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Speaker critiques Indian portrayals
As part of Jamestown 2007 events, an anthropologist says that most films
ignore the realities of American Indian life.

BY ANGELA FOREST

April 2 2007

NEWPORT NEWS -- Pauline Turner Strong is an anthropologist who specializes
in examining how gender, race and ethnicity are presented in American
society.

One way the 54-year-old associate professor and associate director of
humanities at the University of Texas observes this is through the media,
particularly films.

As part of events tied to Jamestown 2007, both Christopher Newport
University and the Virginia Humanities Conference invited Strong to speak
last Thursday and Saturday at CNU's campus.

Strong is working on a book scheduled for publication next year about how
American Indians are portrayed in various media, including movies.

Q: Can you touch on the subject of your presentations at CNU?

A: The Pocahontas part of the lecture is based on two articles that I've
published on the way the Pocahontas/ John Smith story is presented by
Disney and the contradictions in that film between its critique of
property.

In the song "Colors of the Wind," Pocahontas talks about the land as
something you cannot own because it has a spirit of its own.

So the film has a critique of property from a Native American perspective,
but of course the film "Pocahontas" is itself a property, and she is a
trademarked property of Disney.

Q: Do you think that contradiction is symbolic of America in a lot of ways?

A: The Pocahontas story is symbolic of many aspects of American history,
and that's why I think it's been retold through so many generations in so
many different ways. It's a romantic story about the way things might have
been.

And so I think in telling that romantic story, Disney is invoking a sense
of loss and nostalgia that many Americans have for a past that might have
been more peaceful and more environmentally conscious.

But also they're marketing it in a way that's entirely part of the culture
that came to dominate the continent. So yes, I would say it's symbolic of
the sort of mixed feelings that many Americans have toward their past.

Q: And then you have "The New World"...

A: It attempts in many ways to present a sense of authentic native culture.
It only does that in some ways - this is a contradiction in this film. In
"The New World," there's a great deal of ambiguity and ambivalence as well,
much more than in "Pocahontas." Whereas in "Pocahontas" the contradiction
is between the message of the film and the marketing of the film, in "The
New World," there's a great deal of ambivalence within the film itself.

The end of the film when Thomas Rolfe, her (Pocahontas') son, is born, it
seems to me to suggest that her sacrifices, the sacrifice of her life, the
sacrifice of her culture - because she's now an English gentlewoman - that
that was necessary for a new culture to be born. Putting kind of a positive
spin on the story is very puzzling to me because it's actually a very
tragic story.

Q: Can you talk about how American Indian filmmakers have presented their
experiences in this country, and how that contrasts with films like "The
New World"?

A: There's a film called "The Return of Navajo Boy," that was co-produced
by a Native American filmmaker named Bennie Klain, and I think that
contrasts in interesting ways with these two films about the Pocahontas
story, which is the story of captivity, it's a story of John Smith being
captured. Of course in "The New World," the story is also told of
Pocahontas being captured, being a hostage among the English. That's part
of the story that is very rarely told in the mainstream culture: that
Native Americans have been captives and then members of the dominant
culture much more often than colonists and frontier people were captured by
Indians.

This film, "The Return of Navajo Boy," tells a different story (than seen
in mainstream films) because it's from a native point of view.

Q: What are some of the common characteristics of the native point of view
in portraying American Indians in film?

A: It's hard to generalize because there are hundreds of native cultures.
But one thing that is in common - speaking from a very local perspective,
speaking not in generalities but native people speaking about their own
history, about their own landscape, about their own relatives, a real sense
of being in a place and of a perspective and experiences being tied to that
place. People are very, very conscious of place and conscious of where they
come from.

And a respect for different ways of viewing the world, an expectation that
people who come from different places and have different ancestors will
view the world in a different way.

Also a different feeling toward the past. White Americans tend to say,
"That was then, this is now, get over the past." Native Americans, like
African-Americans, are really conscious of the effect the past has had on
the present.

Also a sense of humor. In films that non-natives make about native people,
they're often very stoic, they don't speak very much, they're enigmatic,
what they say is hard to understand, and they're very serious.

But native people have a tremendous sense of humor about themselves and
that comes out in many native- made films. "Powwow Highway" is an example
of that.

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