Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western

Coda: Persistent Vision

Coda Persistent Vision Across the twentieth and into the twenty‑first century, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences. While both the specificity and range of this Native participation have often been obscured by the on‑screen, larger‑than‑life images of Indians in the Western, recovering historical films reveals the complexity of Native interventions in cinema production and consump‑ tion. At the same time, the study of Native American images in cinema need not focus solely on mainstream representations, or on the elements of dominant U.S. culture and values that Hollywood feature films so often reveal. The work of this book has been to complicate discussions of Holly‑ wood Westerns and of Native film production and reception by emphasizing texts in dialogue at moments when dominant cinema tropes and histories are repurposed for Indigenous projects. Not only have Indigenous images mattered to the Western, but Westerns have also mattered to Indigenous filmmakers and viewers, both then and now, in an interrelated and contested field of audiovisual representation. Whether Native filmmakers and their collaborators wield Western genre tropes of their day in feature produc‑ tions or contemporary filmmakers recover and reframe archival images in the present, Native filmmakers have actively shaped and responded to the Western genre from its beginnings. Critical revaluation of Indigenous images in cinema responds to Shari Huhndorf’s crucial query in American studies: “What happens to American studies if you put Native studies at the center?” (Mapping 3). In film studies, such a move facilitates critical recognition of the centrality of Indigenous images and image‑making to the birth and expansion of cinema, including not only the generic development of the Western but also the documen‑ 297 298 / Native Recognition tary, the melodrama, and the action film—all shaped from the very origins of Hollywood by Native participants—as well as the global circulation of Indigenous features, from the silent‑era productions of James Young Deer and Edwin Carewe to the contemporary work of groups such as Isuma Productions. Across this long and ongoing history of Indigenous presence in the cinema has been an emphasis on Native recognition of genealogical continuity as a dynamic and material source for a range of counterimages to cinematic “vanishing Indians.” The analyses developed in this book have explored ways that Indigenous filmmakers and performers, while working contrapuntally to public ideologies of vanishing, have also remained engaged with broader systems of popular culture representation and political action. “Westerns were harmed in the making of this film”: Remediation and Experimentalism The aesthetic reclaiming of early cinematic images by Native communities and individual artists has paralleled a critical recovery of sympathetic silent Westerns as forms of counterdiscourse within the Western genre. A crucial argument for revisiting these films is their renewed relevance for Native youth, the group targeted by the boarding school policies of the past and whose images were so contested in early Westerns. The reframing process in which artists and filmmakers continue to look back to an already‑mediated past is exemplified by two twenty‑first century experimental productions: the short experimental film 4wheelwarpony (2008), directed by White Mountain Apache and Diné director Dustinn Craig,1 which documents the youth skateboarding culture in the Whiteriver community on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, and Tonto Plays Himself (2010) by Muscogee Creek and Cherokee director Jacob Floyd, which narrates the filmmaker’s evolving research into the Western through the personal lens of family history. 4wheelwarpony has shown at various film festivals and in venues such as REMIX: New Modernities in a Post‑Indian World (2007−2008), an exhibit produced jointly by the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai) and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and the nmai exhibition Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America (2009). Craig’s film aligns contemporary Native experience with historical images, resulting in an aggressive revisualization and manipulation of older visual records in an evocative rather than expository mode. Rapidly edited split screens depict historical photographs juxtaposed with images of tribal members, Craig’s Coda / 299 family, skateboarders, and still or animated drawings. The young men in the skateboarding group wear costumes replicated from nineteenth‑century photographs of Apache scouts for the U.S. military, including guns and rifles, reenacting the scouts’ movement over traditional lands. 4wheelwar‑ pony is characterized by formal experimentation and visual effects, including multiple split screens, iris...