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68 FOUR A Concordance of Narrative Voices Harold, Trickster, and Harold of Orange The trickster in the oral tradition, however, would overturn the very printed page on which his name has been printed. And certainly the trickster would blur the television screen. —Gerald Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse: Comic,” 69 The thirty-minute film Harold of Orange, which won a Film in the Cities competition , premiering in Minneapolis on May 17, 1984, is set in Minneapolis– St. Paul, one of several urban areas to which American Indians were relocated throughout the middle of the twentieth century. But this film offers a reversal of the relocation stories told in The Exiles and House Made of Dawn. Unlike House Made of Dawn, which is in large measure a story about how the city defeats the protagonist before forcing him home, Harold of Orange depicts a group of reservation men, the Warriors of Orange, who descend upon the city only long enough to exploit the mainstream system before loping back to the reservation with the loot, as it were. The film tells the story of Harold Sinseer (sincere, sin seer) (Charlie Hill) and his group of friends, the other Warriors of Orange, as they travel from the reservation to the city to present their proposal to a foundation grant agency for a (bogus) pinch-bean coffee enterprise. After introductions in the agency’s boardroom, the presentation before the board members, by the self-identified Trickster Harold, consists of a school bus ride through the city with three stops: a naming ceremony in a parking lot, a visit to a university anthropology department’s museum, and a softball game in a city park. The plot is rounded out with a return to the boardroom before the Trickster Warriors ride home to the reservation. In this chapter I argue that Harold of Orange, directed by Richard Weiss, allows Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), the author of the screenplay, to challenge and talk back to mainstream attitudes toward American Indians. Vizenor ’s targets of special interest are dominant, mainstream articulations of history and culture. Vizenor thus manipulates the viewer in part by overcoming what might be seen as the inappropriateness or impossibility of creating visual, representational images of the trickster. The film undermines the dominant culture’s false images, or what Vizenor calls simulations, by Harold of Orange 69 actually presenting them, but presenting them on his own terms. The film borrows and coopts for its own purposes such quintessentially European American institutions as boardrooms, parking lots, softball games, museums , and television and radio Westerns. The medium of film allows Vizenor the opportunity to confront and transcend dominant (mis)representations and (mis)understandings in a coopted version of the dominant culture’s own visual culture. Harold is continually on the move in what might be called typical trickster fashion: he sidesteps an old college girlfriend, the non-Native Fannie Mason (Cathleen Fuller), to whom he still owes money; he maneuvers the board’s director into lending him the money he owes Fannie; he “shape-shifts” at the softball game by changing team T-shirts; he turns a racist board member’s stereotype about Indian drinking to his own advantage to seal the grant deal; he manages to repay Fannie without incurring any debt himself; and he escapes successful and unscathed back to the reservation. From the outset, Harold of Orange takes several occasions to insist that the Warriors generally and Harold specifically constitute tricksters. The opening intertitle provides this pertinent information: “Now, Harold and the Warriors of Orange, tribal tricksters determined to reclaim their estate from the white man, are challenging his very foundations” (Harold, my emphasis). The film’s theme song, sung by Native artist Buffy St. Marie, is called “Trickster ,” and the viewer sees Harold climb out of the car and self-identify as a trickster: “We are the Warriors of Orange, tricksters in the new school of sociocupuncture” (Harold, my emphasis). Late in the film, Fannie calls Harold a “rotten trickster,” and in a voice-over as the bus leaves the city near the end of the film, Harold reminds the viewer once again: “We are tricksters in the best humor” (Harold, my emphasis). At the same time the film takes such care to establish Harold as a trickster, the actual physical corporeality, the human representation, of Harold is also established from the very opening sequence when the strictly verbal description of the intertitle is made manifest by the visual depiction of Harold, the man...

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