Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments I want to thank Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie, most of all for making Smoke Signals, and also for making time to talk and correspond with me ten years later about the film and its production and reception. I’m also grateful to the indefatigable Christy Cox, Wendy Hathaway, and Tamera Miyasato for keeping communications flowing. Other filmmakers, including Georgina Lightning and Sterlin Harjo, also shared stories about their own films and about Smoke Signals, and my thinking has benefited from the performers’ insights in print and online venues. I liked Smoke Signals the first time I saw it, in a theater in Tucson , Arizona, in 1998, but I didn’t begin to appreciate the film’s depth and durability until I began teaching it in a range of contexts —to high school students on the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, and to college students in southern Arizona and in central Missouri in film studies and Native American studies courses. The film appealed to these wide-ranging young audiences , and I had more to say about it each time I taught it. My thanks go out to all of my students for keeping me connected to their worlds and perspectives, and for helping me to see with fresh eyes. I’m deeply grateful to series editors Randy Lewis and David Delgado Shorter, and to Matt Bokovoy at the University of Nebraska Press, for inviting me to expand my early work on Smoke Signals as part of the Indigenous Films book series. Their astute comments and enthusiastic support for the project—not to mention their patience during the writing process—have meant a great deal to me. I also appreciate the work of copyeditor Sue Breckenridge and the fantastic manuscript editing and production staff. Crucial guidance and suggestions also came from the anonymous reviewers for the press and from conversations emerging from conference panels at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Native American Art Studies Association, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. x | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Along the way, a number of people shared ideas and important resources for primary and secondary research on Smoke Signals, including Aaron Bird Bear, Ned Blackhawk, Jim Cox, Maureen Konkle, Angelica Lawson, and Robert Warrior. Chad Allen, Susan Bernardin, Dean Rader, Michelle Raheja, Ken Roemer, Lisa Tatonetti, and Pam Wilson have been a wonderful and vital circle of support. This book is much the better for the feedback, time, and attention of my writing cohort—Elizabeth Chang, Sam Cohen , and Donna Strickland. Elaine Lawless deserves deep thanks for her unflagging encouragement, as does Anand Prahlad, for saying that Smoke Signals is the closest thing there is to a perfect movie. Elise Marubbio and Gerald Duchovnay provided a venue —the volume of Post-Script dedicated to Native American and Indigenous film—for the first publication of the interviews that appear in the appendix to this book. And this project took its first baby steps in an essay originally published in Western Folklore’s 2005 special double issue on film, which now forms a fragment of chapter 3. My deepest and happiest debts of gratitude are to my family for their unconditional love and their generosity of all kinds—the daily phone calls, the many photographs, the feasts, the gifts of music, the long walks, the gloriously crowded holidays. My mother, Betsy Hearne, deserves special devotion always, for her sustaining comradeship and intellectual nurture. And my gladdest thanks are to my partner in life, Chris Morrey, for building such a good house in his heart and in the world to shelter us and our beautiful sons, Desmond and Leo, whose stories are just unfolding . ...