Dan raises some interesting questions about portrayal of Native Americans in advertising and other popular culture. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, in fact, after watching the movie Transpecos, a kind of Western neo-noir set in West Texas. I like movies about West Texas, because I am from there and because the landscape is naturally cinematic.
I have little interest in verisimilitude in art, but West Texas movies often awaken my internal fact-checker; also, I have very little interest in the narrow politics of “representation” except as they affect the quality of the storytelling, but I would like to see more Native-American stories in popular culture, because they are interesting, central to the American experience, and generally misunderstood and distorted.
I very much enjoyed Hell or High Water, in spite of its patently preposterous plot, and the film has grown on me even more on additional viewings. A thing that struck me about the film, as I wrote in my review:
One other weird thing: Every third person in this movie is Comanche, and everybody in this version of West Texas knows enough about Comanche people to have opinions about them, to make and appreciate Comanche jokes, etc. I lived there 20-something years and still spend a fair amount of time there, and I don’t think I ever met a single person who identified as Comanche. (I knew one Choctaw family and a whole bunch of vague, Elizabeth Warren types, each inevitably descended from a “Cherokee princess.”) The only Comanche the typical person in that world has ever heard of is Quanah Parker. There are fewer than 20,000 Comanche people in the United States, and Native Americans as a whole make up less than 1 percent of the population in Texas. But, I get it, cowboys and Indians and all that.
Upon further consideration, it occurs to me that I had a relative married to a Comanche man from Oklahoma. But, other than that, not much. My experience may be atypical.
Similarly, I mostly enjoyed Transpecos (shot in New Mexico — incentives matter!), but was caught by a scene in which the protagonists travel to the mountains in West Texas and seek out the advice of a Mayan folk healer who speaks only K’iche’ — no English, no Spanish, only K’iche’. I would not be surprised to meet a monolingual K’iche’ speaker in Guatemala. I’d be pretty surprised to meet one within reasonable driving distance of a Dairy Queen.
(A hundred miles is reasonable out there.)
But maybe I’m being too narrow. I know exactly as much about K’iche’ as anybody else with access to Wikipedia, so I ran my notion by linguistic anthropologist Sergio Romero of the University of Texas (author of Language and Ethnicity among the K’iche’ Maya), who responded:
There are many K’iche’ speakers who are for all practical purposes monolingual. Most speak some Spanish, and a few are indeed highly competent bilinguals. However, there are many, especially among the elderly, who have almost no Spanish knowledge to speak of. I speak K’iche’ myself and in my many years living and doing research in K’iche’ communities, I have met many monolingual K’iche’, including several shamans. The latter tend to be rather conservative, secluded individuals who rarely engage non-indigenous Guatemalans.
As I wrote before, I’m in the market for more Native-American stories and characters, not fewer. (Recommendations welcome. And I’ll offer one on the nonfiction front: Jay Nordlinger’s excellent and still relevant report from Pine Ridge.) But these movie contrivances have a perfunctory feel to them, Comanche and Mayan people who are like those fictitious “African proverbs” and all that Eastern wisdom and maxims attributed to Mohandas Gandhi and other exotic screens onto which Western romantics project their own desires and anxieties.
Surely beyond the casinos and the hippie sentimentalism, there must be some very interesting stories left to be told.