John Wayne’s Teeth and George Washington’s Nose: Native American Resistance to Silencing and Erasure in Smoke Signals and Skins

초록

Smoke Signals, directed by Chris Eyre, is the first feature film written, directed, and coproduced by Native Americans to have been distributed commercially by a major studio; it won the Audience Award and the Filmmaker's Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. The screenplay for this film was written by Sherman Alexie, a Native American writer who is very much invested in interrogating the extent to which the media and cultural stereotypes affect our construction of identity and self-understanding. In Smoke Signals, Alexie exposes the extent to which young Native Americans' self-perceptions continue to be influenced by mainstream media representations of Indians as monosyllabic barbaric/noble savages, and proposes a mode of resistance to stereotyping, silencing and erasure that utilizes and subverts the power of the media. By creating a hybrid narrative that merges traditional native form with contemporary U.S. cultural content in Victor's chant about John Wayne's teeth, Alexie, via Smoke Signals, suggests a way for Native Americans to enact resistance to historical silencing while also participating in modern American culture and life in a complementary manner. Skins, Chris Eyre's second film, continues the historical resistance of Smoke Signals through striking images that probe into the collective historical amnesia America seems to suffer when it comes to Native America by focusing on the history of the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre bring to the screen real Indians--not the Indians of Westerns or those caricatured in popular culture like sports mascots--living real everyday lives in America, being influenced by popular culture representations of Native America but refusing to silently accept those stereotypes in Smoke Signals and Skins, and pave the way for Native Americans to emerge as stars and not extras in, as well as writers and directors of, both American film and citizenship.

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