KATHLEEN HOLT : Talk a little bit about Native Americans and film. I think when we talk about the High Plains and a sense of place, we often think of it in terms of white settlement…
TOM AVERILL: Well, yeah. We also start with white exploration . .
TOM PRASCH: As if there wasn’t anything to see
TOM AVERILL: As if nothing existed until there was a white person to see it. So, Coronado is our first tourist looking for the Seven Cities of Gold and unhappy with what he found.
TOM PRASCH: They are figures in that whole conquest of the West motif. You know one of our theme when we look at Kansas film and literature is that whole manifest destiny sensibility that this is ours to settle and it is part of this drive that is going to push us to California and the rest. And because most film making for most of the history of film has been told from that perspective, it gets a little hard to tell the Native American story. And, in fact, we only really get a kind of counter reaction to that with the rise of AIM and Native American rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s and that’s when you get Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man. And there is an Altman film about that time – Sitting Bull – Oh, Custer and Altman taking on the Custer story. Suddenly, you get the sense that, “Oh, gee. We have been leaving some stuff out here.”
When we look at actual Native Americans take control of that as a means of production, we have to think about the fact that film making is an enormously expensive enterprise. Still, not much has happened and where it has happened has not been Plains Indians, but more on the Northwest Coast – Sherman Alexi and the Northwest Territory.
TOM AVERILL: I think some of the early travel narratives have some of the most sympathetic accounts of Native Americans. Someone like Lewis Hector Garrard (15 June 1829 - 7 July 1887) who wrote Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail (about his visit to the southwestern United States in 1846-1847) who went out not to conquer, but to find out, who were actually curious about what was there, without a sense that they were going to homestead or that this land should be agricultural land instead of hunting land. So, a lot of the explorers on official journeys like Pike and Long and people like that were always commenting on the sustainability of agriculture on the landscapes they were traveling through – almost reports on goods and services.
But there are these other narratives like the Lewis Garrard piece. He meets up with a tribe. He stays with them. He eats their food. He tries to understand what their rituals are. He is not judgmental about the tribes. You do get a few glimpses. I that is an interesting perspective and an immediate kind of respect for and an adaptation of the ways of Native Americans. They see right away that somehow these people know how to live in this environment. Let’s imitate turning them into us – kill the Indian and save the man – It is more like, if we are going to save ourselves out here, we better learn from the people who have adapted to here.
