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98 SIX Keep Your Pony Out of My Garden Powwow Highway and “Being Cheyenne” philbert: In the old days, how long did a take a warrior to gather medicine? harriet: What’d you do, find a token in a Cracker Jacks box? philbert: I had a sign. The time has come for me to gather medicine. [Harriet cackles.] philbert: I already have a pony. What did the old ones say about . . . harriet: [interrupting] I get sick of being asked for good old Indian wisdom. I ain’t got none. So get the hell outta here. [Philbert starts to leave.] harriet: Hey Fat Philbert, come! Here’s a quote from Dull Knife. He once told my Great Uncle Benny Looks Twice, he said: “Keep your pony out of my garden.” —Powwow Highway The exchange between Philbert (Gary Farmer) and his Aunt Harriet (Maria Antoinette Rogers) early in the film Powwow Highway suggests that Jonathan Wacks’s film adaptation of David Seals’s 1979 novel, The Powwow Highway, combines a man’s search for identity with both sarcasm and humor. As an early indication of Philbert’s quest for a sense of self and an understanding of his Cheyenne heritage, the exchange also implies that along with that humor the film raises serious questions about appropriation as well as about genuine cultural and spiritual renewal. Aunt Harriet’s reference to Dull Knife foreshadows the film’s emphasis on historical awareness and connectedness versus the Hollywood trope of the vanishing Indian, and it also anticipates the several intertextual references to Cheyenne Autumn, John Ford’s 1964 historical fiction film that traces Dull Knife and Little Wolf as they flee the U.S. Calvary in their attempt to reach their homeland. Intertextuality allows Powwow Highway to talk back to Hollywood by challenging the stock version of history with its limited point of view and thereby overturn long-standing filmic attitudes. The film takes control of history and provides a vehicle for Indigenous self-representation. Powwow Highway is a narrative fiction film set in the twentieth century and based on a novel by Huron writer David Seals. Though directed by nonNative Jonathan Wacks, the film has a largely Indigenous cast, with Cayuga Powwow Highway 99 actor Gary Farmer as Philbert, Apache/Cheyenne actor Joanelle Nadine Romero as Bonnie, and Cherokee actor Wes Studi as Buff, for example. It is not clear that A Martinez, the actor who plays Buddy Red Bow (Red Bird in the novel), has any Native American ancestry. Kilpatrick assumes that he is non-Native, writing that “since Buddy Red Bow is the lead character in a film that consciously deals with appropriation of identity, a Native American actor would have been a better choice” (119). Rodney Simard agrees, and suggests that “in terms of ethnicity” the casting of Martinez to play Buddy is “problematic” (20). In his discussion of the issue of non-Indians playing Indian roles in Westerns, Eric Anderson makes no mention whatsoever of Martinez’s heritage. This silence is perhaps appropriate, for on at least one website Martinez self-identifies as tribal: “My mother was part Blackfoot Indian and they were from the Dakotas” (Martinez), and a Santa Fe newspaper identifies him as “part Blackfoot” (Santa Fe Reporter). Interestingly, in the context of tribal affiliation, it is Martinez’s character who is quite ambivalent about his tribal past and heritage. Briefly recounted, Powwow Highway tells the story of two Cheyenne men, Philbert Bono and Buddy Red Bow, who leave Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana and drive to Santa Fe in a beat-up wreck, a 1964 Buick that Philbert names Protector the War Pony. Their mission is to rescue Buddy’s long-lost sister, Bonnie Red Bow (Joanelle Nadine Romero), who has been wrongly imprisoned. The mining interests in Montana, with the help of the Santa Fe police and the fbi, have arrested Bonnie in order to get the politically active and tribally influential Buddy away from his center of power immediately before an important vote concerning the renewal of a mining operation on the reservation, a mining operation he opposes and evidently has the political power to get defeated. Philbert has a two-fold purpose in taking the trip to Santa Fe with Buddy. He too wants to rescue Bonnie, but he also wants to continue his quest to gather medicine. En route he takes an excursion to the sacred site of Sweet Butte, South Dakota, attends a...

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