If you went to elementary school in the mid-1990s, "Pocahontas" probably recalls the melodious strains of the enduring song "Colors of the Wind," accompanied by her memorable animal pals Meeko the raccoon and Flit the hummingbird. For many people, Pocahontas is their go-to representation of an American Indian, one who is very beautiful, very free-spirited and very fabricated.
After a screening of the 1995 Disney film at the National Gallery of Art Saturday afternoon, two contemporary Indian women - Los Angeles-based Navajo filmmaker Nanobah Becker and Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway Nation research assistant at the National Museum of the American Indian - spoke to the AU-based Center for Social Media Director Patricia Aufderheide and an audience on their own perceptions of the Pocahontas story. Tayac is well versed in the background of the legendary American encounter.
"The issue is that Pocahontas is really very much an American mythology," she said. "This is not the reality of the story. It very much reflects the different telling of the Pocahontas narrative - what we want to build in terms of a national psyche using this narrative more than what the actual facts are."
Becker, who screened her short film, "Conversion," which chronicled the death of a Navajo medicine man after Christian missionaries convinced him to discard his supplies, shared similar sentiments.
"I think the thing that's strange is why they chose to pick a historical figure to portray ... that history of colonization - it's such a devastating story," she said. "I can understand why we don't talk about it anymore. Why we don't address it or think about the situation today, and it was kind of upsetting to me that it was so simplified. That history doesn't even come up. It was completely ignored."
Becker identifies this frustration from personal experience in her film subjects, American Indians.
"I just constantly have to deal with the fact there there's no market for films about Native Americans," she said, illustrating just one of many examples in which American Indians continue to be pushed to the sidelines in contemporary dealings. While their struggles are gradually becoming more widely recognized and taken into account by the general public, acknowledgement has yet to translate into action.
"We're so marginalized in this society," she said. "You just never see the native point of view."
The Smithsonian series "Film Indians Now!" runs on select weekends throughout October, November and December and aims to represent the difficulties facing American Indian directors such as Becker and the communities they are tasked with representing in their visions. Each of the viewings will be followed by discussions with those involved in the creations, and the scholars who study them. Many of the movies selected ("Tkaronto," "The Colony," "A Return Home") are not widely known by their titles, but their visions echo throughout the isolated reservations that American Indians continue to inhabit today.
A unique exhibit featuring the work of French painter George de Forest Brush, whose intricate pieces reflect his years living among the Arapahoe and Shoshone tribes in Wyoming and the Crow in Montana in the tumultuous years between the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, compliments the screenings. Brush's paintings, rarely granted their own, individualized gallery viewings, don't directly depict the colonial skirmishes from the time. Rather, they emerge from his own primordial dreamscape, showing a pristine American landscape with heavenly light highlighting the unspoiled beauty of a land yet to suffer the full scars of industrialization.
Much of what we remember, or claim to remember, about the American Indian experience today originates in artistic accounts from those removed from the conflicts themselves, or comes from a textbook. The National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of the American Indian's presentation of "Film Indians Now!" lays an essential foundation for American Indians to speak in their own voices and through their own work relating to experiences in the Indian tradition. While the devastation European colonization wrought can never be retracted, attention paid to the stories of those directly affected by it allows for a new degree of liberation for a people still desperate for their voices to be heard.
You can reach this staff writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
