The Indigenous Imposition: Settling Expectation, Unsettling Revision, and the Politics of Playing with Familiarity

The artist Steven Paul Judd’s (Kiowa/Choctaw) short claymation film Neil Discovers the Moon opens on a black screen, and as we hear the line “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” the film cuts to an astronaut figurine slowly raising the American flag and plunging it into the moon’s rocky soil. The famous line “a giant leap for mankind” plays in the background as the astronaut firmly digs the flag into the moonscape. The careful listener will notice the astronaut “breathing” during this scene, but the sound of the astronaut’s respiration is actually the familiar, ominous, and mechanical sound of Darth Vader’s breathing apparatus from the movie Star Wars. As this iconic breathing continues in the background, the astronaut releases his grip on the flag when suddenly a hand lightly taps him on the leg. The camera swings out and pans to reveal a young, dark-skinned, Native American girl sitting on the ground next to where the flag has been planted. She looks up at the astronaut and then asks in her Indigenous language, subtitled in English, “Does this mean we have to move again?” The screen swallows to black, with only a circular spotlight preserved on the mask of the astronaut. As he looks directly at the camera, the video once again reverts to audio from the space mission, intoning, “Uhh . . . Houston, we have a problem.”

This film does a lot with its thirty seconds of on-screen action through its invocation of the science fiction (SF) cultural touchstone of Star Wars, the technologies of space exploration, and an emplacement of what I term an “Indigenous imposition” of the Native girl in a futuristic context. The aural blending of NASA transmissions and Vader’s breathing is not particularly surprising here, as there has always been a connection between the SF genre and technologies of space exploration. A concise but exemplary piece of Indigenous Futurist art, Judd’s film is deceptively complex in its deployment of a revisional aesthetic, here accomplished through the juxtaposition of Indigenous and pop-culture symbolism, historical allusion, and a chiastic temporality that slips back and forth across settler-colonial and Indigenous frames of historical reference.

The initial sense of futurity is here accomplished through the use of an otherworldly lunar setting, the implied travel between solar bodies, and the figure of the astronaut—presumably Neil Armstrong, per the title of the film. The space race and lunar landing still manage to evoke a futurist framework within the American cultural imaginary; however, given that the audio transmission used in the closing seconds of Judd’s film is from a different lunar mission, one that never actually landed on the moon (Apollo 13), it is reasonable to assume that the scene and space-race references here are intended rather to call to mind a vague type of nationalism and futurity rather than a precise mimetic construction of any single mission. “Armstrong,” visage concealed behind the faceless reflective glass of his helmet, is generalized through this anonymity and therefore similarly nonspecific: because Armstrong is one of the best-known astronauts other than Buzz Aldrin, the title of the film, while specifying Armstrong’s name, seems to operate more as a metonymy for NASA and “American greatness” during the fullest flourish of the race for space rather than any individual astronaut. Seen in this context, the lunar scene and the NASA figure serve as generalized, somewhat nonspecific representations of space exploration. In that sense, the film toys with the representational force that outer space plays in the U.S. cultural imaginary—a place of the radically foreign and heretofore unknown, and therefore ripe for discovery. And, of course, despite the futurist orientation of space exploration, these referenced NASA events (Apollo 11 and 13) transpired about fifty years ago. Here Judd has chosen signifiers of a “future” that nonetheless have their material reality in the past. As an intertextual complement to this future-historical frame, Judd has inserted the additional aural texture of Vader’s breathing, pregnant with its own pop...