Indian Comics Irregular #101

On UPN's "Star Trek: Voyager," Robert Beltran played Chakotay, a
Native American who attended Starfleet Academy before joining the
rebel Maquis. The standard view is that Chakotay, the first
continuing Native character in a Trek series, was an uplifting role
model. "Chakotay is a passionate man who has earned Captain
Janeway's respect as her friend and First Officer," Beltran
once explained.

But Al Carroll (Mescalero Apache), a PhD student at Arizona State
University, has another view. He dissected Chakotay's background in
his thesis, "Depictions of Native Veterans in Fiction." Some
excerpts:

The character of Chakotay in "Star Trek: Voyager" (STV) is every
bit as much a creature of white fantasies as Billy Jack. STV's
Chakotay is another "faithful companion" or sidekick to a white
lead character, and in his own bizarre ways far more stereotypical
than Tonto. At least Tonto was heroic and rescued the Lone Ranger
once in awhile. Robert Beltran actually seems to imitate the old
Westerns for his unflinchingly stone-faced Stoic portrayal. The
character of Chakotay is a Frankenstein-like patchwork of New Age
fantasies and misconceptions. STV's writers deliberately avoid
making Chakotay a member of a tribe that exists anywhere outside a
screenplay. This enables the writers to mix and match bits and
pieces of New Age clichés about Natives without any regard for
accuracy or believability. His fictional "Anurabi" tribe is from
the South American jungles, yet venerates "sky people."
Generally, the pantheons of jungle tribes involve forest
creatures, not figures from the heavens they could hardly see
through the jungle canopy. Chakotay's people also use the
sweatlodge, which STV's writers falsely assume is a universal
ceremony among all Native peoples. Apparently it never occurred
to the writers that you don't need a lodge to sweat in the jungle.

Chakotay even invites his commanding officer, a white woman in her
forties, to take part in a Vision Quest, a ceremony that is
exclusively done for adolescent boys. Chakotay also urges Janeway
to try and find her "animal totem" or spirit guide. Again, this
is based on New Age misconceptions.

For the purposes of this study, the worst aspect of the Chakotay
character is that it gives no insight into either Native peoples
in general or Native veterans in particular, being content to
spread New Age misconceptions instead. Even Chakotay's name is a
clear signal to New Age followers. In the fictional Anurabi
dialect, his name translates as Earth Walking Man or "Man Who
Walks the Earth But Only Sees the Sky," every bit as pretentious
as most other New Age "Indian names." In a further instance of
New Age homogenizing of all Native cultures into one "generic
Indian" framework, STV's writers openly modeled the Anurabi on a
composite of Aztec, Mayan, Mixtec, and even Inca cultures. The
writers further relied upon a number of New Age sites for
information, and crosslink to them.

For all of their pretensions to having "enlightened" views of
Natives, STV falls back on old stereotypes. Chakotay's people are
shown as trapped or deliberately choosing to live in the past,
even in the Twenty-Fourth Century. Indeed, Chakotay's choice to
join Star Fleet is scripted as a complete rejection of his Native
culture, rather than as adaptation. Naturally, STV's writers
could not show successful Native adaptation to the military.
Instead, they first make Chakotay into a mutineer and rebel
leader. Naturally they also show Chakotay seeing the error of his
ways thanks to his benevolent white leader, his commander Captain
Janeway....As with "Windtalkers," the most positive thing to be
said for this portrayal is that most of the public was smart
enough to see through it and thoroughly reject it.

Alas. Even the future's fictional Indians are stereotypical.
For more of Carroll's take on Chakotay, go to
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/chakotay.htm.

Rob Schmidt
Blue Corn Comics