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202 THIRTEEN People Come Around in Circles Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind People come around in circles. Never ending circles, but you’re never that far away from home. You always come back. —Four Sheets to the Wind Four Sheets to the Wind, writer-director Sterlin Harjo’s first feature-length film, tells the story of two young adult siblings in the days and weeks just after the death of their father. The opening scene depicts the son, Cufe Smallhill (Cody Lightning), as he drags his dead father into a pond, where he lays him to rest. Following this internment, Cufe, his mother (Jeri Arredondo), and his cousin Jim (Jon Proudstar) improvise a funeral complete with a coffin and singing, but without the father’s body. After the funeral Cufe travels to Tulsa to visit his sister, Miri (Tamara Podemski), and there he meets and goes out with his sister’s neighbor Francie (Laura Bailey) before returning home. Meanwhile, after a failed suicide attempt, Miri herself comes home. In the final sequence, Cufe leaves the house on his way to travel with his new friend Francie, and the film comes full circle in that he stops to revisit the pond where he placed his father in the opening sequence. Interspersed throughout the film are several voice-overs that the viewer ultimately discovers are spoken by the dead father himself, Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman). This brief plot summary indicates that Four Sheets to the Wind, like several other American Indian films discussed in previous chapters, prizes how an Indian man’s importance and influence remain well after his death. Much like Smoke Signals, The Business of Fancydancing, Skins, and other recent American Indian films, Four Sheets to the Wind portrays and contextualizes the death of a significant character and insists upon the subsequent lives of those who survive that death. The dead father maintains an influence, as we have seen, well after his literal death, and in a figurative sense, he does not die at all; he certainly does not vanish. Indeed, the film insists on the centrality of the Indian man who dies, and it thus lends itself to an argument about an Indigenous film’s need to talk back to and refute Hollywood’s insistence on the vanishing Indian. This chapter argues specifically that Harjo makes central the legacy of the deceased American Indian father. The film moves well Four Sheets to the Wind 203 beyond a depiction of the individual’s death and a mere refutation of Hollywood , however. Harjo’s film ultimately points toward the future by focusing on the subsequent lives of that man’s children. At the same time it shares with several other Indigenous North American films the portrayal of the death of an Indian man, Harjo’s film indicates how far American Indian film evolved in the nearly ten years between the release of Chris Eyre’s first feature, Smoke Signals, in 1998, and the release of Harjo’s first feature in 2007. In the earlier film, the actor Cody Lightning plays the twelve-year-old Victor, whereas in the later film, the same actor plays the young adult Cufe Smallhill. Tamara Podemski (who plays Miri Smallhill) performed roles as the teenaged character Little Margaret in Dance Me Outside (1994) and as Rox in Johnny Greyeyes (2000). Jeri Arredondo, who plays Hunter’s mother in The Doe Boy, takes the role of the widowed mother, Cora Smallhill in Four Sheets to the Wind. In this sense, the members of the cast of young leads and supporting actors in Harjo’s film have grown up with, and come of age with, American Indian film as a very present reality. The director, Sterlin Harjo, is of the same generation as many in his cast. Together they constitute a young generation of Indigenous artists involved in film and filmmaking. In this context the title of a review essay about the tenyear anniversary of Chris Eyre’s film—“Gone with the Wind: A Decade after Smoke Signals, Success Remains Elusive for Native American Filmmakers” (see Fleischer)—misrepresents the achievements of several recent Indigenous filmmakers, Sterlin Harjo among them. One can quibble about what constitutes success, especially if one limits a concept of success to the box office, but clearly Indigenous North American film developed significantly in those particular ten years. Take for example the film’s title: Four Sheets to the Wind. The title and the dead father’s name...

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