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NY Times, May 5 2015
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias
By CARA BUCKLEY
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from
the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its
distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a
glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in
“Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry
Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr.
Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is
Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in
Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film
roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a
major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script.
According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The
Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is
revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman
squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough
history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of
Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam
Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks,
Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors
and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream
portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally
better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from
accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American
performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation
on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has
very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren
Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying
to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are
killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t,
he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen.
Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous
Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film
industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old
negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the
despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native
Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s
ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a
paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors
Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts
(those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of
the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived
in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree
filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans
over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories:
the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the
backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest
destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for
depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all
indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the
colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee
Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the
American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white
people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk
in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to
come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam
Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while
typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it
comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them
as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the
Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,”
he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated
culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a
child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would
somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American
Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and,
more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film
“Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course,
exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will
now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a
Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of
Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk
detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring
role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach
said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see
anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral
roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to
draw on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian
will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter
and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting
more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente
noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last
two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to
stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no
ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country
Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the
filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number
of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it.
Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about
the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
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