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Movies & TV

Playing Indian

HOW: ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE “HOLLYWOOD INDIAN” at Trinity Square Video (401 Richmond West), to October 25. 416-593-1332.


imagineNATIVE 2008 tells the rest of the world what we natives knew all along – pop culture was giving us fake images of our people

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Canada’s native population is enjoying relatively lucky times. Today’s film and television glow with fairly accurate Aboriginal representations. Some days it feels like you can’t turn on the TV without seeing Gordon Tootoosis, Adam Beach, Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene or Gary Farmer staring back at you.

But it wasn’t always this way. Not that many decades ago, almost all the Indian faces on screen belonged to non-indigenous people.

They were… colour-enhanced.

Like many native people of my generation and older, I spent most of my youth looking for images of myself on the big screen. What we got was Jeff Chandler as a Jewish Cochise in Broken Arrow. Chuck Connors won fame for his Geronimo. It’s mildly ironic that not one actual native person was cast in a film celebrating the life of the great Apache leader.

Greg Staats contrasts images in his film Harold J. Smith, Jay Silverheels, Tonto.

A lot of these cinematic savages were blue-eyed. They say the camera adds 10 pounds, but it also anglicizes.

As the years passed, bizarrely, art didn’t imitate life it redesigned it. And then life began to imitate the redesigned art. In middle school, where we native students would get a special hour of native arts and crafts (any excuse to get out of geography), we sat around in the classroom sewing cheap leather into headbands and beading vaguely Aboriginal designs on the front.

Anthony Quinn as Yellow Hand (1944)

Photo By Corbis Images

Truth is, most native people never wore headbands, at least not the kind Western civilization associates with native culture. They were a Hollywood creation. When the wardrobe department dressed Hudson and Chandler as Indians, they outfitted them with those ridiculously thick wigs with braids that represented so many native cultures.

The wigs were uncomfortable and awkward to wear, and they slipped around under the hot lights. So some guy whose name is lost to fashion history came up with the cool idea of using headbands to keep them on tight even when the actors were riding their horses. Thus, a legend was created.

Jeff Chandler as Cochise (1950)

Photo By Corbis Images

Jay Silverheels is perhaps the all-time best-known Canadian native actor. He wore one of those headbands in the role that made him famous – the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, Tonto. It was just a modest leather strip. And he had no noticeable pigtails. I guess they were reserved (no pun intended) for the white Indians. He got off easy.

Chuck Connors as Geronimo (1962)

Photo By Corbis Images

Though he didn’t act after the early 1970s and died in L.A. in 1980, Silverheels’s appeal has spanned more generations then Chief Dan George’s, and he’s had a bigger effect on the dominant culture’s perception of native people (rightly or wrongly) than all the others combined.

Rock Hudson as Taza (1950)

Photo By Corbis Images

What’s less well known is that his real name was Harry Smith and he was from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford. It seems only natural that Silverheels/Smith would finally make an appearance at this year’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, part of an exhibit at Trinity Square Video called HOW: Engagements With The “Hollywood Indian.” He’s the focus of a media presentation curated by Ryan Rice that explores the contemporary Aboriginal’s relationship with show business.

Buck Jones as White Eagle (1932)

Photo By Corbis Images

An icon of pop culture, Silverheels appears, voice only, in the more modern form of a video installation piece directed by artist Greg Staats titled Harold J. Smith, Jay Silverheels, Tonto. Essentially, the short film consists of an unedited home video of a slow drive along the 7th Line river road on the Six Nations Reserve, metaphorically the path taking Silverheels home. The soundtrack is an interview with the actor from The Jack Paar Show back in 1960.

I found the two side-by-side archival photographs of the man far more interesting. One features the strikingly handsome Silverheels in a suit and tie in the other he’s dressed in his familiar Tonto garb – the two sides of the Hollywood Indian.

I’ve long admired Staats’s still photography, especially a series he did about powwow dancers. Here, the juxtaposition of rez roads and talk show was interesting, but I gained no new insights, learned nothing new about the man except that Silverheels’s wife was Italian.

That’s too bad, because the man was fascinating and led an interesting life. In a later interview, he told Johnny Carson that he married an Italian to get back at Christopher Columbus.

Here’s a popular rez story about Silverheels. As a young man, he achieved success as a lacrosse player, touring the States in the late 30s. The name Silverheels was apparently a reference to how fast he could run. Eventually, his athleticism and good looks brought him to the attention of a Hollywood scout. He became practically the only working Indian actor in the 1940s before he hit it big as Tonto, playing the generic Indian warrior or chief in a series of westerns.

Charles Bronson as Chato (1971)

Photo By Corbis Images

The story has it that more than a few times a director placed him on a hill overlooking a vulnerable wagon train or cavalry troop and directed him to address his brave warriors in his own native tongue, urging them to attack.

But Silverheels’s grasp of the Mohawk language was somewhat tenuous. His Six Nations family and friends used to go to Brantford to see his movies, enjoying his success. Then, when this big scene would come on, the theatre would erupt in laughter – the Indians in the audience killing themselves, literally rolling in the aisles. White patrons wondered what the hell was going on.

Like many of us who aren’t as proficient in our ancestral tongue as we’d like, he’d learned some common words and short phrases rather than the whole lexicon of the language. So there was Crazy Horse/Sitting Bull/Geronimo, speaking in stilted Mohawk, telling his warriors, “Pass the salt. What time is it? It’s raining. One two three four five six. Dog. Cat. I love you. Hello. Goodbye,” and so on.

I don’t know if this story is true, but if it isn’t it should be.

news@nowtoronto.com

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