Denies and Silences
Our stories
Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. It has been a busy couple of weeks here and my attention has been pulled in every direction. But whose attention hasn’t? All the more reason to be so grateful that you continue to direct some of your attention here, with me. To this I offer miigwech, which is to say: thank you.
But first, before I go on, a BIG THANK YOU to all the folks who came out for my poet laureate party at the Missoula Public Library on November 10th. There were so many of you! It was really something special and it went off better than I ever could have imagined. If you want to see more pics from the event you may do so HERE at the library’s Instagram page. MCAT will be uploading the full video of it all sometime soon as well; I’ll let you know when that happens. What a night it was!
The first time I saw the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon I nearly blubbered. It begins with Leonardo DiCaprio greasily telling someone, “You know, you got nice color of skin.” The camera pans to who he is addressing: Lily Gladstone. DiCaprio continues, “What color would you say that is?” and Lily says, “My color.” Then the drums start beating. It still gets me and brings a lump to my throat. Lily! On the big screen in a BIG movie! And that is where my joy ends.
I was abundantly eager to see Killers because Lily Gladstone has been a friend of mine for years and to see her at, arguably, the pinnacle of her craft, is beyond celebratory. I know how dedicated she has been to her art. The last time we saw each other we were in the Missoula airport together more than a year ago, and she wasn’t sure then when Killers would be out. We had a nice long chat and she showed me a children’s picture book she’d found at a thrift store and planned to give to DiCaprio and she was excited and I was overjoyed to share that with her. And now the movie is out and she is spectacular in it and she is receiving rave reviews and there is Oscar talk and I sure hope the academy does the right thing and gives her one. I am so, so happy for her.
Killers as a film is a remarkable achievement but it isn’t a story for Indians. It isn’t celebratory of Indian people in any way I can imagine. Quite the contrary: I was shaken to my core after seeing the horrors unfold onscreen and I haven’t quite shaken them, even as I knew going in what it was about. I was at a conference in New Mexico for Indian education when it came out and heard stories of groups of women going to see it together. I hope their desire was the same as mine – to see Lily. But oh, the tragedy. I wonder how they were left feeling? Watching it is traumatizing because, though it is about one particular story, it is just one of many similar stories that have played out across this continent for 500 years and almost no one knows about most of them. Not really. It depicts us at our lowest which is how most of America sees us all the time anyway, when they see us at all.
Devery Jacobs, an Indigenous actor who played Elora in the TV drama Reservation Dogs, posted on social media X, formerly known as Twitter: “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against (your) ancestors, then having to sit (through) a movie explicitly filled with them, with the only respite being 30 minute long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
from ‘Hollywood doesn’t change overnight’: Indigenous viewers on Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon bills itself as based “on a true American Story.” That is right on point. Because it is a story based on murder, lies, corruption, and theft, all core elements to the founding and continuing evolution of this country. And even this story about what happened to the Osage, as important as it is that people know about it, is slanted toward the white gaze because it was made by a bunch of white people. Yes, they consulted with the Osage to “get things right” but still, is it really the story as told by the people who suffered? No. Would anyone even care about it if it weren’t based on a book by a white guy and made by a famous white filmmaker? Probably not, if only because it wouldn’t have gotten nearly the financial backing without these factors.1 And the white characters get the bulk of the screen time, and DiCaprio’s cowardly, despicable character in particular is held up as what … some kind of redemption story? Even the couple interviews featuring Leo and Lily I’ve endured watching focus on him with Lily as just a token beside him, which says a lot about where we still are culturally. Lily could be a white woman and she’d still be secondary to DiCaprio, even if she acted circles around him. At least she’s not barely half is age, which is the usual story.
A similar assessment could be made about the new Ken Burns documentary, The American Buffalo, out now on PBS. People ask me about it all the time, what I think of it, because many folks know I love buffalo. Hell, my coffee mug has little buffalo on it in a pattern matched by the socks I’m wearing right now. I’m even wearing basketball shorts that have buffalo on them!2 But I haven’t seen the documentary and I’m not sure I will, for similar reasons: do I need to watch a new version of a tragedy so close to my personal and cultural spirit play out onscreen through the lens of white people? Probably not. Yeah, they interviewed some Indigenous folks. But as my Métis-relative/Blackfeet friend Rosalyn LaPier told me, just because she was a consultant for them it doesn’t mean they listened to what she had to say. When I mentioned to her last summer that I feared I would be pissed-off after I saw it but felt better knowing she was involved, she assured me, “No, you’re still going to be pissed-off.”
Even the title is a slap in the face. “American” buffalo implies ownership in a way Indigenous people would never imply or comprehend. Just thinking about it makes me want to watch it even less.
“The stories of Native people anchor the series,” the copy for the documentary reads, “including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the Lakota, Salish, Kootenai, Mandan-Hidatsa, and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others.” What about mention of the Métis, my people, certainly as important a nation as any on the northern plains, and arguably the most notable hunters and traders of buffalo for the better part of a century, for better or worse? It’s entirely possible this is sour grapes on my part but it also contributes to the erasure of an entire culture of people all because of politics and an arbitrary border created by white imperialists, all filtered through the subsequent perspective of aging white historians. They may think they are “including” us by interviewing us. They are not. Give us the money and the cameras and the grants and the sponsorships and let us tell the story ourselves. That is an opportunity we have not had.
Each fall as we enter the month of November, Indigenous people are confronted with the pervasive settler colonial narratives of our history by way of the holiday referred to as Thanksgiving. This willful whitewashing of the past seeks to further eradicate the true lineages of this land through a falsified unity construct between the colonizer and the Wampanoag people, while perpetrating a continued violence against Indigenous ways of being as a whole.
– from “Decolonizing Thanksgiving And Reviving Indigenous Relationships to Food” by M. Karlos Baca
And now Thanksgiving, arguably the only day of the year most Americans even think about Indians. “What about Indigenous Peoples Day?” you might ask. I talked to a bunch of students on that very day, middle schoolers and high schoolers, and the overwhelming majority of them had no idea it was happening. Same with my travels all over Montana this month, which is allegedly National Native American Heritage Month. Hardly anyone knows, which means hardly anyone cares. This isn’t an indictment of students. It is an indictment of our community. And this in a state with something like the 4th highest population of Indian people (albeit only 7% or so of the state’s total population) in the entire country, and with an (alleged) mandate toward Indian Education for All inscribed in our state’s constitution.
This isn’t a knock on my good friends at OPI working on IEFA, or the teachers fighting the good fight by hanging the Essential Understandings posters in their classrooms and libraries and doing the best they can with limited education and resources. I get such a thrill every time I see one – the Essential Understandings poster, I mean – like I have found an oasis, often in communities that feel like being behind enemy lines. They are waging an uphill battle. Education isn’t just the fifty or sixty minutes a student may spend studying a subject any given day, or week, in a classroom. It’s a multi-dimensional commitment that hinges more on what happens outside of school than inside, an approach we have lost perspective on. Teachers, with minimal support and even less time, can’t be the only ones providing this education and yet we expect them to. It is a community effort.
Which takes me back to a previous post that has been troubling me ever since I wrote it. I considered deleting it after it had been up only about half-a-day because of the direction some of the comments were taking. I’ve only ever done that once before, when the comments to a post started erupting into a level of discourse I preferred not to have to deal with.
I was talking about an experience in Kalispell, one of the most reactionary communities in Montana, and the source of some of the most despicable legislation brought to the floor of our most recent legislative debacle. While commenting on my time there, which included half-a-day spent in Flathead High School, it was never my intention to drag the students I visited with and especially not the teacher. Going back, I don’t think I did. Saying a teenager looks bored or disinterested is like saying Mishomis is bright at sunrise. Or that buffalo are big and shaggy. Or that chihuahuas believe they are as imposing as Rottweilers. Teenagers are a difficult and intimidating crowd but they are no worse behaviorally, and generally less so, than adults. These students were better than average, in fact, and I enjoyed my interactions with their teacher immensely and hope for opportunities to do so again in the future. I think I saw two kids in one of the classes stealth-texting with their phones. Big deal. In a room full of adults I probably see at least a third of them texting throughout. Or whispering to their neighbor. Do you think the person in the front of the room doing the talking doesn’t notice that? We do. So no one – including me – should be getting on our high horses about how kids act. We are all mostly awful a large percentage of the time and care little beyond our own immediate and entitled needs.
What depresses me, and what I was trying to draw attention to in that post, is that images of Indians are still side-by-side with western hunting imagery, and what does that say to Native people? What does that reinforce among school students? I’m depressed by the continued presence of Indigenous-themed mascots in non-Indigenous communities, and what does that say to Native people? What does that reinforce among school students? The overwhelming attention I gave to those images in my post, and to the use of language, makes me surprised that so much attention was directed at the teenagers and their teacher, the people least responsible for the heartburn I was feeling about everything else I mentioned. It’s not going out among teachers and students that fills me with anxiety in the coming months and years, it’s … well, everything else. Teenagers generally don’t choose the art on display in any given public space west of the Mississippi, and you see a lot of the ilk I mentioned in many, many hotels and restaurants in particular.
I said it last year and I’ll say it again today: I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m not looking for anything, really. But if you are compelled to comment, share something beautiful. Share something that made you happy recently. Share something that made you think, if only for a moment, that life is beautiful. Because it is. Truly.
What does any of this have to do with Killers of the Flower Moon, or Ken Burns & co., or even Thanksgiving? These are all stories that include Indigenous people in large ways in which there is hardly any contributions from Indigenous people in telling the stories. Which is what is so great about a phenomenon like Reservation Dogs. Rez Dogs is a story about Indigenous people by Indigenous people. There is trauma and heartbreak, sure … but there is also a whole lot of humor and love and joy. Give those people $200M to make some movies and see what happens. That would be something worth celebrating. Of course the stories the Rez Dogs writers present aren’t the only stories about Indigenous people, but it’s a start. Certainly a better one than more of the usual fare from a bunch of white folks who haven’t had to wonder where their next meal is coming from for a few decades.
And yeah, “Indigenous Peoples Day” and “National Native American Heritage” month are starts too, just like Land Acknowledgments3 are. I get it. But in order to get beyond just “good starts” we need engagement from people outside of where the rubber meets the road. Parents, community members, everyone. We all need to be paying attention and uplifting voices that need it. We need to demand stories be told by the people living them, not by people out to parachute into a community to pillage and disappear, which is largely what white folks writing in non-white communities tend to do. As in schools, education is a full community effort. We can’t just shove it off on others.
Ugh. I didn’t sit down on Thanksgiving to write a hack piece on Thanksgiving. I’m over complaining about it. I’d like to see the idea of it torn down and rebuilt under a different framing because I like the idea of people having time off to gather with friends and family. We need more of that. Yet if you are still buying the narrative of the “original” Thanksgiving you are being willfully ignorant because the truth is readily available and I can’t help you if you are so lazy in your curiosity or critical thinking. Nor am I willing to play along with the idea of, “But can’t we just get along this one day for the good of everyone?” because that is what so many folks try and trick me with on the 4th of July. Even writing another word about it is just exhausting at this point. So I won’t.
I said it last year and I’ll say it again today: I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m not looking for anything, really. But if you are compelled to comment, share something beautiful. Share something that made you happy recently, as I did in opening with gratitude over my poet laureate party. Share something that made you think, if only for a moment, that life is beautiful. Because it is. Truly.
Good Ancestors in Yellowstone
Friends, it’s not too late to register for this workshop. You may get all the details HERE. But also, check this email I received some weeks ago:
"I wondered if you would be open to me opening up 5 spots on your winter program to 5 Indigenous students or recent graduates. We can work through the details and I’m open to suggestions but first wanted to see how you feel about it. And when I say opening I mean we would cover the cost/make it free. Thanks!"
– email from Yellowstone Forever re: my upcoming “Good Ancestors” workshop
This is happening. And YF has already accepted more than five applicants and will continue to do so until the class fills up4. Which means your window of opportunity is narrowing if you want to spend the Winter Solstice in one of the holiest places on earth in the company of more than half-a-dozen (and counting) engaged young Indigenous folks. What an opportunity! I’d figure out a way to make it happen for myself if I wasn’t already going to be there. JOIN US!
Miigwech for hanging in there, friends. I hope you all had a wonderful, wonderful day today.
$200M, in fact. That’s a lot. You can almost own property in Whitefish with that kind of budget.
Skyn Style brand! “Get them before your cousin does!”
I still fully consider them the white progressive person’s version of “thoughts and prayers” and that won’t change until something starts to happen around them, but I do see some of you trying and I appreciate it.
I can’t applaud this decision by YF enough. They don’t have to do any of this, you know, and yet they are. We need so much more of this and I am thrilled to be part of it.
“Give us the money and the cameras and the grants and the sponsorships and let us tell the story ourselves. That is an opportunity we have not had.”
Exactly. What Hollywood fails at time and time again is giving voice to people who would tell much better stories of their own history and lives. I dream of the day when Rez Dogs is one of the many original stories out there. I personally think Hollywood is afraid to give up their white male heroes and villains because they feel they have to be in every story. I’m over it. I will not be traumatized. Where’s deer woman? She has some visits to make. Just kidding (kinda).
Thank you as always for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I learn and I grow. Peace, friend!
I'm weary of world wars and lines drawn over who is right and who is wrong and who gets to claim genocide. But not as weary as those in the battles themselves. My fight is about to begin--this little one-person battle with cancer cells and chemo. I'll probably be quiet for a few months while my hair falls out and my teeth bleed. But I'm always listening to your stories and observations, and feel grateful to learn something every time. I'm going to Montana one of these days, maybe late in the new year. I'll see you then.