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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

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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

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(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

631

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

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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

637

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.

638

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.