chapter 9, "disputable truths: the american stranger, television documentary and native...
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Wilson, Pamela. "Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s." Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1996. CHAPTER NINE: MEDIA ACCESS, ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICAL EFFECTIVITY OF REPRESENTATION PLAYING INDIAN: HISTORIES OF (MIS-)REPRESENTATION
In Diplomats in Buckskins, his account of the history of Native American
participation in the political life of the United States, Herman Viola relates a fascinating
anecdote which provides insight into the way that representations of Native
Americans have been engineered in the public imagination. In 1936 (the heart of the
supposedly-progressive Indian New Deal era), the Pueblo Indian people were
engaged in a struggle over legislation and appropriations to prevent further alienation
of their tribal landholdings which had been lost since the Dawes (Allotment) Act in the
late nineteenth century. Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier--generally
considered the most liberal and benevolent non-Indian Commissioner of the twentieth
century--urged the All-Pueblo Council to send a delegation of articulate spokesmen to
Washington to present their case to Congress and the American public. As Viola
explains, “To ensure sufficient attention from the news media, Collier suggested the
delegates bring with them samples of their tribal handicrafts and perform a few
traditional songs and dances as well. The Interior Department would pay all costs.”
According to Viola, the council members were somewhat confused by, and perhaps a
bit indignant at, this suggestion--since until just a few years earlier the government
had “consistently tried to eradicate” tribal culture, and many Indians now accepted and
emulated the styles and values of mainstream white America in their lifestyles. Yet
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now they were confronted by the Commissioner himself telling them to “play Indian” to
protect their tribal rights and property. However, convinced that the strategy of
performing before an audience would be honorable to support a worthy cause, the
All-Pueblo council approved the plan. Viola continues:
Collier immediately set in motion a media event of major proportions. He arranged for press and radio coverage; he persuaded Paramount Pictures to loan him documentary films on southwestern Indian life and to shoot special footage highlighting some of the land problems unique to the area. The key to obtaining the necessary publicity, of course, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Collier sent him a lengthy memorandum . . . to make Roosevelt realize that the delegation was “worthy” of his attention. “I suggest that it could be made the picturesque and human occasion for a renewed statement having to do with the crisis of our natural resources. . . .”
In May of 1936, a delegation of 24 Pueblo, Navajo and Hopi Indians arrived in the
Nation’s Capital, and they quickly became media darlings as they attended baseball
games, met with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, attended a barbecue at Collier’s
home with the Secretary of Agriculture, met with the Secretary of the Interior Harold
Ickes, appeared before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and entertained “a
variety of distinguished guests” for four nightly performances of speeches and
dances, with a grande finale performance for several thousand spectators at an
open-air theater at the base of the Washington Monument. Collier was accused by
some legislators of attempting to manipulate public opinion “by using a troupe of show
Indians who performed like ‘trained seals’ but who did not reflect the wishes and
feelings of the majority of southwestern Indians.” Collier protested that these Indians
were not “show Indians”--they were the governors and principal leaders of the
Pueblos, “hard-working, ordinary men who had come to Washington to protest the
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‘impending breach of faith by Congress, contained in the Interior Department
Appropriation Bill.’” Collier reassured the tribal leaders about the success of their visit,
since the objectionable aspects of the Bill had been removed. He protested that the
delegates had “conducted themselves with dignity,” and that their dances were
“beautiful and dignified, and added much force to the delegates’ plea.” In a postscript,
Viola notes that even today, delegates who come to testify in Washington dressed in
tribal regalia often have the most success, since (quoting a BIA official), “it impresses
the Congressmen and it attracts the media.”1
“Playing Indian” for white audiences was a prevalent mode of
self-representation for tribal leaders and representatives even as late as the 1950s
and early 1960s. Almost all of the carefully-stages mainstream press photographs of
tribal leaders, lobbying for tribal rights in Washington, show them posed in a
juxtaposition of feathered headdresses and Western business suits on the steps of
the Nation’s Capitol. One well-known example is the 1942 photo of Iroquois Chief
Jesse Lyons and colleagues posing with white government leaders as Lyons
“declared war” between the Six Nations of Indians and the Axis powers of Germany,
Italy and Japan.2 Even during the well-publicized Seneca protests against the
construction of Kinzua Dam in the early 1960s, most of the staged photographs of
protest displayed Native American men in full (Plains Indian) feathered headdress.3 In
their presentations of tribal issues to a non-Indian public, the donning of the ubiquitous
headdress became the signifier of Indianness to white America. This is one reason
why the use of a photograph of a tribal elder in full headdress as the print
advertisement for The American Stranger--a documentary about Indians which lacked
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even a single headdress--was both ironic and squarely in synch with the prevalent
media discourses about, and representations of, Native Americans, even though the
documentary itself strayed from such stereotyped representations in significant ways.
Clint Wilson and Félix Gutiérrez have discussed the historically structured
absence of representation of racially diverse populations in the American media.
Explaining the problematic lack of media produced for the consumption of American
subcultural groups as well, Wilson and Gutiérrez provide an historical explanation: “As
originally envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, media in the United
States were supposed to operate in a free marketplace of ideas in which every political
group, interest group, or anyone else with the wherewithal and motivation would be
able to print and disseminate newspapers. . . . Media were seen as both the
watchdogs of the government and the critical communication link on which the new
democratic society would depend for communication.” However, by freeing the press
from federal restraints, the Constitution also forced the press to function as a business
within the capitalist economic system; for this reason, the advertising-oriented mass
media developed with an orientation to a mass-audience. “As a result,” they continue,
“media geared for political, national, or racial minorities have been consigned to
economic second-class standing, and members of these groups have either been
ignored in the mass media attracting the majority society or portrayed in ways that
made them palatable to the majority.” They claim that this has resulted in a mass
media that has generally reinforced rather than challenged the established norms and
attitudes of society. Groups which could not be easily assimilated into the “melting pot”
were perceived as marginal to the focus of the mass audience, and their issues,
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cultures and traditions have either been ignored or stereotyped. Native Americans, in
particular, who have been an “invisible minority” in the American media, even today
are still typically portrayed as either vanquished savages or a downtrodden social
group overburdened with problems. “For the most part,” Wilson and Gutiérrez explain,
“the images of the people the Europeans called Indians have been shaped by the
movies, television programs and Western novels we have seen or read. . . , media not
designed to be primarily informative, but to serve as a diversion for their audiences.”4
News media have rarely covered activities in non-white communities unless, in
accordance with the surveillance function of news, members of these communities
were perceived as posing a threat to the established order, or covered during colorful
cultural festivals--neither of which jarred preconceptions, and which actually helped to
legitimize and reinforce preconceptions. Wilson and Gutiérrez delineate a number of
phases of minority coverage in news: the “exclusionary phase,” the “threatening-issue
phase,” the “confrontation phase,” the “stereotypical selection phase,” and the
as-yet-unrealized “integrated coverage phase.”They claim that the changing
demographics of American society--particularly the growing populations of African
Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in urban areas--is forcing
an awareness by the media industries of the need to market programming to these
audiences in order “to capitalize on the rainbow of races that will characterize the US
in the future.”5
The relationship between any marginalized group and the media can be seen
at one of a number of levels. These and similar issues have been raised by scholars
and activists about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians,
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disabled persons, members of religious communities, and others. Issues of
representation for all of these social formations share common theoretical concerns
with those of Native American representations.6 First, there is the question of
mainstream media representation of the social formation and/or its members. Issues
surrounding mainstream representation can range from absence/exclusion to
stereotyped or limited misrepresentations to representations with more fully realized
cultural understandings. Secondly, there is a question of access by minority groups to
the modes and apparatuses of media production. The question of access raises many
interesting questions about the degree to which having a minority presence in the
production of a mainstream film or television show can significantly change the quality
of the representation, given the constraints inherent in the mainstream industry
systems. I will explore this question further below. Third, there is the option for a
minority group to create its own media outside of the mainstream system, as either
alternative or oppositional media, which increases the possibilities of
self-representation. As in all of these cases, the phenomenon of alternative media
raises the question of access to a culturally wide versus a narrowly-delineated
audience: is the alternative medium targeted only at members of the group, or for a
transcultural or multicultural audience? Each of these levels of representation carries
its own set of ideological issues, problems, and quandaries in terms of the political
effectivity of representation.
In Representing Reality, a theoretical examination of the ideological
underpinnings of documentary media, Bill Nichols conceptualizes the documentary or
nonfiction media as a major site through which the cultural and political work of
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“representing the real” gets done in contemporary society. He draws connections
between documentary media discourses and other “discourses of the real” which
function at the service of the dominant ideology: ”Like the constructed realities of
fiction, [documentary] reality, too, must be scrutinized and debated as part of the
domain of signification and ideology. The notion of any privileged access to a reality
that exists ‘out there,’ beyond us, is an ideological effect.”7 Nichols includes
documentary media in a larger category of Western nonfictional systems of
representation that he calls “discourses of sobriety”--which include such authoritative
representational systems as science, medicine, economics, politics, history,
education, religion and ethnographic anthropology. These systems have traditionally
shared an assumption of instrumental power, a belief that they could alter the world
itself; they have regarded their relation to the “real” as direct, immediate and
transparent. According to Nichols, such imperialist discourses have been “the
vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowledge, desire and will.”8
Documentary [media] are part and parcel of the discursive formations, the language games, and rhetorical stratagems by and through which pleasure and power, ideologies and utopias, subjects and subjectivities receive tangible representation. In the beginning was the Word but now there is television--and photographs, movie theaters, the political campaigns of press conferences and photo opportunities, choreographed debates and paid advertisements, the spectacles of space shuttles, Olympic contests, and living room wars.9
Nichols sees documentary practice as a prime site of contestation and change, with
documentary traditions as institutional formations reflecting the sense of common
purpose, the ideologically-charged technical conventions and semiotic languages for
representation of their historically-, culturally- and institutionally-specific worlds. The
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nonfiction media are produced and received within historically-specific communities of
production (whereby ideology is encoded into textual practice) as well as
interpretation. The creation and circulation of media texts and representations, then,
are necessarily political acts, and the question of authority over representations
becomes a defining issue in the cultural politics of colonial and postcolonial
representational practices ranging from the production of academic ethnographic
representations of tribal “customs” to the production of representations of Native
Americans on television news.
This chapter interrogates the political effectivity of the strategies of
representation utilized by The American Stranger, situating the documentary within its
historical context both as a television documentary and as a text closely akin to an
ethnographic film in intent and method. It examines related strategies that indigenous
peoples and other subcultural groups have used to gain representational control of the
media in the years since the late 1950s--ranging from strategies of self-representation
and media activism within the mainstream media systems (such as radio
broadcasting, television and film) to the phenomenon of alternative and
community-based media systems, including the formation of national native media
networks and distribution systems.
AUTHORITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE OTHER: ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY MEETS TELEVISION JOURNALISM
There is a tribe, known as the ethnographic filmmakers, who believe they are invisible. They enter a room . . . weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed--or, at most, merely glanced at, quickly ignored, later forgotten. Outsiders know little
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of them, for their homes are hidden in the partially uncharted rain forests of the Documentary . . . [where] they survive by hunting and gathering information. . . . They worship a terrifying deity known as Reality.
We, the urban white people, held, until recently, the film technology and the “scientific” methodology to record and analyze them: the non-Westerners and a few remote white groups. . . . Where travelers had gone to collect adventures, missionaries to collect souls, anthropologists to collect data and settlers to collect riches, filmmakers were soon setting out to collect and preserve human behaviors: the only good Indian was a filmed Indian.
(Eliot Weinberger, 1994)10
Given that journalistic representation and ethnographic film have generally
been considered two very distinct genres of representation, it may at first seem odd to
consider The American Stranger as an ethnographic film. However, such a
comparison can shed critical insights upon certain journalistic endeavors, especially if
they are seen to reflect an ethnographic impulse within the institutional constraints of
the profession of broadcast journalism. “Journalism, like ethnography, is a direct
response to the experience of a specific cultural or historical actuality,” David Spurr
has claimed,11 and the codified and conventionalized treatments of that actuality
through the combination of expository writing and photographic “documentation” are
two of the primary characteristics of both professional activities. The major differences
between the goals of the two--supposedly a distinction in projected audiences, in
academic versus nonacademic purposes, and most significantly in the
accountabilities to different sources of funding--are actually fairly minor when the two
undertakings are compared outside of their institutionalized environments.
Within the historical context of television documentary programming of the
1950s, the NBC journalistic documentary style represented by The American Stranger
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most closely follows the model for on-air investigative reporting created by the
highly-acclaimed CBS documentary series See It Now, produced by Fred Friendly
and journalist Edward R. Murrow, which ran from 1951 until 1958. This series,
sponsored by Alcoa, was best known for its controversial episodes that used a
combination of journalistic commentary and actuality footage to attack the influence
and tactics of McCarthyism. Murrow’s other noted and controversial documentary,
Harvest of Shame (produced by David Lowe for CBS Reports in late 1960), was
strikingly similar in many ways to The American Stranger both in its approach to the
cultural and political problems of migrant labor and in its resulting controversy at the
government level.
However, historians of television documentary such as Eric Barnouw have
argued that See It Now represented only a fleeting moment of editorial independence
in television journalism. During the Cold War period, Barnouw has claimed, television
schedules reflected the “military-industrial stamp.” Many television historians have
agreed with Barnouw that the commercial imperatives of the television industry during
this time turned sponsors away from controversial topics and thus shaped television
as a medium of “tamed” programming which avoided “vigorous probing” by
investigative reporters in favor of documentaries which were “suitable backdrops for
advertising.” Barnouw has described the documentaries of this period of the late
1950s and early 1960s as being authoritarian in style, marked by a newscaster’s
omniscient narration which proclaimed objectivity: “It quoted dissent, but regularly
paired it with official refutation. Through mazes of controversy, newsmen walked a
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tightrope labeled truth. . . . Documentaries became institutional, depersonalized . . .
[tending] to rely heavily on official statements.”12
The American Stranger positioned itself, through its ambivalent and ambiguous
discourses, as an anomaly in television documentary during this period, if we are to
accept Barnouw’s characterization. In this 1958 NBC documentary, producers
blatantly worked to discredit the perspectives of the official, military-industrial
complex--an intentional oversight for which they were severely attacked by
government representatives--and chose instead to sympathetically focus upon the
“dissenting” voices of the anti-termination camp, which included many Native
Americans and their non-Indian allies. The documentary also may be seen to reflect
the influences of anthropological perspectives which were circulating in American
society during the 1950s, and stylistically embodied what Ana López has called “the
imperial authority of an ethnographic vision.”13 In fact, the year 1958 in which the NBC
broadcast was produced was also the year in which contemporary American
ethnographic film came of age, revived after several decades of inactivity with John
Marshall’s production of The Hunters, about the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari
Desert. Generally, ethnographic films have been considered those
independently-produced filmic texts (produced within the institutionalized
late-imperialist paradigm of academic anthropology) that try to interpret the behaviors
and world views of one culture (classically a tribal or indigenous group) to members of
a dominant, Western culture. In so doing, they have generally attempted to follow the
Malinowskian anthropological mandate to “grasp the native’s point of view.”
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Interestingly, the themes of both 1958 films are uncannily similar in their
narrative construction of the cultural Other. Weinberger characterizes The Hunters as
portraying “courageous men--it is always men in these films--surviving in a harsh
environment: the !Kung are a ‘quiet people’ engaged in a ‘ceaseless struggle’ for food
in a ‘bitter land indeed where all the trees have thorns’.”14 This story summary might
be a metaphor for the portrayal, by the television documentary (and other
contemporaneous social discourses), of the American Indian as a quiet, courageous
and noble people engaged in a ceaseless struggle to retain their land and their culture
against the thorny colonial regime that dominates them. Like other ethnographic films
from the period, The American Stranger was a construction and celebration of
masculinity as well--in this case, a masculinity which exceeds racial and ethnic
divisions, as the film implicitly established a bond of 1950s masculinity between the
social actors McCormick, Metcalf, Byrne, Wetzel, Swingley and McKay. Also following
the genre conventions of ethnographic film, this documentary constructed a scenario
of Indianness in which “the people are remote and as timeless as geography, but will
be revealed to be, in some ways, just like us”--us, of course, being white Americans of
the 1950s.15
The authoritative journalistic style, which reflects a documentary heritage that
Nichols has labeled the “Voice-of-God” mode of expository documentary and network
news, still squarely dominated and provided the central authority for The American
Stranger. However, the extratextual process of intensive empirical research
undertaken by Robert McCormick, his personal immersion into alternative cultural
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perspectives, and his textual gestures allowing for Native American
self-representation (even though such authority was partially recuperated by the
summary white voices) all position McCormick’s experience as one which closely
resembles that of the ethnographic filmmaker or author. In spite of the collaborative
nature of television program production, through which a team of producers, executive
producers, directors, camera operators, editors, narrators and others work together to
produce the finished text, all extant archival materials indicate that this project was
primarily built around the research and vision of one sole news reporter. Apparently
McCormick and a camera crew produced all of the filmed footage, the production
overseen from a distance by McCormick’s superiors in NBC’s News Division
(McCormick’s role in editing is unclear); it was at the strangely hybrid level of the
actual live broadcast that most of the collaborative floor production took place.
Because of the intensely personal involvement of McCormick, this documentary
reflects an emotional, personalized immersion in the participant-observation process
which is not so clearly evident in Edward R. Murrow’s documentaries, for example
(since Murrow frequently stayed in the studio but sent reporters to do the field
interviews). The American Stranger is a text which reflects many ideological
contradictions similar to those of the anthropological endeavor--embodying colonialist
discourses even while trying as an advocate to provide a space for liberatory voices.
For me, having had access to the larger body of extratextual material, the
sub-narrative produced by the filmic process is a very personalized one--the story of
one middle-aged white male journalist’s political and intercultural awakening as he
grappled with the ethnographic “realities” of the Indian experience and the injustices
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perpetrated by his white government. However, like most journalists (and
anthropologists) of his generation, McCormick perceived his role as merely that of the
messenger, and did not textually foreground his own positioning.
Documentaries about human groups inevitably construct a triadic
relationship--and accompanying tension--between the “subjects” of the film, the film
producers, and the audience (real or anticipated). To which is the producer most
accountable? Nichols has noted that a central issue raised by the expository mode of
documentary representation is the ethical question of voice, or how the text speaks
objectively, persuasively, or as an instrument of propaganda: “What does speaking for
or on behalf of someone or something entail in terms of a dual responsibility to the
subject of the film and to the audience whose agreement is sought?”16 This tension
was responsible for many of the contradictory or seemingly incompatible discourses in
The American Stranger. The film became a negotiated text which tried to satisfy the
desires for the expression of similarly ideologically contradictory truths by the
non-Indian professional cultural mediators (religious activists, Friends of the Indians,
anthropologists, legislators) with whom McCormick could most closely identify, the
desires for expression of culturally-specific truths by the tribal members interviewed,
the economic and corporate imperatives of the NBC network’s News and Public
Affairs Division, and most importantly, the sociocultural expectations of the television
viewing audience portion of “the American public.” The documentary was addressed
to the general audience--but in so doing explicitly spoke to that audience as
non-Indian (and specifically, white) through its discursive construction of a spectatorial
position which was white (i.e. dominant), alternatively masculine and feminine,
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bourgeois (in economic and educational levels), Christian, and politically
liberal-leaning. This audience was interpellated (and the spectatorial position
established) through a combination of verbal and visual strategies of film form and
style.
The camera in The American Stranger established an imperial gaze which was
both surveilling and curious, desirous of the spectacle which the camera provides. As
surveillor, the camera kept a detached distance from the subjects of its gaze. In the
scenes without human subjects (the montages of landscapes and natural scenes from
the Flathead and Menominee reservations), this task became one of surveying a
geographic domain with a panoramic gaze--eerily and ironically repeating the same
imperializing gaze or “commanding view” of the Euroamerican explorers like Lewis
and Clark who, following the American call for manifest destiny, first looked upon
these Western landscapes and in so looking became the controllers of them, in spite
of the claims to the lands by their indigenous inhabitants. As David Spurr has noted,
the “commanding view” can be the source of aesthetic pleasure, information and
authority, a combination of pleasure and power which “conveys a sense of mastery
over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange
and bizarre. At the same time the commanding view is an originating gesture of
colonization itself, making possible the exploration and mapping of territory which
serves as the preliminary to a colonial order.”17
The implications of the gaze of surveillance become more complex when the
camera turns to human subjects. As Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins have pointed
out, the multiple levels of gazing embedded in photographic representations of the
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ethnic Other--the camera’s gaze, the viewer’s gaze, and frequently the countergaze of
the photographed subject--”are ambiguous, charged with feeling and power, and are
central to the stories (sometimes several and conflicting) that the photo can be said to
tell.”18 While many feminist film theorists, following Laura Mulvey and Jacques Lacan,
have claimed a masculine positioning of the film spectator through the gaze of the
Hollywood camera, Lutz and Collins extend this understanding to the way the
positioning of the spectator potentially enhances or articulates the
socially-constructed power of the observer over the observed. However, they also
acknowledge that looking need not always be equated with controlling; following
Frederic Jameson, they suggest that there may be legitimate pleasures gained in
looking at Others which are unrelated to any desire to control, denigrate or distance
oneself from the Other.19
However, Homi Bhabha and David Spurr have described the gaze as a central
strategy of colonial regimes and of colonialist discourses. As Spurr has noted about
the essentially colonialist project of journalism:
Reporting begins with looking. Visual observation is the essence of the reporter’s function as witness. But the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, or examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.20
In The American Stranger, the surveilling gaze was dominant as it objectified,
distanced and silenced the colonial subjects in such scenes as the introductory “fly on
the wall” view inside the Vielle family home in impoverished Heart Butte, Montana,
where members of this Blackfeet family actively turned their gaze away from the
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intruding camera. This penetrating colonial gaze searched out the bodies and faces of
its subjects to the degree that their avoidance of the probing eyes of the camera--and
ultimately, the home viewer--led the family members to awkwardly pose in a
simulation of natural-seeming activities. Later, in the Blackfeet tribal council meeting
staged for the NBC cameras, this awkwardness and self-consciousness about their
positioning as subjects of the camera’s gaze was evident in the body language and
speech patterns of the council members. A similar surveilling gaze led the viewer
through the exterior portrayal of the poverty of Hill 57, where the panoptic gaze took in
the substandard conditions of the ramshackle houses and the rotting corpses of
rusting automobiles, and in which the occasional humans (all women and children)
were looked at as merely another component of this economically and culturally
deteriorated landscape.
However, The American Stranger has moments in which the viewer
experiences an occasional, though momentary, rupture in the comfortable system of
looking-at-ness developed by the documentary. Spurr characterizes the colonial
situation as one in which gazing is a one-way privilege, and describes the colonial
subjects as powerless in the system of gazes: “Gazed upon, they are denied the
power of the gaze; spoken to, they are denied the power to speak freely.” Yet Spurr
acknowledges that the colonial subject of the gaze does have the power to resist or
refuse the acknowledgment of the gaze which is desired by the camera. Bhabha has
written that the relations of colonial looks creates tremendous ambivalence and
discomfort because “there is always the threatened return of the look” by the colonial
subject.21 In The American Stranger, these occasional ruptures in which gazes
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intersect were always instigated by Indian children--subjects who were innocently
unaware of (or disobeyed) the unwritten rules of how to behave around cameras. The
first of these moments comes at the end of the Menominee segment, when a girl with
a hula hoop smiled directly into the gaze of the camera, locking gazes with the viewer.
The other time was during the scene at Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, during an
interview with the physical therapist in which the Blackfeet polio victims were meant to
be merely props. Suddenly, one Indian infant disarmingly smiled at and waved into the
camera’s eye--twice. These are startling moments in the film, moments in which the
entire realist underpinning of the film (which comfortably distances the detached
observer) is exploded and in which the viewer potentially feels that she or he has been
directly acknowledged by the young subjects of the film. The childrens’ intersecting
gazes have the effect of shattering the one-way mirror illusion of the surveilling
gaze--a seeming acknowledgment by the subject that “I know you’re looking at me,”
and a countergaze which briefly and subversively disarms the surveilling viewer.
This brings us to the issue of the strategic use of children in the documentary to
evoke sympathy, pathos and strong emotional reactions in the viewers. The text of the
NBC documentary was especially powerful in its combination of appeals based in
intellect and emotion. Although dominated by an omniscient, authoritative rhetoric
which was almost purely political and in which the words overpowered the images
(especially during the sections in the first half concerning the Menominee and
Flathead termination efforts, in which the disembodied narrator’s voice articulated the
political discourses of the anti-termination movement), the film also used powerful
techniques of emotional appeal to elicit a gut-level response from the viewers. For
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whatever reason, the use of children in persuasive appeals in American society, from
the classic baby-kissing of political campaigns to the focus on starving Third World
children by television news cameras as well as “Feed the Children”-type infomercials,
has become a dominant trope of emotional persuasion in our media toolkit--and one
that has generally “worked” in terms of generating nurturing responses of
humanitarian aid and political sympathy. Children are signifiers of innocence, purity,
goodness, vulnerability, sweetness, and basic humanity. The inscription of social and
political issues onto the bodies of children is not purely theoretical by any means, but
these images have frequently been exploited by the media to evoke visceral rather
than rational or intellectual responses from viewers.
The strategies of using images of suffering children as bases for persuasive
arguments are a part of the larger representational (and ethical) issue of creating
spectacle from the misfortunes of others--a technique that television journalism has
developed to near-perfection in its half-century history. Newspaper columnist George
Will has commented upon this phenomenon:
Today, writes [Clifford] Orwin, because of television, everyone’s gaze can be fixed on--can hardly avoid being fixed on--the plight of distant people. This television “window on the distress of fellow human beings” is often thrown open as the suffering is actually occurring, and humanitarians hope that the instantaneous global dissemination of heart-rending pictures of agony will soften hearts and prompt humanitarian interventions.22
The spectacle of suffering, like any spectacle, tends to objectify the subjects of the
camera’s gaze, and can easily create a to-be-looked-at-ness with an appeal rooted in
curiosity and condescension that further wedges “them” from “us” in its
sensationalized and exotic framing of the Other. However, the spectacle is also
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designed to provoke viewers at an emotional rather than (or in addition to) a rational
level--to connect to the gut or the heart or the nerves (whichever somatic metaphor
one prefers) rather than to the cognitive mind or brain. Spectacles work to
excite/arouse/stimulate us, and often directly provoke emotional (or visceral)
responses of aversion, disgust, pity, guilt, shame, pride, love, lust or just plain awe.
This also leads us to question the varied emotional responses an audience
may have to a film, since such responses may either reinforce, or perhaps overcome,
the rational, cognitive, deliberated response. The psychological aspects of such
questions are outside my area of expertise, yet I believe it is an important question to
be examined, particularly with respect to the reception of documentary films. Nichols
discusses visceral reactions to some documentary films, noting that “cognitive
processing and bodily experience produce contradictory responses that disorient the
mind. Visceral reactions occur that are not contained by the descriptive or explanatory
grid utilized by a given film.” He asserts that such displays of emotion are generally
regarded an anomalous behaviors that cannot be assimilated into a cognitive frame:
An aesthetic, visceral response translates into expressive excess, spillage from reactions unconnected to a self-reflective, consciousness-raising means of contextualizing and understanding them. Instead of comprehension, assimilation and interpretation these reactions surge past the mind in a guise that allows expression to what remains ultimately repressed within the unconscious.23
Even thirty-five years after the original broadcast, a showing of The American
Stranger to an auditorium of media scholars evoked a strong emotional response.
There is indeed something moving about the film which is embedded into its
construction, some emotional and aesthetic cues which are strategically inserted to
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push the emotional buttons of its white viewers and evoke specific feelings of pity,
grief, anger, indignation, sympathy, guilt, loss and shame.
The dual appeal made by The American Stranger--through political argument
and through emotional images of vulnerable and impoverished children--worked as a
double-edged knife as it cut its way through the defenses of the audience members of
the original broadcast. The strong political outpouring in response to the show was
evidently a direct response to the persuasive political argument constructed by the
combination of rational, articulate voices (both Indian and non-Indian) against
termination. This is not to dismiss the emotional content of the verbal message either,
however, since the passion of the arguments presented embodied more than merely
dry facts. Indeed, the ultimate judgement of “truth” by the viewers was likely influenced
by the passion of lived experience and the depth of feeling which was expressed in the
testimonials by members of the Blackfeet Tribe, especially the historical account by
Iliff McKay and the statements by the elderly traditionalists. One cannot say which
particular voices had the most effect, since it is likely that different listeners were
moved to action by the words of McKay than those moved by the rhetoric of Father
Byrne. However, although all of the speakers represented a range of ideological
positions, the master narrative constructed by the film’s structural and verbal
argument, spoken through McCormick as omniscient narrator, worked to elide all of
the various cultural and ideological positions into a single “anti-termination” argument
for most viewers.
It is evident from the responses to the broadcast that a significant segment of
the active viewers who were aroused by the film were moved to perform a
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humanitarian, rather than an explicitly political, action. There also seemed to be a
distinct gender differentiation in these two responses, since more of what we might
call the altruistic responses were from women viewers and more of the political
responses were from men. I think that this indicates to us that the film was structured
to interpellate a wide range of viewers of both genders through its incorporation of
strategies which would elicit the socially-constructed civic behaviors of both attacking
the political machinery and nurturing those portrayed as society’s vulnerable victims.
The elision of Native Americans with children, however, also had the effect of
reinforcing the pernicious and longstanding stereotypes of infantilization and
helplessness of Native Americans which have worked against many efforts for
self-determination. This perception was reinforced by McCormick’s explicit statement
in closing that Indians “still are, for the most part, unprepared for the hurly-burly of our
competitive society. Their general health is bad, they are childishly susceptible to
flashy con men and they’re still hamstrung by anti-Indian discrimination. . . .”
Such rhetoric by McCormick (and the other non-Indian speakers in the film
such as Metcalf and Byrne) actively worked to construct an “us” versus “them” cultural
division which was never questioned, at the time, as an underlying assumption of the
documentary. Indeed, the construction of the audience’s assumed whiteness (an
extension of prevailing discourses which constructed anyone “American” as white), in
tandem with the constructed racial/ethnic/class Other-ness of the Indian subjects,
situates the documentary squarely in the tradition of ethnographic writing and
filmmaking, which has involved a presentation of the Other through the lens of white,
Western mediating interpreters. Ethnography is one institutionalized discursive
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tradition which composes the historical discursive constellation that Nichols has
labeled discourses of sobriety:
The separation of Us from Them is inscribed in the very institution of anthropology and into the structure of most ethnographic film. They occupy a time and space which We must recreate, stage or represent . . . under the aegis of scientific responsibility (and power). . . . Ethnographic film, in fact, belongs squarely among what I have called . . . the discourses of sobriety. As systems of discourse, science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion, and welfare exercise instrumental power, they operate on the assumption that they can and should alter the world itself or our place within it, that they can effect action and entail consequences. . . . Discourses of sobriety treat their relation to the real as non-problematic. . . . Through the discourses of sobriety knowledge/power exerts itself.24
One aspect of the cultural dichotomy reinforced by filmic representations of
non-Western cultures has been the striking difference between the ways that
whiteness and Otherness (in this case, Indianness) are constructed by the text. For
example, in The American Stranger, the politics of white America was visually
constructed around the talk of white men. In terms of mise-en-scene, white men were
always dressed in suits and ties and their talk situated in interior (office) spaces
constricted by walls and windows. In contrast, Indian country and its people and
cultures were visually constructed through a trope of vast openness and a
foregrounding of the natural world. Even the interviews with tribal leaders (some of
whom were dressed in “white” business clothes, but more casual without the ties)
were shot outdoors rather than in offices--on the fences of cattle ranches, in oil fields
and on porch rails. For much of the film, we watch silent Indians in action; it is only
during the last twenty minutes or so that tribal leaders were allowed to speak. In these
623
interviews, McCormick shed his coat and tie and favor of a casual ethnic shirt,
emphasizing his own on-site role as ethnographer and cultural mediator.
The text fabricated a bifurcated whiteness that was contradictory but not
incommensurable. Through the construction of the “us” in the voice of the
documentary, which interpellated a more socially and politically liberal white audience
who could identify with one of the three main white social actors in the text
(McCormick, Metcalf or Byrne), the text spoke to a whiteness that was complicitous
with the liberal political and humanistic aims of the documentary. However, through its
biting narrative and indignant characterization of “the white man” so evil and greedy
that “he’s committed mass murder. . . [and] persecuted, brutalized and debauched the
Indians as well as the forest,” The American Stranger constructed the evil twin of the
contemporary white liberal. This bogey man was discursively distinguished from “us”
in McCormick’s commentary: “He’s been trying to shove the Indian out of the way. The
Indian has something he wants, and, history says, he usually gets it.” Into this
undesirable category of “the white man” also fell the institutional evils of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, Congress, and corporate powers. The other side of the coin--the
benevolent, well-intentioned white “we”--was not explicitly sketched out by
McCormick, though its construction was implicit in the portrayals of three caring,
passionate, pro-Indian white men (Metcalf, Byrne and physical therapist Luckman) in
addition to McCormick himself. Through its discourses about whiteness, the populist
stance taken by the documentary (reflecting a lingering New Deal social and political
philosophy) created a dichotomy which threw suspicion on--and in many cases,
vilified--big business and government bureaucracy, while celebrating the compassion
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and dedication of individual white workers who devoted their energies to pro-Indian
and other liberal causes. These are the models of whiteness that the documentary
applauded, while acknowledging (and implicitly accepting guilt for) the historical
injustices perpetrated by ancestral whites and vehemently criticizing those members
of the white race who continued to use their privilege to perpetrate contemporary
injustices.
One of the most striking aspects of The American Stranger that has been noted
was the documentary’s unprecedented representation of Native Americans from a
sympathetic political perspective (antagonistic to that of the white government), and
especially the opportunity it provided for tribal leaders to speak for themselves, on
camera, directly to the predominantly white viewing audience. Since this period in the
late 1950s, the implications of “allowing the subjects to speak” within a text have
become a topic of great concern within ethnographic text-building, especially in the
context of the postwar processes of decolonization which uncomfortably made
anthropologists aware of their own complicity in the colonial project, and in response
to the radical cultural theories of the 1960s and 1970s. To what degree, many have
asked, does such a strategy subvert the authority of the omniscient narrator? The
question of authority in ethnographic representation has been a political and moral
dilemma of ethnographic film as well as a primary issue in the postmodern critique of
anthropology represented by such seminal essays as James Clifford’s “On
Ethnographic Authority.”25 These new paradigms have led to larger epistemological
questions of representation of Others. As Nichols puts it, “Who has the responsibility
and legitimacy (or power and authority) to represent, not only in the sense of rendering
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likenesses but also in the sense of ‘stand for’ and ‘prepare an argument about,’
others?. . . The unasked question is, In what way does this representation matter to
those it represents?”26
Ethnographic filmmakers like David MacDougall are often credited with
incorporating, starting in the 1960s and early 1970s, dialogic or interactive strategies
which allow their subjects a voice. As MacDougall himself explains, about this time
ethnographic filmmakers began feeling “uneasy” about the “unchallenged dominance
of the author’s voice” in ethnographic representations, and began to open their work
more fully to their indigenous subjects. However, he acknowledges a leading critique
that in this paradigm the indigenous voices are merely appropriated for what ultimately
becomes the author’s project, that there may exist a gap between the voice of the
social actor in the film and the voice of the film itself.27 Clifford has discussed this issue
by examining the various possible ways of incorporating the voices of the “natives”
into an ethnographic text:
This possibility suggests an alternate textual strategy, a utopia of plural authorship that accords to collaborators not merely the status of independent enunciators but that of writers. As a form of authority it must still be considered utopian for two reasons. First, . . . multiple-author works appear to require, as an instigating force, the research interest of an ethnographer who in the end assumes an executive, editorial position. The authoritative stance of “giving voice” to the other is not fully transcended. Second, the very idea of plural authorship challenges a deep Western identification of any text’s order with the intention of a single author. . . . The textual embodiment of authority is a recurring problem for contemporary experiments in ethnography.28
In the case of The American Stranger, the collaborative efforts which took place were
historically located in a period several decades prior to the widespread acceptance of
this new self-reflexive paradigm in academic anthropological ethnography. Apparently
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not trained in any sort of anthropology, McCormick just followed his own muses in
determining the need to immerse himself in intensive intercultural research upon
which to base his journalistic story. Given the journalistic as well as the ethnographic
conventions of his time, then, what is amazing is not the question of why he did not
cede more authority to his Indian collaborators--but actually, why he felt compelled to
let them speak for themselves at all.
The question MacDougall theoretically asks about ethnographic films--”Whose
story is it?”--is also a very pertinent question to ask of The American Stranger. The
answer is that the story is clearly McCormick’s, though there are segments of the
documentary in which he cedes the storytelling floor momentarily and that these
moments produce opportunities for rupture in his authoritative control of the master
narrative. As MacDougall claims, “By using the words of their informants,
anthropologists (and ethnographic filmmakers) bring into their work the narrative
forms and cultural assumptions embedded in speech. Whenever ‘quotation’ occurs,
an indigenous narrative model is possible.”29 Filmic quotations are usually found
either in interviews or in freestanding sound bites in which the indigenous subjects
speak. There is a difference even within the interview style between those interviews
in which the McCormick as “author” takes a controlling role (e.g. the interview with
Meade Swingley) and those where he is present but passive, and pretty much lets the
subjects talk (e.g. the interview with Walter Wetzel and Iliff McKay). The filming of the
Blackfeet Tribal Council meeting is yet a different situation, though one with even
more problematics since it was a situation with the potential to be quite liberatory given
that there was no interviewer and it was hypothetically a free forum for the expression
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of Native ideas. However, in this case the rehearsed and staged nature of the meeting
(evident from production papers which have transcripts for a number of “takes” of the
scene, as well as from the awkward self-consciousness of “acting” on the part of some
of the council members) inhibited the liberatory potential of the opportunity.
“What textual independence do these incorporated voices actually have?” asks
MacDougall, since they may be seen to be subordinated to the text produced by the
film’s author. MacDougall has suggested that much of the power and collaboration
afforded to indigenous subjects of films may be invisible in the final text itself but may
have shaped the structure of the text in indelible ways. Sometimes, MacDougall has
claimed, films may be “possessed” by their subjects when the orientation of the film
gradually shifts towards a particular narrative voice. At other times, the shaping of the
finished film owes much to the extratextual social process which is larger than the film
itself. I believe this is an important factor in the case of The American Stranger, which
was critically shaped in tone, if not as much in textual representation, by the influential
perspectives and involvement of radical white religious and community activists such
as Sister Providencia (whose presence is absence from the visual text though her
rhetoric permeates the spoken commentary) as well as tribal leaders such as Walter
McDonald of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (also an invisible textual
presence).
In such cases, we might then ask, “Who did not speak? Who was excluded, or
was not heard?” First, we have the situation of the three Indian elders, two of whom
spoke in the Blackfeet language but were not heard (or at least linguistically
understood) by most members of the viewing audience. In a positive light, this strategy
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can be interpreted as having given respectful voice to the Blackfeet traditionalists, and
may be seen as a fairly radical technique. On the other hand, we might consider being
able to speak without being understood a silencing of sorts. It is a strategy with
ambiguous intent, which can be read as either radical or as one more imperialist
request (as part of a long tradition) for members of this generation of Native
Americans to “play Indian” to satisfy the curiosity and longing for spectacle by the
non-Indian American public.
Other more blatant omissions of voices in the controversy over termination
were those of the government, obviously--ranging from the Department of the Interior
officials in Washington to the localized Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators and civil
servants working on the reservations (many of whom were themselves Indian). These
voices were excluded by McCormick’s choice, as were the voices of the mediating
advocacy groups such as the Association on American Indian Affairs and the National
Congress of American Indians. Perhaps in an effort to show a unified and
single-voiced Indian perspective, some of the most important voices which were
unheard were those which would complexify the Indian position--those Native
Americans who held contradictory perspectives within the Native community about
termination. Also, as I have noted elsewhere, the voices which spoke the
documentary’s arguments were exclusively male, and spoke not only from their racial
and ethnic perspectives but also from gendered positions that excluded the
perspectives of both Indian and non-Indian women. The failure to incorporate the
strong and powerful voices of many women who were major players in the political
struggle against termination--including NCAI Executive Director Helen Peterson
629
(Coeur D’Alene), AAIA Executive Director LaVerne Madigan, and Sister Providencia
Tolan--is an oversight with no recorded explanation to shed historical light upon it.
Finally, the voices of pro-termination white interests, such as legislators and corporate
capitalists, were not provided a forum. The choices of inclusion and exclusion
themselves were significant in shaping the final “voice” of the documentary text. By
many journalistic standards of the time, these exclusions--particularly those of the
government perspectives, since gender exclusion was certainly not a 1950s
issue--marked this documentary as one taking an editorial position of “biased”
advocacy rather than one striving to meet the highest journalistic standards of
objectivity and fairness to represent all sides equally.
Despite the omissions and perceived shortcomings of the documentary in
terms of presenting all possible voices and/or fairly representing the interests of all
relevant parties to the issues (a feat which would be impossible to achieve in its ideal
state), and despite the power of the authoritative narrator’s voice to recuperate a
master narrative, we can still read the film as a work made more ideologically complex
by the inclusion of indigenous voices and worldviews. As MacDougall explains,
Whenever culture forces within a subject act upon the structure of a film in the ways I have described--through the patterning of an event, a personal narrative, appropriation to a local function, or in some other way--the film can be read as a compound work, representing a crossing of cultural perspectives.30
THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
This brings us to consider the question of the effectivity of any representation of
the non-mainstream “Other” in the mainstream media. Can progressive or even
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radical images of the usually-stereotyped-or-chronically-absent Other (African
Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, to name just a few) ever be
“recoded” to produce a more “authentic” understanding of the cultural experience and
reality of being an Other in American society? Is the presence of any representation
better than none? To what degree is the metaphorical “voice” of the cultural Other a
necessity for the production of a culturally “authentic” representation? Similarly, to
what degree is the actual control over the production by a member of the represented
group necessary to validate and authenticate the representations produced? Is an
uncompromised native-controlled production even possible within the
production/distribution system that characterizes American film and television, given
that economic autonomy is almost nonexistent? These are questions which are not
merely of academic speculation, but which are currently being hotly debated in the
pragmatic discourses of the film and television industries and in some sectors of
society at large.
There is a tendency to oversimplify our conceptualization of the media process
when considering the possibility for increasing access by America’s cultural Others to
the apparatuses and modes of production of mainstream media. When considering
the possibility for activist intervention into, and negotiation about, the production of
representations in a media text, we must take into account all stages of the effective
life of a media form, including pre-production planning, the process of production itself
(generally considered the “shooting” stage), the processes of post-production
(especially editing), the channels and outlets for distribution (broadcast or theatrical
release, video rental), as well as the processes of reception (in which any negotiations
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over meaning are necessarily extratextual) . Negotiations over the text regarding
representation and issues of control can occur at any or all of these levels.
Traditionally, we have seen cases of many journalists or ethnographers or filmmakers
speaking for and representing the cultural Other, without granting approval or veto
power. In such a case, the only recourse is intervention at the level of distribution or
reception. A recent example is the 1996 international and intercultural protest by
Australian Aboriginal elders over the representation of their culture by a New Age
American writer (Marlo Morgan) in a fictionalized autobiographical account (Mutant
Message From Down Under) of her supposed experiences on an Aboriginal
“walkabout” ceremony. In response to her newfound celebrity and plans for a
Hollywood film version, a group of indigenous elders traveled around the world to
meet with United Artist executives to protest the proposed film, and also used Internet
networks for indigenous peoples globally to mobilize support for their cultural cause.
They proclaimed:
It is through the eruption of Marlo Morgan exploiting our Culture and our Blackfella Religion and our Sense of Belonging that our Elders and People Australia-wide have become deeply concerned with this issue. Marlo Morgan is becoming a rich woman overnight and telling lies about our Beliefs and Culture. Many Aboriginal people have read her book and have heard tapes of her speaking at lecture tours. She is being very racist saying Aboriginal people have made a decision to die out. Her lecturing makes fun of us the Aboriginal People and our Beliefs. It is not a laughing matter.
The statement by Aboriginal leaders continued:
All this has to be corrected by the Indigenous People of this Land. There
have been meetings over the last year throughout the Central and
Western Desert, South Australia, the Kimberleys, and the South West
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coordinated by Dumbartung. All are agreed in a united voice of concern
that we must speak in America concerning Marlo Morgan's book. . . . It is
also asked by me and my community of Nyungah people living on our
Sacred Homegrounds on the Dreaming Track of the Sacred Belief of the
Waugal Rainbow Serpent in the Swan Valley Western Australia, to the
11 Spiritual Elders and to Indigenous People where you are and who
you are, can you support? We are asking for world indigenous support
by telegram, letters, faxes, making statements, by contacting the
Publishers of that book, Harper Collins to withdraw it, and the film people
who have bought the rights, United Artists to stop, and American T.V.
radio, newspapers and Oprah Winfrey who put Marlo Morgan on air.31
Robert Eggington, an Aboriginal activist spearheading the trip, commented in an
accompanying release: "Marlo Morgan has taken away the right for Aboriginal people
to tell their own story as she saturates the American market with a complete
fabrication."32
A slightly more progressive option in allowing native control over some aspects
of production would be allowing representatives of the non-dominant group to be
consulted during the pre-production or development stage, but having no control over
the ultimate textual structure or representation. Similarly, white producers might allow
Native Americans--or other Others--to have a voice on camera, as in The American
Stranger and, more recently, in television news reporting in general--but their “voice”
and the perspective it represents is subsumed within the larger piece that is edited and
controlled by a white producer or production hierarchy. This is the level of
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representational access that The American Stranger provided to Native Americans,
but it was considered a breakthrough at that time from having no voice and no access
to having limited access to and influence over their own representation.
Another notch forward in the continuum might involve granting members of the
represented group some mechanism for approval or veto power at the
post-production stage, a practice which has been incorporated into the ethnographic
process by some anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers, but has rarely been a
practice within the media industry. Similarly, bringing Native American employees on
board the project in either creative (writers or actors, for example) or technical support
roles (camera operator, grip, etc.) or as co-producers in which shared decisions are
made does increase the possibility of native control and/or influence over the terms of
representation, although the structures of power in such production situations can
create inequalities and lead to cultural negotiations which are often settled by
economic imperatives rather than creative or cultural ones. This situation is the most
likely scenario in the most progressive conditions of Native American representation
today in the mainstream media, such as television series like Northern Exposure or
television “historical” productions about Native American history such as those
produced by Ted Turner during the early 1990's. In the most progressive of such
cases, Native American producers can create self-representations but because they
are working within the system their media pieces must be controlled and constrained
by pressures of the industry system.
The alternative to such compromised and negotiated productions would be for
native groups to produce totally independent, alternative productions outside of the
634
hegemonic, mainstream media system. Several large bodies of political literature,
theory and practice converge in the issue of Native Americans and media access.
Very few overviews exist which account for the historical cultural and political
meanings and uses of what might be considered Native American media.33 The
question leads us to consider the many ways that we can metaphorically consider the
sources of difference between Native America (including its hundreds of culturally and
geographically distinct tribal groups) and dominant, white, mass-mediated America.
Do we conceptualize the marginalization of Native America in the media as a local or
regional versus a national issue--or, politically, as a matter of Native America’s
distance at the peripheries from some sort of white American core ideology and
industry? The latter might lead to a distinction between mainstream and alternative
media which is parallel in some ways to the distinction between Hollywood studio
versus independent film production, although this analogy is problematic in many
ways. However, both imply the existence of some core, integrated culture industry
against which independent media producers are defining themselves. In addition to
the existence of a thriving Native press, which is mostly localized with some degree of
national networking (and a national association of Native American journalists), we
can consider native-produced and controlled media through the separate discourses
and practices of independent Native American filmmakers (of both documentary,
feature and experimental films), community-based tribal broadcasting (radio and
television) industries, as well as a few national Native American media organizations
for networking support, broadcasting, and/or distribution of films, videos or press
releases about Native American issues to the non-Indian American public.
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If intended for the widest audience, then of course the problem with alternative
media is that of distribution, since mainstream distribution is limited to attempting to
acquiring space on public broadcasting stations or trying to achieve wide theatrical
release for an independent feature film. A Native American Public Broadcasting
Consortium does exist, which works to encourage Native American production and to
distribute such productions as widely as possible through either broadcasting or rental
venues. There are also Native American press associations and radio networks which
produce press releases and syndicated programs for more mainstream distribution as
well as programming for more localized consumption in Indian country.
Locally-produced television programs and films are also produced through the
auspices of many tribal communications offices. Many alternative circuits for national
distribution exist, though their scope is limited: ranging from distributors specializing in
the rental and sale of culturally-oriented nonfiction and experimental films and videos
(such as Women Make Movies) to mostly academic and political audiences to the film
festival circuit (a number of Native American film festivals, as well as documentary and
experimental film festivals, exist). On a more delimited geographical scale, public
access cable television channels and community media systems modeled upon the
successful Native American press provide opportunities for exhibition of media in
community-oriented settings.34 Community media and especially community radio
have become extremely significant vehicles for grassroots political organizing and for
control of self-representations to a local audience,35 especially among indigenous
peoples globally and in developing nations.
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In terms of geographically localized communities whose local indigenous
cultural needs have been overlooked, ignored or marginalized by the mainstream
media, the growth of tribal and community media offers an alternative for serving the
needs of the distinct and vastly dispersed groups of indigenous peoples within the
Americas, as well as the rest of the world. Also, as a politicized national collectivity of
indigenous Americans, at different times in recent years a number of social
movements have emerged from the political body that is Native America which have
worked to radically change the political, social and/or economic conditions of some
segments of the Native American population. Although Native American filmmaking
as an art is beyond the scope of this project, the craft is thriving, as is media activism
through media production--and artists such as Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva are
demonstrating ways that alternative cultural truths can be encoded into very
cultural-specific forms of media.36 The growth of an interdisciplinary scholarship in
social movement theory as well as pragmatic guides to media organizing provide us
with an alternative model for thinking about the use of media by socially
disenfranchised groups in their struggles for power and sovereignty. It is where these
two bodies of interdisciplinary theory and praxis converge--the strategic use of media
for indigenous artistic and cultural expression and for deeply localized cultural/political
movements--that we find the most revealing clues about the power of the media,
either national/mainstream or local/alternative, to become integrally meaningful
socially, culturally and politically for indigenous people.
Questions of voice and of representation in mainstream media (either fiction or
nonfiction) are ultimately two different but interconnected issues, and they are
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intimately relevant to the issues debated in the self-reflection of post-Eighties
anthropologists about the role of ethnography as a system of representation and the
questioning of who has the authority over ethnographic representation. They are also
related to the sensitive historiographical question surrounding who has the authority to
speak Native American history, as Gail Landsman and Sara Ciborski have recently
explained in their study of conflicts over the representation of Indians in curriculum
development in New York State:
The controversy offers an opportunity to explore important questions
about the politics of historical representation and the social construction
of knowledge. What are the assumptions about historical writing and the
nature of historical “truth” that underlie both the Indians’ construction of
their own culture history and the scholars’ dissenting history?37
In all academic disciplines which create representations of either the temporal or
geographically spatial cultural Other, the “post-everything” turn (post-colonial,
post-structuralist, post-modern) towards self-critique of the past decades has
foregrounded the implications of the ideological assumptions which have saturated
such traditionally-accepted representational practices as writing culture, writing
history and even writing journalism. Such theory has been a bit slower making its way
into media practices, especially those associated with the mainstream media
industries which are notoriously non-self-critical about their ideological
presuppositions as long as they are making comfortable profits.
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In his writing about the media representation of gays and lesbians, Larry Gross
argues that, although control over production of images is the ultimate goal, other
forms of media exposure are still important:
Representation in the mediated “reality” of our mass culture is in itself power; certainly it is the case that non-representation maintains the powerless status of groups that do not possess significant material or political power bases. . . . When groups or perspectives do attain visibility, the manner of that representation will itself reflect the biases and interests of those elites who define the public agenda. . . .
Gross continues:
The most effective form of resistance to the hegemonic force of the
dominant media is to speak for oneself. At one level this means
attempting to be included in the category of recognized positions and
groupings acknowledged by the mass media. Achieving this degree of
legitimation is not a negligible accomplishment, and is not to be
despised or rejected as an important minority goal. . . . The ultimate
expression of independence for a minority audience struggling to free
itself from the dominant culture's hegemony is to become the creators
and not merely the consumers of media images.38
The question of the political effectivity of media representations at the level of
reception or consumption of media images, then, becomes one of the most relevant in
terms of considering how media representations might be used to shape public
opinion and the public’s perception of the diverse cultures that constitute global
society. However, this question of effectivity in altering or reshaping public
perceptions is one that can only be answered through reception studies which
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address the uses and meanings people make from media and the ways media
representations affect their perceptions of--indeed, constructions of--social reality.
There has been much debate in the mass communications scholarship on media
effects over the degree to which viewers’ or audience members’ perspectives are
potentially determined (or overdetermined) by media, and especially the degree to
which mass media is only one contributory agent among many other mediating factors
in determining audience understandings of situations (e.g. effect of representations of
sex, crime or violence on audience values and behaviors.
An assumption of political effectivity at the level of reception is taken for granted
by media activists who work on behalf of social movements. The goals of such media
activism, according to Ryan, are first, to turn television news into “contested terrain” (“
to point out that the establishment view is not the only or ‘natural’ way to look at a
problem, and, at best, to present an alternative”), and second, to use the media as a
vehicle for mobilizing support for their social cause.39 In her how-to manual for media
activism, Ryan admits the inherent difficulty of using the mainstream media to
challenge the status quo when those same media are generally structured to reinforce
the status quo, and generally operate in economic and political structures which are
intricately interlinked with the structures of hegemonic power in American society,
reinforcing the political views of the powerful by promoting insiders’ framing of events
and by employing notions of newsworthiness that reinforce the status quo,
marginalizing challengers and their perspectives. However, although acknowledging
that the mainstream media have generally silenced, marginalized, or absorbed
alternative and opposition voices, Ryan continues to promote the use of mainstream
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as well as alternative and oppositional channels of media, since mainstream media
can reach a segment of the national population which will never be accessed through
alternative media. Since alternative media are perceived to reach the
already-converted, Ryan queries, the challenge becomes: how to mobilize
mainstream support through media?
Through the case study of The American Stranger, a 1958 mainstream
documentary produced within the constrained environment of television’s structures
of journalism and broadcast nationally to an audience which was for the most part
previously unaware of the cultural politics of Native America, we have seen one
detailed and early example of the use of television as a channel for the mobilization of
political and social support at a national level. Like Ryan, I have understood the
process of journalistic documentary production as “the exercise of power over the
interpretation of reality,” and interpret the inclusion of Native American voices,
however limited, to be a first step in what will be a long historical process in the
struggle for power over control of the social practices of cultural representation. The
clash between numerous versions of “truth,” and the subsequent struggle to
determine facticity about the federal relationship with Native American tribes,
highlights the ideological nature of all struggles over truth in the public sphere
constructed by the mainstream media. “Facts are tactical weapons in an ideological
struggle,” Ryan argues40--and the ongoing debate in Montana and across the nation
during the late 1950s over which facts were the “true-est” provides scholars of culture,
society, history and the media with a rich example of the complex ways that such
discourses may be generated around, through and about the media. Ultimately, the
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legacy of The American Stranger is to help us to understand the many cultural and
political meanings that may be made--and actions that may be taken--by active media
consumers in their public spheres of influence.
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NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE
1. Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981) 193-196.
2. Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986) 6-7. The photo is in the National Archives.
3. See Hauptman, 116-117.
4. Clint Wilson and Félix Gutiérrez, Minorities and Media: Diversity and the End of Mass Communication (London: Sage, 1985) 32-34, 38-40.
5. Wilson and Gutiérrez 41, 135-40.
6. See, for example, the work of Michael Real, Herman Gray and Ed Guerrero on African American representations in film and television. The cultural studies approach to representations of race and ethnicity in the media has an extremely rapidly-growing body of literature.
7. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 107.
8. Nichols, 3-4.
9. Nichols, 10-11.
10. Eliot Weinberger, “The Camera People,” in Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994) 3-4.
11. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 189.
12. Eric Barnouw, Documentary (London: Oxford UP, 1974) 221-227.
13. Ana M. López, “(Not) Looking for Origins: Postmodernism, Documentary, and America,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993) 153.
14. Weinberger, 8.
15. Weinberger, 9.
16. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 34.
17. Spurr, 15.
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18. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic,” in Visualizing Theory, 363-364. Lutz and Collins distinguish seven kinds of gaze: the photographer’s gaze; the institutional/magazine gaze (evident in cropping, picture choice, captioning, etc.); the readers’ gaze; the non-Western subjects’ gaze; the explicit looking done by Westerners who are framed with locals in the photos; the gaze returned or refracted by the mirrors or camera in local hands; our own, academic gaze. See also their Reading National Geographic (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993).
19. Lutz and Collins, 364-365. See also Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 1975) 803-816; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1981); Frederic Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” in Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1983) 1-14.
20. Spurr, 13.
21. Spurr, 13. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24 (6) 18-36.
22. George F. Will, “The Viewers and the Viewed,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (19 November 1995) B-3. Will refers to a not-yet-published essay in The National Interest quarterly by Clifford Orwin entitled “Compassion and the Globalization of the Spectacle of Suffering.” See also Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus (Winter 1996) 1-23.
23. Bill Nichols, “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” in Visualizing Theory, 69-70.
24. Nichols, “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” 63.
25. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) 21-54.
26. Nichols, “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” 61.
27. David MacDougall, “Whose Story Is It?” in Visualizing Theory, 27-36.
28. Clifford, 51, 53.
29. MacDougall, 31.
30. MacDougall, 35.
31. Letter from Robert Bropho, Nyungah Elder and Spokesperson, of Swan Valley
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Western Australia, posted 24 Jan 1996 on NATIVE-L Mailing List (native-l@gnosys.svle.ma.us) by mktrecon@iinet.net.au.
32. A follow-up posting dated 31 Jan 1996 from mktrecon@iinet.net.au on NATIVE-L Mailing List (native-l@gnosys.svle.ma.us) excerpted an article from the West Australia Newspaper that same day, written by Vanessa Gould, entitled “Elders Receive Apology.” The Gould article reports that “Hollywood action star Steven Seagal has brokered an apology to eight Aboriginal elders from Marlo Morgan, the American author who claimed first-hand experience of a group of unknown Aborigines she called the wild ones. The New Age author of a best-selling book, Mutant Message From Down Under, claimed she was initiated by the tribe during a four-month walkabout in the central desert. In an emotional hour-long telephone call to Morgan in New York from Seagal's Hollywood studio on Monday, Morgan admitted for the first time to the eight elders that her work was fiction and a fabrication. . . .The group did not want her money or any compensation, just to stop the story. Morgan made $1.8 million from the first book's publishing rights, is likely to make $3 million from a second volume, and stood to make up to $90 million from lecturing and film rights. The book has been published in 11 languages. She had written a disclaimer in the second 1994 edition of her book, published by Harper Collins, which said the book was fiction, but based on her experiences in Australia. However she maintained this was only to protect the identity of the tribe. Dr. John Stanton, curator of the Bendt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, said the book contained misleading and damaging information about Aboriginal people which had pandered to the gullibility of Americans desperate for New Age ideas. . . . He was not sure whether the damage the book had done to the overseas image of Aboriginal culture, which was complex, diverse and vibrant, could be ever undone.”
33. See Richard LaCourse, “A Quickening Pace: Native American Media 1828 to 1994,” Akwe:kon Journal/NMAI 11/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1994) 53-60.
34. For more on the Native American press, see Douglas Scoville, “As Cultures Clash,” Presstime (Jn. 1994) 22-25; James and Sharon Murphy, Let My People Know (U Oklahoma P, 1981); and Richard LaCourse, “An Indian Perspective--Native American Journalism: An Overview,” Journalism History 6/2 (Summer 1979) 34-35.
35. See the numerous articles in Tony Dowmunt, ed. Channels of Resistance: Global Television and Local Empowerment (London: BFI, 1993). Also, see Lorna Roth, “Mohawk Airwaves and Cultural Challenges: Some Reflections on the Politics of Recognition and Cultural Appropriation After the Summer of 1990,” Canadian Journal of Communication 18 (1993) 315-331; Ray Cook and Joseph Orozco, “Native Community Radio: Its Function and Future,” Akwe:kon Journal/NMAI 11/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1994) 61-67; and Marian Bredin, “Ethnography and Communication: Approaches to Aboriginal Media,” Canadian Journal of Communication 18 (1993)
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297-313.
36. See Kathleen Sands and Allison Sekaquaptewa Lewis, “Seeing With a Native Eye: a Hopi Film on Hopi,” American Indian Quarterly 13/3 (Summer 1989) 387-96. Michele Stewart’s doctoral work at the University of Minnesota on Native American activism through filmmaking is also a promising development in this area. See also Geoffrey White, “Village Videos and Custom Chiefs: The Politics of Tradition,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 15(2) 56-60, and Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal Art and Film: the politics of representation,” Race and Class 35/4 (1994) 89-106.
37. Gail Landsman and Sara Ciborski, “Representation and Politics: Contesting Histories of the Iroquois,” Cultural Anthropology 7/4 (1992) 425-447. Also see R. David Edmunds, “Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995," American Historical Review 100/3 (June 1995) 717-740, and Daniel Richter, “Whose Indian History?” The William and Mary Quarterly, 50/2 (April 1993) 379-93.
38. Larry Gross, “Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media,” in Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter et al (London: Routledge, 1991) 130-149.
39. Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
40. Ryan, 10, 79.
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