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158| Scott Richard Lyons Dear Diary: How can I lay my hands on some of that sweaty tourist money this summer? Politically speaking, the time has probably never been better for a big budget Billy Jack remake. Yah, that’s the ticket. Think of the cross-marketing possibilities: Wrangler, Tony Lama, Stetson, MoveOn.org. Does anyone know if Laughlin uses e-mail? He would be perfect to play the aging sheriff with a big belly. Love ya, Hollywood Billy Jack f f f Scott Richard Lyons Three memories from my childhood come to mind as I consider the cultural tour de force that is the Billy Jack franchise. The first is my uncle Vern learning karate from a book sometime between the years 1973 and 1975. I remember watching him with great admiration and awe as he practiced his kicks in my grandparents’ backyard, pausingonlytotakeanoccasionalsipfromhiscanofbeer. The second is me at the age of nine or ten preparing for a schoolyard wrestling match with one of my chums by taking a good three minutes to dramatically remove my shoes and socks (and then learning a lesson about the pitfalls of brawling in bare feet); anyone familiar with Billy Jack will recognize the scene I was trying to replicate. My third memory is an entire generation of young Indian men my uncle’s age—he was born in the 1950s—wearing variations of what is now considered to be the standard American Indian Movement (AIM) uniform, but which was originally Billy Jack’s iconic outfit: denim jeans and jacket, cowboy boots, a black flat-brimmed hatwithabeadedheadband.Thesearejustchildhoodmemories,hencesubjecttoalloftheusual caveats. Yet they are also images of an era that should not be underestimated for its cultural and political importance to Indians: Red Power. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that in the early to mid-seventies, we were all, in one way or another, Billy Jack. TomLaughlin,aMinneapolis-bornwhiteman,directed(underthepseudonymT.C.Frank) Billy Jack| 159 all four Billy Jack films. He cowrote the final three with wife Delores Taylor (who plays Billy’s love interest, Jean, in the films) under the pseudonyms Frank and Teresa Christina. He also starred in the lead role. Laughlin created a classic American hero in the character of Billy, a “half-breed” ex–Green Beret living in the dusty wilds of some unnamed Arizona reservation after his return from Vietnam, where among other things, as we learn, he refused to participate in the My Lai Massacre. Using a combination of martial arts, gunplay, and mystical Indian tricks, Billy protects children, Natives, horses, and hippies from local oligarchs, corrupt cops, and racist rednecks. Like his nineteenth-century cultural ancestor, Cooper’s Natty Bumppo from the Leatherstocking Tales, Billy understands both the supposedly civilized world, which he thinks a sham, and the Indian world, which represents a vastly more compelling alternative. Unlike Cooper, Laughlin didn’t situate his character between different groups of warring savages—a narrative maneuver that couldn’t help but create a false distinction between good and bad Indians—but rather between two irreconcilable political worlds: on the one side, a white supremacist reign of terror waged by powerful elites who take whatever they want in order to forge a society in their own image; on the other, a diverse, radical, and democratic society privileging the young, the female, the poor, the marginalized, and of course the Indian. While occupying a liminal space himself, Billy Jack always defends that second world without apology, as did Laughlin. Billy Jack was the second and by far the most successful film in Laughlin’s quartet. The first was The Born Losers (1967), an extremely violent exploitation film introducing Billy through a confrontation with an obnoxious biker gang terrorizing a small coastal town and running a rape house. It is in the second film, Billy Jack (1971), that Laughlin truly begins to flesh out his melancholy character and develop the themes that run throughout the series: social justice, environmentalism, nonviolent resistance, and more. In this film, Billy Jack defends an alternative school and hippie commune, located on tribal land, from small-minded townspeople and local leaders with ulterior motives. Although the movie predates the real-life Wounded Knee standoff by two years, it remarkably concludes with an outgunned Billy Jack holed up in a small church trying to keep surrounding authorities at bay. As its title indicates, The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) is set in the aftermath of Billy Jack’s standoff and provides more...

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