The Philosophy of the Western

REGENERATION THROUGH STORIES AND SONG: The View from the Other Side of the West in Smoke Signals

291 REGENERATION THROUGH STORIES AND SONG The View from the Other Side of the West in Smoke Signals Richard Gilmore What is it that makes a western a western? Is a western a western because of where it is situated? Is the West of a western a place or a plot or an attitude, or is it some still more vague concept that includes all of these but is reducible to none? By location, Smoke Signals (Chris Eyre, 1998) is certainly a western, but location seems an especially insufficient criterion for identifying what makes a western a western. Richard Slotkin, in his book Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, argues that the myth of the West is the founding myth of the American identity. He speaks of the founding fathers in “the American mythogenesis” as those “who tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness.”1 Included in this “implacable and opulent wilderness” were the indigenous people of the land, and so they were part of the violence, the subjects of the violence, that brought forth the new nation. Slotkin says, “Myth describes a process . . . by which knowledge is transformed into power; it provides a scenario or prescription for action, defining and limiting the possibilities for human response to the universe.”2 The same could be said of stories in general. If the traditional westerns, novels and films, are part of the founding myth of the American identity, what role does, or can, a story from the other side of the myth, a story about indigenous people told by and from the perspective of indigenous people, play? Smoke Signals is just such a story, the first feature film that was written, directed, and coproduced by Native Americans. The question is a philosophical one, and it will take some philosophy to answer it. Bruce Wilshire, in his The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Prag- 292 Richard Gilmore matism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought, finds, as his title suggests, the roots of American pragmatism, the unique philosophical contribution to world philosophy by America, in Native American thought. As Wilshire says of pragmatism, “It is original because it is aboriginal.”3 Both Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) had many encounters with Native Americans, and both were deeply impressed with Native American ways of regarding and thinking about nature. Insofar as Emerson and Thoreau are responsible for writing our founding intellectual texts, as such contemporary philosophers as Cornel West and Stanley Cavell have argued,4 they are also responsible for constructing some important elements of our American identity. That American identity as it is articulated in Emerson and Thoreau’s transcendentalism and then later in the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952), is profoundly inclusive, strives always for ways to sustain a relationship with complexity, is nondogmatic, and always has as its aim the amelioration of pain and suffering. At the same time, it is also an expression of the American character that has treated its indigenous people with such terrible violence and cruelty. This tension in the American identity comes to the fore when we consider the movie Smoke Signals as a part of the genre of the western. Smoke Signals is composed of several overlapping and interweaving stories, but the core story is of the journey made by Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams) to recover the truck and cremated remains of Victor’s father, Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer). They are Coeur d’Alene Indians living on the Coeur d’Alene reservation in Idaho. Arnold’s remains are outside Phoenix, Arizona, where Arnold moved when he abandoned his family. Neither Victor nor his mother, Arlene Joseph (Tantoo Cardinal), have enough money to pay for his trip down to Phoenix , and that is how Thomas gets to go along. Thomas has saved enough coins and bills to pay for the trip for both of them and offers it to Victor on the condition that he, Thomas, go along with him. Victor is resistant to that suggestion because there have been tensions between the two since early childhood, but he finally relents. The movie begins and ends with fire. Fire is the primary trope for the violence that is both perpetrated and suffered by all the major characters in the movie. It is also the primary trope for the possibility of regeneration . Although Victor seems to...