It isn't really surprising that everything we were taught about Native Americans / American Indian's was a lie. History tends to work that way. Columbus didn't sail the world to prove it wasn't flat; even the Greeks knew about the spherical properties of our planet. Similarly, Louis Carroll didn't write Alice's Adventures in Wonderland about drugs; it was about advanced mathematics. For everything we learn in school, there's at least one thing we have to un-learn later. Newton wasn't hit with an apple, for instance, and Einstein wasn't bad at math as a child.
Usually, it seems, we can blame movies. Cars don't explode when you shoot them; silencers don't make bullets shoot silently; swords don't sing when you draw them. Movies are fun and sometimes reflect reality, but they are first and foremost a visual art media. The bigger the blast, the easier the explanation, and the cooler the characters, the better.
American films teach us about extremes. There's no need for the complexities that arise in Japanese cinema. There are only good guys and bad guys; you can't be both (OF COURSE there are exceptions, but they're so rare that we really don't need to go into them right now). Everything is black and white, light and shadow, heroes and villains. There's no room for culture or grey areas. If you're filming about Cowboys and Indians, it has to be ALL cowboys vs ALL Indians. The same happens in other films as well: It’s ALL cops vs ALL gangsters, ALL rebels vs ALL government officials, and ALL Americans vs ALL terrorists.
"Reel Injun" showed us the effects of our culture simplifying another into oblivion. Of course it isn't all the film-maker's fault. How often have you gone to the movies and asked questions about the characters? How often do you question the motive of the obvious hero, or attempt to empathize with the villainous terrorist? We created this system by spending money on the simple plot lines and ignoring the more complex films. That’s why “Bell-Air Chihuahua” was a financial success, while “Donnie Darko” wasn’t. When's the last time you watched a documentary in a theater instead of a classroom? It just isn't our style. And it never has been. We created—and continue to create—this system of simplification. And I don’t expect us to change that anytime soon.
Aside from simply pissing me off, “Reel Injun” also introduced me to some realities I’m just too young to have known. For instance, I never would have expected the Hippie headbands—which have become such a symbolic and unmistakable signature of Hippie identity that you really only need to have a headband and unkempt hair (and maybe a joint) to make a realistic impersonation of a Hippy which anyone would be able to identify—to have actually come from the image of Native American’s. Of course, in retrospect, in makes perfect sense that the nature-loving, minimalist Hippie culture would associate themselves with the nature-loving, minimalist ideal of Native American’s as they are depicted in the media. It’s just not a connection I would’ve been capable of making on my own.
As for the readings this week, we had to read ninety-some pages of Native American tales. My reactions to these were…mixed. I am an author first and foremost, and I spend nearly all of my time either enveloped in stories or creating my own (though unfortunately, not nearly as much time goes into actually typing them up as it should). This was the angle I read these from: that of a writer, searching for interesting story techniques to “steal” for later. This led me to three concerns:
1) “Idioms”. Quite often within the text, I ran across what I consider to be English idioms or clichés. Since this is a translated work from several different languages and cultures, my instant reaction is that either this is the source of those idioms (unlikely), or the translation is drastically bastardized. The most gross example of this is the story “Better Luck Next Time,” where not only the final line and moral, but also the title of the work, are an obvious English Idiom which would make no sense in another language.
2)”Narrative”. This is what I suspect to be the reason that no one takes Native American literature seriously. Every story which is written seems to be mumbled in monotone by a simplistic, childish narrator who speaks in terse, repetitious sentences without any attempt whatsoever to liven-up or artistically represent the story. Basically, there’s little or no “literary value” to the text. Of course, one could argue that the reason for this is that these stories were oral tales; my counter-point would be that Beowulf and The Iliad were also oral stories, but they contain beautiful examples of artistic expression and complexity within them.
3)”Impossible items”. This is what I loved about the stories, and what I will likely steal for my own writing. Native American stories tend to introduce impossible, abstract concepts (such as “Summer”) as tangible items that can be stored and stolen. I’ve seen amazing stories by Neil Gaiman using similar devices, and I believe I could craft some very compelling, even horrific stories by introducing similar ideas.
The only other note-worthy experience I had while reading “American Indian Trickster Tales” was that of confusion. I found it difficult to be sure whether the characters (which are almost exclusively animals) were supposed to be imagined as real animals or anthropomorphized spirits of those same creatures. Eventually this difficulty was eradicated when a couple of the stories mentioned specifically that all the animals were once just as people are now, and that they were forced to change their shape after they had created humans to look like them. My confusion, then, was apparently one in which Native American people were also struggling with, and those couple of stories helped to alleviate that uncertainty.
As for the class as a whole, I’m really not sure if I’ll enjoy it. It seems a bit too hardcore, honestly. I’m doing about three times as much reading for this class as I am for my Literature survey course (and as I did for my Humanities courses when I took them), and about four-times as much writing as I do for my Writing workshop. That seems grossly unbalance, in my opinion.
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