenous resistance and revitalization in the arena of mass entertainment. Images of media relations in Alexie’s fiction and screenplay speak to issues of accessibility, adaptation, and the performance and reproduction of Indigeneity in the public sphere—elements that are brought together in the way young Native spectators are imagined as both the objects of representation and as interpreters of media. This figure is important, too, because the very existence of Native audiences works against narratives of Indian vanishing (since the “vanishing” trope presumes that there are no Native people in the contemporary world, only in past, or in the virtual playground of the screen) and disturbs fixed assumptions of audience homogeneity embedded in mass-media content. This idea of Native spectatorship as an image of both colonization and resistance—as well as the idea of performative address to such spectators through Native acting—helped to carry the production of Smoke Signals from script to screen. Performances involve heightened, specially framed relationships between performer and audience, thus forming and playing with the boundaries of staging and inviting audiences to understand the performed communication in a particular way. Performance, then, can be seen as a form of display, a way of saying, “Look at this, not that.” Like the lens of a camera, performative framing focuses our attention and opens up the content of the performance within the frame for special scrutiny. Theories of performing arts have often focused on the relationship of performance to fixed texts: to what extent does an actor change the meaning of a text through his or 34 | “THE STORYTELLER IS PART OF THE STORY” her interpretation of it? To what extent does a text establish and hold a stable core of meaning across various performances? Employing a different approach, folklorists and anthropologists have theorized performances as socially and culturally communicative events: how are performances used to accomplish social actions? Theorizing the performance of Indigeneity in Smoke Signals, then, represents a key bridge...