Did Bugs Bunny just take a rifle and shoot at a bunch of natives? Say it ain’t so, Bugs.
But in his latest documentary Reel Injun, filmmaker Neil Diamond (no, not that Neil Diamond) explores the history of Hollywood’s depiction of Aboriginal Peoples—and there’s lots more startling stock footage along these lines.
“Growing up on the reservation, the only show in town was movie night in the church basement,” explains Diamond, a Cree native who grew up in James Bay. “Raised on cowboys and Indians, we cheered for the cowboys, never realizing we were the Indians.”
Reel Injun marks Diamond’s seventh documentary and his first feature to be released theatrically. He started his career as a photographer and journalist. He remains a contributor to Nation, a Cree First Nations magazine.
First and foremost, Diamond is out to entertain in this documentary. He keeps things light, focusing on the absurdity of watching actors like Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, and Anthony Quinn playing stoic Native American heroes.
“It’s funny, right?” Diamond remarked in an interview last week, and it is—finding out that most native peoples in movies wear headbands because it is a practical way for the actor to keep his wig from falling off is pretty humorous. Learning that, after translation, an Aboriginal in a 1960s western is really telling actor Troy Donanhue that “you’ll be crawling in your own shit”—that’s funny. When Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American who stood in for Marlon Brando at the 1973 Oscars, tells us that John Wayne was ready to pummel her—that’s funny, too, but certainly in a dark way.
Diamond successfully keeps his movie from veering into a film of despair or indignation. Oddly enough, it is fringe director Jim Jarmusch who comes across as the most deadly serious about Aboriginal culture. The First Nations peoples Diamond interviews, such as filmmaker Chris Eyre, are mostly laidback and casual—just as willing to laugh off the Hollywood stereotypes as Diamond.
In a strange moment in the film, Diamond visits the American Great Plains and decides to ride a horse. “I’ve always wanted to ride a horse on the open planes,” narrates Diamond. “I finally feel like a real Indian.”
The moment doesn’t come across as entirely sarcastic. We see that Diamond feels as though he’s connecting with something with which he feels he should connect, despite it having nothing to do with his tribe, his upbringing, or his way of life. The film transcends its breezy narrative when Diamond shows us how Hollywood has strangely warped Aboriginal Peoples’ own self-image.
The laid-back and casual approach to the movie ends up disrupting some of its impact. Diamond hops all over the place, switching from an account of how native peoples were depicted in early silent movies (in fact, in a quite noble manner) to indigenous people as depicted in revisionist Westerns from the 1970s, such as Little Big Man. Diamond is then liable to switch back to a vignette about Wounded Knee or Crazy Horse. He also takes time to interview a Native American stuntman and the eldest adopted son of Native American-wannabe Iron Eyes Cody (actually an American actor of Sicilian ancestry), yet these side excursions and interviews fail to arouse much interest or spark any sort of discussion.
Stereotypes or not, Diamond remains optimistic about depictions of Aboriginal Peoples in cinema, pointing to movies such as Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) as examples of pure indigenous cinema. However, he does not conclude that only aboriginals can depict indigenous peoples properly on film. Diamond applauds Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers for Adam Beaches’ honest capturing of native Ira Hayes. There is certainly no call to arms in this movie.
It’s too bad that the film wrapped before Avatar dominated the box office and earned over $2 billion—in a recent interview, Diamond points to James Cameron’s sci-fi epic as simply a variation on the white-washed Pocahontas myth and a prime example that these stereotypes will not disappear any time soon. To Diamond, the Na’vi are nothing more than thinly disguised (and humorous) aboriginal stereotypes.
With a Mohawk/Cree Romeo and Juliet short film in the works and a First Nations road trip movie in development, Diamond is taking on the challenge of dispelling or addressing these stereotypes head-on. At the moment though, Diamond gives us an interesting retrospective that casually brings up some serious issues about identity, culture, and movies.
Reel Injun is now in theatres.
