Coming out from behind the Rocks: Constructs of the Indian in Recent U.S and Canadian Cinema

From the point of view of fiction as it gives form to our inchoate visions, it is tragic that Native Americans are real, with real feelings and real heritages, rather than the elusive creatures of our imagination. . . .[T]he western uses the devices of fiction to speak to the inner needs of its viewers . . . and hence should be responded to inwardly. But the reality of Native Americans disrupts such a possibility. . . . History unwittingly crosses over to intervene in the fictive relationship between work and audience. -John Harrington It was on a night like this that ol' Coyote got on a plane to Ottawa to see the Prime Minister. "Boy are we happy to see you!" said the Prime Minister, "maybe you can help us with our lndian Problem.'' "Sure," said Coyote, "what's the problem?" -Lionel James in Medicine River Much work has been done by scholars to document and critique the long history of negative stereotyping of the North American Indian in film, especially the particularly virulent genre of the Hollywood Western. Fortunately, recent U.S. and Canadian films reflect a pronounced interest in Indians not as faceless savages who fire arrows at the good guys from unseen hiding places but as members of dynamic cultures. However, it is inevitable that new problems and issues of representation arise when the Indians “come out from behind the rocks.’’ An examination of these films can yield much information for those interested in North American Indian studies because they act as barometers of social attitudes toward Indian peoples and indicate to what ideological use the Indian subject is being put. The foregrounding of the Indian subject in such high-profile films as Dances with Wolves, Black Robe, Thunderheart, and Clearcut is in itself a step toward cross-cultural dialogue. However, these pictures can be seen to conform to the traditional pattern of constructing the “Indian” to embody mainly non-Indian concerns. More modest films such as Loyalties, The Company of Strangers, Where the Spirit Lives, Spirit Rider, Powwow Highway, and Medicine River explore new ways of representing Indian culture and attempt (at least partially) to free the Indian subject from its position of useful but ideologically fixed Other