REEL LIES & WORKING TOWARDS THE TRUTH

“In over 4000 films, Hollywood has shaped the image of Native Americans. Classic Westerns like They Died With Their Boots On created stereotypes. Later Blockbusters like Little Big Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Dances With Wolves began to dispel them. Not until a renaissance in Native cinema did films like Once Were Warriors and Smoke Signals portray Native people as human beings.” In bold, white letters this statement sets the tone for the 2009 Canadian documentary film Reel Injun, directed by Neil Diamond of the Cree nation, Catherine Brainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes. In the film we follow Diamond himself, as he travels across the North American continent, documenting not only the long-standing and marred relationship of the Native American to cinema, but also detailing these stereotypes that the medium has engendered in common consciousness. In this “typing” of people, the Native American Indians have been lumped into one homogenous group, and suffered a great cultural genocide, stripping them of the rich individual history of each Native American’s respective nation and creating the façade of a mythical figure that no longer exists in the present day.

The image of the “Savage Injun,” unified under the common guise of the Plains Indian, complete with headdress, buckskin, and headband (all attire that these people would not have even worn in reality) was perverted into that of the “noble savage,” meant to serve the dominant hegemonic social structure of American society. By denying the basic human rights of these native people and creating a common caricature to rally against, Hollywood helped erase and justify the seizure of these indigenous peoples land and culture through the Imperialistic practice of Westward Expansion. Westerns developed with heroic cowboys always fighting against and attempting to quell these backwards invaders, more homogenized than ever under extremely negative stereotypes. It really was not until a renaissance in the mid-70’s that Native Americans began to gain some sense of humanity through their roles in film. Reel keys in on Will Samson’s performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest as being a real turning point in cinema, where the actor was able to work with a stereotype and reclaim it for a new purpose, giving it a grace that it never had before. During this time filmmakers began to return to Native American characters the humanity that had been denied them through the cultural genocide Western film had enacted and flesh out a bit more who each of these individuals actually are. Throughout the 1990’s American society began a kind of revival of Native American culture, focusing more on the human aspect of these people in films like Dances With Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dead Man. I found Chief Dan George’s performance alongside Dustin Hoffman Little Big Man to be particularly heartwarming, conveying the spirit of not only the individual but also the people he represents.

One idea that I found particularly interesting from the end of the film was that in order for Native Americans to deal with these stereotypes and misrepresentations many have turned to humor. By recognizing where Native Americans have come from as well as working to reorient the mainstream understanding of where these myriad of differing individuals fit within our contemporary society, this kind of filmmaking is at times meant more so for the Native American community itself as well as the larger mainstream audience. While I was watching the film I found myself relating this idea to the work of the Navajo nation’s reservation doctor and artist. I was lucky enough to actually hear Mr. Thomas speak last semester in my Artist Lecture Series course at UWM. In his lecture he explains how Native American peoples all over North America have a kind of “soul wound” which is inexplicably linked to the oppressive history this group of people has faced since the first colonization of the continent so long ago and has been perpetuated by the American government since its inception. In order to combat the extreme depression and multitude of social issues these peoples face, and to bring a positive representation of members of the Navajo nation to their people Mr. Thomas creates large-scale street art style wheat paste portraits of the members of the Navajo he serves and then places them on buildings and other public spaces. By celebrating the individual character of these people and presenting them in a positive light in public space, Chip Thomas is attempting to reorient not only the outside world’s understanding of who these people are but also their own. For more information on Chip Thomas and his work with the Navajo nation visit: 

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THE DISSEMINATION OF (MIS)INFORMATION

            This past Thursday in our Media and Society course a local artist and professor in the UW–Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts came into our class and gave his take on the Latino/a mural movement and how it originated from its indigenous roots in large, highly Socialist leaning public works like those of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfredo Sequeirios, the “Big Three” Mexican mural painters who began to use highly politicized imagery to reshape their shared and perceived Mexican history, to what it has become today. The overarching principle that I personally took away from Professor Deal’s talk was that there is a deep-seated power in imagery, the power to persuade and influence and reorganize the often times misinformed conceptions of aspects of one’s personal identity within the social structure. I have always been attracted to the powerful and excessively utopian imagery present in propaganda imagery, specifically that of WWII pro-war posters from both Allied and Axis forces. Deal shared some of that imagery in his talk, emphasizing how Nazi as well as American and Chinese visual propaganda demonized the enemy they were facing, poisoning the minds of scores of citizens in the name of nationalism and communal pride. Here I think it would behoove me to relate a description of my understanding of propaganda. In its most basic form, propaganda functions as a misrepresentation of reality that is constructed in such as way to influence and direct one’s understanding of the world in which they live; it is meant to illicit an emotional rather than realistic response to whatever information is presented and often times seeks to influence one’s thinking through the dissemination of misinformation.

With this description it is definitely possible to recognize a number of different and varying forms of propaganda that have developed into the varying forms of mass and social media we all experience everyday. Several news organizations present their biases and personal leanings quite readily in not only the types of stories they choose to cover, but also how they construct these stories to influence the viewer’s understanding of the facts (Fox News on the far right, and networks like National Public Radio on the left, which claims to be completely unbiased, as well as a slew of others). With the advent of social media, the dissemination of misinformation has even often times gone viral. This new kind of viral propaganda was nowhere more evident than in the almost absurdly presented information of the KONY 2012 campaign. KONY 2012 stigmatized and called for justice for the crimes of a long-disappeared ex-military war criminal through a film produced by the “social activist” group Invisible Children, Inc., was distributed via YouTube and spread across the Internet like wildfire. I still remember seeing those videos first pop up on my News Feed, often times along with a plea to donate to the cause of the forced child-warriors of the African continent.

However, after watching no more than a minute of the video I stopped it, because I recognized the way that the narrator was speaking was in a very disingenuous way and maintained a deeply persuasive tone, obviously ignorant of the actual truth and rather speaking to illicit a response; to want to do something, to give him money so him and his organization can do all they can to help these “Invisible Children”. After a couple of days people slowly began to see through the empty promises and deluded goals of the KONY 2012 campaign, however a good amount of donations filtered into the organization from people wanting to literally show their support for the campaign, with a KONY 2012 t-shirt and other swag provided in return for donating. The legitimacy of the organization was later shaken when on of the founders of the Invisible Children group was arrested by police on the San Diego streets naked, screaming incoherently, interfering with traffic, and obviously on some kind of powerful drugs. It became painfully evident that this groups was simply exploiting the pain and misery of actual child-soldiers they claimed to be trying to help in Africa for their own gain through the implementation of the highly affective and persuasive propaganda in their video released on YouTube. Social media seems as good a disseminator of misinformation as any other kind of propaganda channel because of how extremely quickly information can spread, especially in our fast-paced almost ADD-like media environments wherein new kinds of visual media are meant to only grab attention for a moment and then forgotten, in the interest of experience (think of the meme). None of these experiences are really genuinely new however, because they simply recycle the tropes of success rather than focus on unique expression. I can see through these facades because of what my studies in school. Graphic Design & Visual Communication is just that, and behind every piece that someone creates there is a purpose.