Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground

Notes

177 notes Acknowledgments 1. See also my article on recent Navajo filmmakers as another complement to this book: “The New Navajo Cinema: Film and Nation in the Indigenous Southwest,” Velvet Light Trap 66 (Fall 2010): 50–61. 2. When I use this image, I am indebted to my friend Katie Stewart and her book A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Introduction 1. Brenda Norrell and Carolyn Calvin, “Navajo Talking Picture Selected for French Film Festival” (1997), from a website devoted to Navajo issues: http:// www.yvwiiusdinvnohii.net/articles/nav-film.htm. A slightly different version of this article appeared in print as Carolyn Calvin, “Arlene Bowman: Navajo Filmmaker,” News from Indian Country, February 28, 1997, 1b. 2. Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, “Navajo Talking Picture” (review), sva Newsletter , Summer 1987, 18. 3. Reviews quoted in the Women Make Movies catalog entry for the film. The distributor’s catalog is online at http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/ c277.shtml. 4. Les W. Field, “Dynamic Tensions in Indigenous Sovereignty and Representation : A Sampler,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 3 (2003): 45. 5. Navajo studies, broadly defined, is a small industry: a WorldCat database search of the word reveals 7,499 nonfiction books, excluding juvenile titles. A full WorldCat search of all titles containing the word “Navajo” produces a staggering 11,017 entries, which does not account for videos, cds, and other media on the subject (such as the 372 videotapes or dvds that are listed), nor relevant books that might not include the word “Navajo” in the title. 6. One example of the way that cinema is excluded from consideration as “Navajo art”: there is no mention of it in books that survey Navajo creativity, such as Jerry and Lois Jacka’s Enduring Traditions: Art of the Navajos (Flagstaff az: Northland Press, 1994). 7. The literature on the commodification of Native culture is substantial and well worth reading. Among the most useful books are Leah Dilworth’s excellent Imaging Indians in the Southwest (Washington dc: Smithsonian Press, 1997), and Erika Marie Bsumek’s important study, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008). Another recent book on the subject that has been well received is Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2009). An older book that remains helpful is Nancy J. Parezo, Navajo Sandpainting: From Religious Act to Commercial Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983). On how merchants had “an extensive influence on the transformation of Navajo sandpainting into a successful ethnic art” (187), see pages 164–91. For a good account of the first commercial sandpainters to emerge in the 1930s, see pages 101–21. Also worth considering are Colleen O’Neill, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); and Molly Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 2001). A more general perspective on commodification is provided in Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer, eds., Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). 8. Faye Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 173. 9. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2000), 216. 10. See Lewis, “The New Navajo Cinema.” 11. Back cover blurb on rerelease of Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 12. In calling Bowman “the first Navajo filmmaker,” I do not mean to slight the creative efforts of the participants in Sol Worth and John Adair’s famous experiment in the midsixties. As I’ll describe in chapter 6, I have great respect for their beautiful short films. Nonetheless, there is a difference between being paid to join an intercultural experiment for a few months and choosing to make a career in cinema as Bowman has done. However, in the interest of thoroughness, I should mention one other forgotten Navajo predecessor. In a foreword to the revised edition of Worth and Adair’s account of their experiment , Through Navajo Eyes, their colleague Richard Chalfen describes how Adair had guided a Navajo painter named Johnny Sakatero into filmmaking. In 1971 Sakatero...