Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film

Introduction: Where to Concentrate

1 INTRODUCTION Where to Concentrate The Indian filmmakers, I would imagine, you know, we would concentrate on life, life itself. —Imagining Indians Imagic Moments “Native ceremonies, and imagic moments,” contends Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor, “create a sense of presence, and, at the same time, mask an absence: the rites of presence are ecstatic unions of time and place, and the absence, virtual masks of sorcery. Alas, the images of Indians are simulations ” (“Interimage” 231). In another place, he writes that “clearly, natives are the storiers of natural reason on this continent, and their stories are, as they have always been, the imagic moments of cultural conversions and native modernity” (“Ontic” 161). I take the phrase “imagic moments” as the title of this study in part because it so effectively allows for a crucial distinction : “images of Indians” are not the same as imagic moments. Images of Indians, Vizenor argues, are the inherited representations that mainstream culture offers back to mainstream culture: they are the images it offers to itself , that is. These (mis)representations can be seen to include depictions that Hollywood produces or those that ethnographic photography submits, for example. “The native persons in most portraits and photographs,” writes Vizenor, “became mere ethnographic simulations, silenced without names or narratives; the pictures were the coincidence of discoveries in the course of dominance” (“Interimage” 239). Imagic moments, in stark contrast, as I understand Vizenor’s concept and use it here, are the Indigenous stories, whether verbal or visual, that Indigenous people offer of themselves. These stories, the Indigenous films themselves in my context, are “ecstatic unions of place and time”; they constitute instances of self-representation and a form of visual sovereignty, and in every single frame they insist on survival. Indigenous films create a sense of presence , and through their presence they refute Hollywood depictions, other simulations or “images of Indians.” They replace both mainstream (mis)representations and the absence that results from such. They replace simulations with what Vizenor calls postindians. Indigenous films provide a Native presence where before there was none. Introduction 2 Self-Representation and a Cinema of Sovereignty In his essay “Ontic Images,” Vizenor writes that “natives must create their own stories; otherwise, the sources of their identities are not their own.” They “create stories of survivance, a sense of presence and distinctive identities in the very midst of . . . many contradictions and contingencies” (162, 164). In these few sentences, it seems to me, Vizenor articulates a concise and fundamental explanation of one of the major achievements of American Indian film: it is a medium through which Indigenous North Americans create and tell their own stories and thereby not only confront and challenge a range of political and historical contradictions but at the same time establish and maintain a presence that includes and privileges self-representation and selfdetermination . In her book Decolonizing Methodologies, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith makes an argument similar to Vizenor’s: “Telling our [Indigenous] stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the past are strategies which are commonly employed by indigenous peoples struggling for justice. . . . The need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance” (34–35). Inspired by these understandings of Indigenous self-representation and resistance , this study looks in detail at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada that—when placed in historical and generic contexts and explored through detailed readings—participate in creating instances of Smith’s forms of resistance as well as Vizenor’s “stories of survivance.” Indeed, the very existence of the films emphatically demonstrates Indigenous survival. Survivors. The Dead Can’t Dance. Screen Capture. Harmy Films. Where to Concentrate 3 The significance of self-representation as a form of resistance and as fundamental to appreciating Indigenous North American film cannot be overstated . In another context Vizenor reiterates the dangers of not allowing Native American Indians to speak for themselves. He writes that “anterior simulations of the other are cited in the generative interimages of the ‘discovered ’ indian, and without a substantive reference; one simulation becomes the specious evidence of another” (“Interimage” 229). The perpetuation and proliferation of these specious (mis)representations result in stereotypes and reductive renditions and misunderstandings. The simulation replaces the real and thereby becomes the real; hence the real real is lost. Several scholars of Indigenous literature and film make this assertion...