Abstract
Multiculturalism’s project at the end of the twentieth century was to offer a complete map of American diversity and model the image of a nation that makes space for all groups. What has been missing from our cinematic map of late-twentieth-century America, however, is Indian Country. As noted in chapter 1, films that the-matized white-Indian contact in a manner ostensibly sympathetic to the Indian perspective peaked in 1969–1971. Then, the three landscapes key to depicting multiculturalism in the post-sixties era—the South, the inner city, and the suburbs—all drew on themes that can be traced to that primal American contact zone: themes of white rebels or primitives, of spaces in opposition to modernity that offered either chaos or liberation. However, direct representations of Native American cultures or Indian Country were largely absent from popular cinema.
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Notes
The actor in the commercial was Iron Eyes Cody, an actor who lived his life and built his career around being Native American, but was actually of Italian descent. Angela Aleiss, “Iron Eyes Cody: Wannabe Indian,” Cineaste 25, no. 1 (December 1999): 30–31.
See the middle-aged protagonist in The Swimmer (short story by John Cheever, 1964; film directed by Frank Perry, 1968) who wants to feel his physical prowess through swimming, but can only swim in man-made pools, and another suburban husband who tries to recover his masculinity by digging a pathway from house to road in Revolutionary Road (novel by Richard Yates, 1961; film directed by Sam Mendes, 2008). Timothy Aubry, “John Cheever and the Management of Middlebrow Misery,” Jowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 64–83; Michael P. Moreno, “Consuming the Frontier Illusion: The Construction of Suburban Masculinity in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 2003): 84–95.
See Murray Leeder, “The Fall of the House of Meaning: Between Static and Slime in Poltergeist,” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, no. 5 (August 12, 2008): n.p.; and Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 132. Poltergeist 2 brings both types of ghosts together when it presents the next Freeling family home as built over both a Native American graveyard and a cave where poor white religious cult members died. It also uses a Native American shaman to help the husband fight the dangers.
Gesa Mackenthun, “Haunted Real Estate,” Paradoxa 3, no. 3–4 (1997): 439.
David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 201.
Armando J. Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Jeffrey Walker, “Deconstructing an American Myth: The Last of the Mohicans,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 170–86.
Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 174.
Strong emphasizes this in the song entitled “Colors of the Wind.” Pauline Turner Strong, “Animated Indians: Critique and Contradiction in Commodified Children’s Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (August 1996): 412.
Kiyomi Kutsuzawa, “Disney’s Pocahontas: Reproduction of Gender, Orientalism, and the Strategic Construction of Racial Harmony in the Disney Empire,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 6, no. 4 (2000): n.p.
Timothy W. Luke, “Picturing Politics at the Exhibition: Art, History and National Identity in the American Culture Wars of the 1990s,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 16, no. 2 (1996): 3–23.
Steven Hoelscher, “Conversing Diversity: Provincial Cosmopolitanism and America’s Multicultural Heritage,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams, Steven D. Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 375–402.
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 10.
This is actually Alexie’s poem, found in The Summer of Black Widows (Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 1996).
Laura Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen 39, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 336. Marks expands on haptic cinema in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 207.
Ibid., 225.
Amy Corbin, “Traveling through Cinema Space: The Film Spectator as Tourist,” Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 314–29.
It also functions as a nod to some Native critics who are disturbed at the popularity of Alexie’s poetry and fiction, which they feel put Native poverty, dysfunction, and alcoholism on display for outsiders. Alexie signals his awareness of the way a Native writer might perform cultural otherness for profit by presenting a caricature of how he thinks his critics see him. See in particular Gloria Bird, “The Exaggeration of Despair in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,” Wicazo Sa Review (Fall 1995): 47–52; and Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998): 74–82.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), employ this term, derived from Mikhail Bakhtin, to describe the presence of multiple discourses, a more accurate way to represent a social world.
Louis Owens, in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 9, argues that this distinction between author and storyteller is a central problematic of the Native American novel.
Quoted in Meredith K. James, Literary and Cinematic Reservation in Selected Works of Native American Author Sherman Alexie (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 85.
Trinh Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2.
Stephen A. Tyler, “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 125–26.
Melissa Olsen, “Alexie’s ‘The Business of Fancydancing,’” The Circle: News from an American Indian Perspective 23, no. 6 (June 30, 2002): 10.
Karen Lynnea Piper, Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 13.
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© 2015 Amy Lynn Corbin
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Corbin, A.L. (2015). Ghosts of Indian Country: Filling in the Map. In: Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47971-6_6
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