Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

2. Native America, Thunderheart, and the National Imaginary

Every state, according to Edward Spicer, is a plural entity, containing within itself two or more nations. Although the widespread use of the term nation-state tends to obscure the fact, the nation-state is not a “welded unity,” but rather, almost without exception, consists of several entities that have long been considered nations in their own right, possessing distinct languages, histories, and cultural symbols.1 Until recently, nation-states have generally succeeded in concealing or eradicating the cultural particularity of these “hidden nations”; today, however, partly due to the fascination of the mass media, many are becoming increasingly visible in ways that implicitly challenge the monological narrative of the state order. Native American nations are a striking case in point: historically among the most deeply hidden of the nations within the state, native nations have begun to break free of the “cocoon of invisibility” that the dominant culture had woven around them, an emergence thematized in several recent films that foreground the historical and poetic dimensions of native life.2 With this increasing visibility, Indian nations have also begun to acquire a different status and meaning within what Annette Hamilton calls the “national imaginary”—the collectively held images circulating within the dominant culture that aim to distinguish the “national self” from “national others.”3 In place of the disfiguring stereotypes of the past, Hollywood films and documentaries have recently visualized Indian nations as desirable alternatives to the nation-state, imaginative 38 2 Native America, Thunderheart, and the National Imaginary substitutes for a state order that, as one writer says, “has largely lost the ability to confer an adequate sense of identity upon its people.”4 Although Native Americans have yet to gain access to the resources to tell their own stories in feature-length films, the complex forms of identificatory desire evoked by works such as Thunderheart, Geronimo, Pocahontas, Legends of the Fall, and Dances with Wolves, along with recent documentaries such as Five Hundred Nations and The Way West, suggest that contemporary images of Native America have become even more powerfully imbricated with the national imaginary than in the past. Hamilton employs the term national imaginary to describe the way cultural identity coalesces not simply around a set of positive images , but, just as important, in opposition to images of the other, against which the self, or the nation, can be distinguished. Rather than emerging from concrete experience, the national imaginary is formed from the circulation of negative images or stereotypes of national others against whom the national self is defined. Hamilton compares this oppositional logic with the Lacanian mirror-stage, “a moment in development when the child sees itself in the mirror, while thinking it sees another.” Images of national “others,” she argues, actually represent unacknowledged reflections or aspects of the national self: “Imaginary relations at the social, collective level can thus be seen as ourselves looking at ourselves while we think we are seeing others.” Stereotypes of national others may be understood as the split-off parts of the national self, aspects of nation that are sensible or visible only when projected onto the other.5 The identities defining the national imaginary can change, however , when the nation’s sense of coherence is threatened. Hamilton suggests that this is the case in Australia, where the need to secure a stable national image and identity, an identity that has never been adequately defined, has been exacerbated by the widespread influence of external cultural forms now inundating Australia as a consequence of globalization . This has led to a widespread reevaluation of what it is to be Australian, a reevaluation that has transformed the meaning and significance of the native Aboriginal culture for white society. Long seen as an undesirable internal other, Aborigines have recently acquired a new prestige as embodiments of an organic Australian culture and spirituality that has survived for thousands of years, an identity that the dominant culture now wishes to claim as an aspect of its own heriThunderheart and the National Imaginary  39 tage. As Hamilton says, “Aboriginal identity may well become the Australian identity of the future, something not chosen by us, but imposed on us by the land itself.”6 A similar shift appears to be occurring in the way Native Americans are perceived in the United States. Indians, of course, have long held a prominent position within the U.S. national imaginary, providing the principal terms of otherness—savagism, infantilism...