Brehm Center

            The Covenant Church which I (Rob) grew up in was predominately Swedish. (In the parlance of today, our tossed salad was heavy on Swedish cucumbers, though we did have one messianic Jew, a Chinese matriarch and her talented clan, and several Armenian families.) When my mother started attending the church around 1930, she was the only non-Swede; she was Cherokee and Irish. Not wanting her culture to be lost, she took our whole family on Easter vacations to Arizona to visit Indian reservations and Native American archeological sites. Growing up with a healthy consciousness that we were part Native American was not easy. Few cared about the modern day Indian. And little has changed.

            It should come as no surprise, then, that it is rare to find a movie about contemporary Native Americans. Audiences will pay to see "cowboy and Indian" fare based in the 19th century, but few in our culture have any real interest in exploring what it means to be an Indian in white America today. That the film Smoke Signals has been so well received by audiences and critics alike is therefore quite extraordinary. The movie even won two awards at Robert Redford's 1998 Sundance Film Festival!

            Billed as the first feature movie entirely written, directed, and acted by Native Americans, Smoke Signals  was adapted for the screen from four short stories by Sherman Alexie out of his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Alexie is quoted in Time magazine as saying, "I love the way movies have more power than books. They continue the oral tradition, the way we all sit around the fire and listen to stories." Here, indeed, is a story to see and hear.

            The film opens on the Fourth of July, 1976. It tells the tale of two modern-day Coeur d'Alene Indians, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire who leave their Idaho reservation twenty years later to go by bus to retrieve the ashes of Victor's alcoholic father. Arnold Joseph has died in Arizona, years after abandoning his family, and forgiveness does not come easily. Victor is good-looking, self-righteous, and stoic. He has sealed himself off in anger since his father left him as an adolescent. Thomas -- geeky, happy, and forever talkative -- is the storyteller trying to understand his friend's pain (and perhaps his own). It is Arnold Joseph who binds these otherwise dissimilar twenty year olds together. He is not only Victor's father; he also saved the infant Thomas from a fatal house fire that orphaned him that July 4th evening.

            From such a skeletal plot description, one might presume the movie to be dark and sentimental; it is not. Humor abounds. The weather report on "K-Rez" always begins, "It's a good day to be indigenous" and its traffic report typically says, "One car went by earlier." Frustrated with Thomas' non-stop talking, Victor can tell him to "get stoic. Look like a warrior." He also accuses Victor of learning his "Indianness" from watching Dances with Wolves! In this movie, we see a younger generation of Native Americans poking fun at themselves.

            Smoke Signals is a genre "road picture" whose structure needs only a "destination" to work. Otherwise, the story allows for freedom and improvisation along the way. In this movie, the need to recover the father's ashes is the "excuse" for the young men's bus trip to Arizona. But the real movement occurs as the youth discover life's meaning and possibilities through their growing friendship. Dialogue is the heart of the movie, but it is never preachy. Rather, the movie uses humor and a fondness for Indian culture to help its viewers better understand both today's Native American and ourselves.

            Through the use of storytelling so typical of Indian culture, Smoke Signals weaves together fantasy and realism in a series of flashbacks and fast-forwards, often narrated by Thomas. In the process not only are Thomas and Victor able to accept their past and present, but we as viewers are able better to discover our stories as well. The director, Chris Eyre, says, the movie is a "universal story about fathers and friends and forgiveness." He has used the tradition he knows best (the Native American), but the movie is meant to transcend culture. Its final soliloquy is a moving voiceover of a poem by Dick Lorrie: "How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream....Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs? Or in their deaths? Saying it to them or not saying it?" These are questions for anytime or place.

            But because Smoke Signals is a Native American movie, it is more than just a metaphorical story with universal meaning. The movie is political despite itself; it is about getting to know the American Indian in our midst. We are shown three typical ways that Native Americans have learned to cope with the largely indifferent if not hostile world around them -- quiet anger, ingratiating storytelling, and alcohol. In Smoke Signals, no overarching answers are presented, but insight is achieved nonetheless. And we do get a glimpse of the neighbor in our midst.

Catherine Barsotti
Robert K. Johnston