Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising

Introduction—“A Way to Sit at the Same Table”: Indigenizing Popular Culture

xv Introduction — “A Way to Sit at the Same Table” Indigenizing Popular Culture Smoke Signals is the most widely recognized and frequently taught film in the field of Native American cinema. The creative duo behind the film’s production, director Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho) and author/screenwriter Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), marketed it as “the first film to be directed , acted, and produced by Native Americans to have a major distribution deal.” Among its many awards were the Audience Award and Filmmakers’ Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival. The film has been a critical and financial success and has become a Native cinema classic, appreciated by Native and non-Native audiences and appearing frequently in high school and college course lists. Released in 1998, Smoke Signals is both an event—a historical milestone in the development of Native American filmmaking —and an innovative work of cinematic storytelling that calls for sustained critical attention. For some viewers, this was the first film to tell a story they recognized ; for others it was a gateway to understanding perspectives outside of their experience. The film can be seen as a landmark “first” in American film history—although it is important to remember the long history of Native filmmaking that came before Smoke Signals—and it can also be seen as a self-positioned first introduction to Native perspectives and Native filmmaking for many of its viewers. These “firsts,” like stepping stones, invite us to move from celebrating the film’s accomplishment to recognizing its activism. As an intervention, Smoke Signals challenges widely accepted misconceptions about Native Americans. Its “firsts” can be seen in different ways as inaugurating a new generation of Native film production; as an important but also problematic industry marketing category; as part of a critical paradigm based xvi | INTRODUCTION on sovereignty; and as a strategic creation of politicized space for Indigenous identity in the public mediascape. Smoke Signals is a pivotal film for a host of reasons. It signaled a generational shift in Native artistic production toward young writers and artists immersed in the same media they set out to subvert, with its film-school-trained director and media-fluent literary star writer. The film’s release in 1998 bookended a decade that began with the 1990 release of the nostalgic, romanticized representations of Plains Indians in Dances with Wolves, and the subsequent political struggle over representations of Native American and European contact surrounding the 1992 Columbus Quincentennary. The questions that emerged during that public conversation—Who should be celebrated in such an anniversary, and who should do the celebrating? Why is this history publicly celebrated at all?—are issues that Smoke Signals raises with equal intensity in its focus on another calendrical marker, U.S. Independence Day celebrations. Smoke Signals also consciously counters representations of Indians in conventional Westerns in iconoclastic, humorous ways. And with all its teasing and playful performativity, the film deflects a certain habit of intrusive public curiosity about Native Americans. If Smoke Signals intervenes in mainstream media’s representations of Indians, it also forges a connection between those images, with their mass audiences, and distinctively Indigenous points of view. This intervention is not just a counter-appropriation; to borrow Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s term, it is also an “Indigenization” of mass media. Yet Smoke Signals is an energetic and ambiguous film in part because it refuses to function as an outsider’s guide to Native cultures. It reaches out to both Native and non-Native viewers, yet declines to answer questions or divulge cultural information; viewers are expected to keep up. Smoke Signals may look like other American films in its use of established formulas—it’s a road movie, a buddy movie, a comedy, a family drama—but when we look more closely we see that these familiar conventions take on different meanings, reshaping American cinema from within. Sherman Alexie refers to his pop-culture INTRODUCTION | xvii references as “cultural currency” because popular culture creates common ground: “It’s a way for us to sit at the same table. I use pop culture like most poets use Latin.” Yet at the same time, audiences are never allowed to forget that Native viewers take in the lingua franca of pop from a radically different position than other audiences: “Superman means something different to me than it does to a white guy from Ames, Iowa or New York City or...