Racism & Settler Colonialism Panel--> Notes for Indigenous Voice Discussion

• Noo’ a ewksikinii (I am a Klamath person), introduce tribe, name story: G’eela (pronounced Ka-EE-la is a Klamath word for the mythological being representing Earth, Creation, and the Land). • Andrea Smith in her article “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” introduces the three pillars/logics of white-supremacy that were the foundation of the USA: (1) slaveability/anti-black racism that renders black people as enslaveable and property, anchoring capitalism; (2) genocide, this logic holds that Indigenous peoples must disappear so that non-native peoples are left as the inheritors of all that was Indigenous (land, natural resources, culture, art, and spirituality), anchoring colonialism and (3) orientalism, which deems people from other nations (brown and black) as inferior and a constant threat to empire, which anchors war. • I am here this evening to discuss the second pillar or logic of the settler colonial machine, which is genocide, where the settler colonial oppressor needs the erasure of Indigenous people to complete their project of colonization. This relates to my family story and I will outline different aspects of cultural genocide via forced assimilation and relocation policies that have happened in the last 100 years, following events during my father’s life. • Note this begins with ideas and concepts that were propagated to settler’s and non-Natives; doctrine of discovery, expansionism and manifest destiny, which instigated the indian wars, Andrew Jackson’s massacres of Indigenous families, elders, women and children and the removal of tribes via events such as the trail of tears etc. during late 19th century-early 20th century. An important period to note here is the forced removal of tribes to reservations, the reservation period. • I will briefly outline a condensed life history of my father Al Smith in terms of looking at further US government policies that will move this discussion into a contemporary global dialogue describing the continued actions of neo-colonialism an how it’s aims are still the erasure of Indigenous people globally. • Born 1919, Al is born on the Klamath Lakes at Modoc Pointe, speaking Klamath, and he collects huckleberries, chokecherries, wocus (lily pad grows in the Klamath Lakes, food sustenance for my tribe), and lives with strong family connections and love. At age 7, he is removed from family into the Boarding Schools‡ forced removal by Christian Priests to Reform, Boarding, and Indian schools. Loss of culture, language, spirituality, strong family connections. These are colonizing tactics used for forced assimilation into white American culture by dismantling Indigenous knowledge bases and family life through the Boarding School system whose motto was: “Kill the Indian Save the Man”. • Drafted WWII, graduates to living on skid row, in and out of prisons & jail‡ which are settler colonial institutions: the US military and prison industrial complex that are used to continue the control and assimilation by reiterating dominant white culture forced during the Boarding schools, anchoring the erasure of the Indigenous world view. A literal smashing out of an Indigenous paradigm by the colonial oppressor. • The Termination Period, the Klamath tribe is fully terminated in 1954, for our Ponderosa Pine timber, this is the last act to remove all land rights Klamath people have to their homeland, no more reservation. Also at this time are the Relocation programs of rez Indians removed and relocated to work in the cities‡ this is the creation of Urban Indian culture. The colonizing tactic: removal of Indigenous connection to ancestral homelands and food sustenance knowledge. • At age 36 Al gets clean and sober, begins work in A & D (alcohol and drug) recovery programs, and travels around Indian country working with different American Indians on embracing a life of sobriety. 1970’s Al is first introduced to Native American culture i.e.; Sweat lodge ceremony, Peyote church (tipi meetings), and Sundance ceremony that was brought to Oregon with a few Lakota Medicine men, who had visions to share this specific Indigenous ceremony and healing methodologies with the Oregon Natives suffering from recent trauma due to loss of Indigenous spirituality. This sharing was in return for the shared Ghost Dance ceremony with the Lakota’s 100 years earlier. • Al incorporates this into the AA programs for Native people like “Sweathouse lodge,” which was an Indigenous recovery program revolving around sobriety and Sweat Lodge ceremony and this took place as an encampment by American Indians upon an abandoned US government base in Oregon. During this time he stood in resistance alongside his friend and fellow tribal member Edison Chiloquin, resisting against the legalized theft of Klamath land via the Termination act. He also goes to Alcatraz for the AIM occupation. • “Al Smith vs. Oregon,” the Freedom of Religion Case.‡ Al is fired from his job as an A&D councilor for going to a Native American Church meeting and ingesting Peyote an ancient Indigenous medicine, that the state deems an “illegal drug.” This case goes to the Supreme Court and ends in a loss, but sparks the Native American Freedom of Religion Restoration Act that President Clinton signs into law. • 1980’s, I am born and raised in a time of resurgence of Indigenous culture, reinvention and emergence of American Indian political activism and reconnection to land bases and ceremonies. • This reemergence and reconnection or remembering of Indigenous ceremonies and connecting to ancestral land via political activism that usurped government property is important because this is the return of the Warrior culture 100+ years after the Indian wars. This is the empowerment embedded within Indigenous resistance against the dominant settler colonial culture. This time period is an incredible inspiration to my artistic practice. • Settler colonialism aims to erase Indigenous people and this has happened through systematic massacre, genocide, war, and then the continued cultural genocide via forced removal, relocation, and assimilation policies of the USA. This happened through the United States of America’s legal systems, justice systems, military systems and the written documents of treaties. The Native American holocaust was a deliberate and systematic genocide and we survived and thrive in a unique and vibrant contemporary culture, embracing recent ideas of hybridity, border culture and split-headedness. We, the next generations of Indigenous people work to mend these fractured identities within the insanity and greed of the white-settler-colonial dominant culture that has morphed into a larger re-colonizing monster, while still upholding our ancestors strength of Warrior’Ness. • Indigenous nations have a unique relationship with the nation-state USA, because as tribes we are sovereign nations and have a legal relationship that must be honored and respected, specifically in regards to our human rights via our water and land rights. This is being contested and threatened in the face of corporatism, trans-national capitalism, and globalization, which are the face of neo-colonialism. This is what the Idle No More movement is resisting and fighting against, demanding the larger culture become aware. The rape of the earth to fulfill an unsustainable addiction that this “civilized” culture has with mining natural resources around the globe, directly impacts and effects Indigenous peoples and allies world wide who are resisting and fighting to protect Mother Earth, Pachamama , and all life we recognize on this planet.

Critical Film Review: The Lone Ranger (2013)

This review critically deconstructs the film’s content of visual and cultural misrepresentation, embracing an oppositional gaze to the predominant rhetoric of white oppression and erasure of aboriginals in the America’s. The Hollywood blockbuster brought to us by Disney fell far below any standard that should have been demanded for a remake of this racist recolonizing tale. Nothing has changed from the original relationship between Tonto (meaning “stupid,” “idiot,” in Spanish) the Comanche sidekick and the all American white-hero, the Lone Ranger, except that these filmmakers reverted back to casting Tonto with a white man. Unfortunately, in 2013 the film continues to reinforce all of the detrimental stereotypes communicated via false visual information (i.e. regalia, geographic locations) and ‘Tonto Speak,’ which continues to instigate a narrow, white gaze that erases vast diversities of indigenous nations thriving today. Starting with the title, in this version of the action duo Tonto doesn’t even make the cut! That is a clear statement of negating any representation of Native America whilst creating a vivid hierarchy of character importance. What else happened to Tonto in this Disney version? Obviously we all know who Johnny Depp is, a Hollywood super star who happens to be a white guy. No amount of dry crackly make-up and taxidermy accessories (a costume meant for a Zombie apocalypse not a proud Comanche warrior) will ever convince us that Johnny Depp is not white, or allow us to negate the Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean) reference of a bumbling drunk. The movie-viewing public has witnessed through out film history an array of white actors starring as Indian warriors and Indian saviors, none of whom have been as offensive as Depp’s portrayal of Tonto. We are currently witnessing the renaissance of indigenous filmmaking, Native artists writing their own stories, casting indigenous actors, humanizing the gaze and redefining indigeneity in film, movies like: “Powwow Highway,” “Rabbit Proof Fence,” “Whale Rider,” “The Fast Runner,” and “Boy.” This renaissance in indigenous filmmaking functions as a vital area of decolonization for Native and non-Native communities alike because watching indigenous artists make movies from their gaze humanizes the past damage created by characters like Tonto. These films are critical antidotes to colonialism, specifically areas of colonization that are psychological, intellectual, political, and spiritual. Why would Disney and Hollywood take 1000 steps backward by casting a white super-star to make a mockery of an archaic flawed, one-dimensional stereotype, continuing the sad role of defacing indigenous people through essentialist racism? Maybe they couldn’t get any real American Indian’s to play the embarrassing role? Perhaps they should not of made the movie in the first place. The filmmakers are recolonizing the American media-consuming psyche by employing every classic western film tactic, utilizing cowboys versus Indians that stamped the stereotypes of the “wild west” onto mainstream globalizing culture in the first place. These tactics feed myth’s of an unthreatening American Indian caricature like: romanticizing the ‘noble savage,’ the ‘stupid but friendly Indian,’ ‘the sell-out Indian’ who is too dumb to ‘own’ land, the ‘spiritual Indian’ leading a white guy on a vision quest, herds of buffalo stampeding through Monument Valley, which is according to the film, now in Texas. Save the best for last the myth of the ‘vanishing race,’ where every Indian in the movie dies, except for Tonto, who ends up as an exhibition at a carnival being compared to majestic taxidermy animals from the ‘west,’ a buffalo and grizzly bear, orchestrated together for the entertainment of a young white boy dressed up like the Lone Ranger. This film makes hegemony of a complex continent of indigenous nations to justify, satisfy and cater to the gaze of a young white boy searching to fulfill his fantasy of American history and feel nostalgia for the ‘wild west.’ What that little boy (and all children being educated in America) need to learn is why Tonto was a human display, a tactic used by Imperial oppressors to exhibit domination over conquered tribal people’s, comparing them to beasts representative of myths of recent pasts, murdered for concepts of progress and civilization like Manifest Destiny and expansionism. The reality is that little boy needs to read Howard Zinn’ s book “A People’s History of the United States,” to start his education about the 500 year genocide on indigenous people in North America and then watch films like “Smoke Signals” and “Skins” to realize that even after the longest holocaust in living memories we have survived and thrived into contemporary tribal peoples alongside the rest of American society! The Lone Ranger (and Tonto!) are archetypal characters created for and by the white American gaze that inaccurately depicts history, which indigenous nations remember very differently, these characters attempt to rewrite the past and manifest a continual fantasy of white heroism via cowboys and the Texas rangers. By recasting these characters in a contemporary context revalidates a violent colonial past degrading the relationship mass American culture has imagined with indigenous people, relegating American Indian people to a shallow peripheral, reverting back to notions of an idiot sidekick, used for slapstick, mascot, and scapegoat. This is a detriment to the psychological relations, which inevitably degrades real life relationships, instigating stereotypes and racism that manifest into daily interfaces. The story line strongly reiterates every other film made by a white gaze, for a white gaze attempting to define indigeneity, which translates into a colonial portrayal of ‘the pathetic once-were-warrior tribe’ who can have one last stand against their inevitable annihilation in the face of imperialism, but only with the help of a heroic white man, as in the films: “Dances with Wolves,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “Last of the Samurai,” “Pocahontas,” and “Avatar.” This 2013 version was no different and unfortunately left the viewer feeling complicit in the recolonizing tactics by submitting to watch Mr. Depp jester for the white hero, mutter gibberish to a spirit horse, and feed ravenous cannibal rabbits in the glow of a primitive fire. This film was a detriment to all movement forward towards decolonization specifically in the actions of naming exploitation, addressing the mourning process to allow for rediscovery of culture and indigenous spirituality. These detrimental acts of the filmmaker’s and producers only solidify the accusation of embedded white supremacy and colonialism inherent in the film industrial complex.

Questing Indigenous Identity in the Academic Industrial Complex

Excerpt from a critical analysis essay of article “American Indian Identity and Intellectualism: the quest for a new Red Pedagogy” ...The reactions some have of not understanding a painting because it doesn’t “look like” an American Indian painted it, falls into essentialism identity theory because either, the artist or the artwork is not fitting into their Whitestream vision of authentic Native America. The opposite scenario also occurs when I give visual clues to the viewer of cultural content and the responses are; they can’t relate to it because it is “too Indian,” statements of “you are limiting your audience” and asking the question “why are you dwelling in the past?” These comments come from a postmodernist theory on identity where Grande writes “empiricist notions of knowable and absolute determiners of origin and authenticity dissolve and along with them essentialist constructions of identity. In short, it asserts the ‘postmodern condition’ as one in which grand narratives of legitimization are no longer credible.” (Grande 350) So I’ve found myself in reaction to a postmodernist critique of my artwork, feeling the need to return to an essentialist description and use of imagery, or vice-versa, but now I understand that what I am doing is far beyond either of these narrow Eurocentric gazes, including Marxist Critical Theory Grande also includes as identity theory. Witnessing the ease in which Whitestream thinking travels back and forth between dominant identity theories is frustrating and seems to be used to invalidate my subjective, personal experience, which reflects a larger consciousness of indigenous experiences and contemporary survival stories. I have identified this as utilizing Eurocentric intellectual methods of continued oppression upon students who are constructing identities that threaten to unveil dark histories of violent imperial colonialism. ...In concluding thoughts....Beginning to unfold what it truly means to transcend colonialism at an individual basis can be very difficult and must emanate into daily practices. I have attained part of this process by identifying my art practice as personal ceremony and a format to manifest vision, healing, and ancestral memory; so the symbols and visceral memories of annual indigenous ceremonies (the neuro-decolonizers) become a constant source for the writing, creating and image making. I still have a long way to go on my indigenous pathway to freedom of understanding my families struggle, soul wounds, survival and re-emergence of culture, but thanks to authors mentioned in this essay, I have had help identifying my own American Indian intellectualism and the value that has in these institutions of higher academia.