Once Upon a Time on the Rez: A Northern Arapaho's Review of "Wind River"

Once Upon a Time on the Rez
The Fiction and Fiction of Tyler Sheridan’s “Wind River”
A review by Ernest M Whiteman III

 “While there are missing persons statistics compiled for every other demographic, there are none for Native American women.

“No one knows how many are missing.”

Tyler Sheridan, writer of “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” ends his problematic directorial debut with this equally problematic quote. Why would he link his directorial debut about two white people trying to solve a murder on an Indian reservation to one of the most heinous things occurring in Native American communities across the US and Canada today? Simple, to lend his clumsy action mystery film an air of immediacy, timeliness, and an attempted connection with Native American peoples. But in the end, it is only to elevate his authority over the stories of the Northern Arapaho people that still live on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, the reservation of my birth and where I lived most of my life and the tribe to which I belong.

I have tackled the stealing of the Northern Arapaho voice before in my review of the Margaret Coel Wind River Mysteries Series. Native American representation and first-voice are issues at the heart of how everyone sees, treats, and reacts to Native peoples. Not only does representation matter, so does whose voice is raising the questions count in every issue across the societal spectrum. “Wind River” fails at this on every level, including basic mystery storytelling.

 “Wind River” opens with a Native woman, Kate Asbillie as Natalie, running across a frozen wasteland, barefoot. Later, she is found dead by Jeremy Renner’s Game & Fish hunter on the lookout for mountain lions that have been attacking tribal members’ livestock. FBI agent Elizabeth Olsen enters the story and when bureaucratic bureaucracy interferes with her being able to bring the FBI into the investigation, decides to solve it her self and asks Jeremy Renner to help her “track a predator”.

We learn that Natalie was the daughter of Renner’s Native friend Martin, played by the solid Gil Birmingham, who is good as the stoic, angry father. All the Native actors are good in this despite the representational baggage. I mean, really good. Funny, they should put them in more movies they are all that good. So, when the investigation turns toward the possible suspect being the dead woman’s white boyfriend (Jon Bernthal), the movie de-evolves into a standard action-western showdown in an oilfield complex.

The murder is solved with Jeremy Renner having cathartically exorcised his own failings over his own daughter’s freezing death, which this movie is really about – his grieving and need for revenge over the death of his own daughter. A daughter born from his marriage and divorce to a Northern Arapaho woman, and whom also happens to be the friend of the murdered woman Natalie. The movie ends with Renner and Birmingham sitting in the dirt – Renner in a cowboy hat, which is still a symbol of modernity, and Birmingham in face-paint, which is not, failing at dispelling stereotypes. Says Sheridan to Rolling Stone Magazine, "I am trying to demolish the stereotype behind those particular images with that scene. It's no longer the concept of two enemies fighting for the land; it's just two best friends bonded by pain, survival and the idea of making their world a better place to live.”

So why does one have to dress as the Indian from the old Western movies? The movie ends then, with them just sitting in the dirt, the everlasting image of the old west remains: a stereotypically, stoic Native American man in face-paint looking at the changing world under the saving grace of Jeremy Renner. Then that last problematic title graphic comes on screen before cutting to credits, the story having done nothing in service to those missing Native American women except to allude to them at the end for relevancy purposes.

It has been stated over and over again in other reviews and articles that Sheridan is making a loose trilogy with “Sicario”, “Hell or High Water” and now, “Wind River”, which are supposedly done in a “New Western” film style. But this new western does not seem all too different from the old westerns – Natives still get killed, Natives are still bad guys, Natives are still at the periphery of the story, lining the hills of our own representations, our own stories; still a threat, not to the white heroes of today, but as Jeremy Renner will always state in different ways, a threat to ourselves.

Armando José Prats writes about this in his excellent examination of the Hollywood western “Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western” in which he explores how the American western movie influenced audience perceptions of Native American peoples almost from the very beginning of the medium. In his book, he states that the battle for the west has not really ended and alludes to an ongoing, subtle war, which continues against Native people that is fought through their representations in films for over a century. That even the revisionist westerns, like “Wind River” continue to perpetuate a lesser representation of Native American peoples regardless of their announced progressive intents.

Many revisionist westerns will always work at making the Native visible simply to render them invisible. It is their very presence in the story that allows them to be rendered extinct, such as Natalie’s presence in the film. How many of these films do this lie in presenting Natives in such a manner that their destruction is all but assured. Such as the Native peoples inability to function like basic human beings because of “this place”. This place, this place; having all the Natives crying about “this place” is only tantamount to Grief Porn, which is the enjoyment of others’ suffering for the purpose of entertainment. You can tell a white person is trying to tell a “Native American” story because all the Native characters will complain about this place and almost all of the characters suddenly are spouting off reservation lifestyle statistics for some reason, a “Did you know that one in five Natives…” sort of thing.

Take a look at how the Natives in “Wind River” are depicted. The film is very orthodox in its depiction of Arapaho men. Why does everyone think that Native men treat white women like shit? Look at when first meeting Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham simply becomes an asshole and insulting toward her. This is not how a family on the Wind River Reservation would grieve – isolated and alone. Martin’s home would have been flooded with family and friends.

All the Native men, when first introduced become sexist and insulting as when Elizabeth Olsen goes to question the druggie son Chip and his friends. The young Native man who opens the door is high, rude, and then begins to hit on Elizabeth Olsen. So, she simply ends up killing him. This brings us to another trope of the Western film: why does the white woman get to survive? It is a common Western movie trope that, only the sanctity of white women is worth saving.

And she is saved, in the ending shootout; yet Jeremy Renner cannot save the Native BIA police chief, whose death can be seen as an insult to Native law enforcement, but he can save Elizabeth Olsen. Thus, the white heroine saved by our white western hero, again. But Natalie was doomed from the moment her character was written as a Native woman. As Prats writes in the Preface of Invisible Natives on the representations of Native women in Western films “Ubiquitous, to be sure, …yet somehow, hardly central to the action: she dies or else she disappears-all in docile compliance to the mythology that so harshly abuses her.”

Why then show her rape? Why is no one up in arms about this the way we got when Game of Thrones implied the rape of a major character? Using this horrible act to justify your own authority is problematic to begin with; but why use it, to add titillation and shock value to your film? That only cheapens the act and taints Natalie’s rape as exploitative. Yet Sheridan never accepts his responsibility for such portrayals, using the age-old excuse, “I don't like being lectured to when I go to the movies, and I don't imagine other people do either. I'm here to entertain. I like playing against expectations. And if you can tell my political affiliations by watching one of my movies, then I've failed."

"But," he quickly adds, "I want people leaving the theater with something to think – and think hard – about. My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions." The emphasis is mine because once again, Sheridan hides behind that old excuse, to remove his responsibility to the veracity of his representations and excuse his exploitation of Natalie’s rape, which has now been reduced to mere entertainment because, as he states, “I'm here to entertain”.

The real life situation in Native Country is that rape is all too real for almost every Native woman, that they do not need a white man, in front of or behind the camera, showing us how rape is bad. Again. Look at this Twitter Feed about that scene of the film. It can explain the problem with much better authority than I could about the real problem of the depiction of the rape in this film.

The scene only gives Sheridan the excuse to use that end graphic. Why tie this stupid movie to such a serious topic, to “Ask questions”? By the way, do you know who knows how many Native women are missing? Native people. Fucking ask them! According to the Native Law Resource Center “Native women are being murdered at a rate ten times the national average. Due to under-reporting, the actual numbers are almost certainly higher.”

But to ask Natives to speak for our selves would mean that Sheridan, and directors like him, would have to relinquish that authority his depictions of Native people give him. Who would give up that? Sheridan has the privilege to “ask the questions”, never once thinking to let the Northern Arapaho do this for ourselves, and the privilege to allow himself to walk away when it comes time to seek those answers, patting himself on the back the whole time as if he had something grand to contribute to the conversation.

The Native Americans of “Wind River” are still the “Other”, even in this film about them. As Prats points out, the Natives of western movies have their space, but it is at the edge of the space of the Same, of the white heroes, where they have always been, since the cameras first began rolling. Films such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, even Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves, relegate the Native to lining the hills and stoically staring down upon the changing world that leaves them behind. The only authority left being the white hero, who has become a better Indian than the Indian.

According to Prats, Revisionism seeks to act against the “Myth of Conquest” the old western movies upheld, as sort of “the conqueror’s remorse for vanishing the Indian” where the motif of savage becomes one of nostalgia. As Prats puts it “the past is the Indian’s place.” “Wind River” does this by following the three principle tenets of Revisionism in Western film: 1) that Native American vanishment is assured, irrevocable, complete, and irreversible; 2) Natives themselves cannot do the revision, and; 3) The Native can only confirm the white hero’s transformation into the “Self-other” or the “White Indian”, which “Wind River” does for Jeremy Renner’s character in spades.

Because it does so, Jeremy Renner can then proclaim about Natalie, “She’s a warrior” as if that is his right to confer that upon her. She is a warrior, sure, but she is still dead. It seems that in the world of the new Western movies, the only way for Natives to be Warriors is to die. With our white heroes crying over the fact Natalie ran six miles in the snow and yet, it still was not enough. It will never be enough. They are still alive at the end of the movie because Natalie was doomed the instant she was written to be a Native woman. You see: the battle for the Mythical West has never really ended.

Which leads us to the subtlest issue that revisionist films such as “Wind River” promotes. Who hold the authority over Native American representations and why? In “Wind River” Jeremy Renner represents the Double Other, a tired Western movie trope where to separate the hero from the actions of his race, his knowledge about Natives makes him separate from his own whiteness without denying it. Think Hawkeye from “Last of the Mohicans”, Jack Crabbe of “Little Big Man”, and John Dunbar of “Dances with Wolves”. They are a character etched in the solid foundations of western movies. Sheridan seems to think he is acting against those old western movie conventions, and he convinces his audiences he is doing so, but he is not smart enough to make a point about their obsolescence in doing so, but rather ends up reinforcing them; reinforcing the idea that the white hero is the authority over the Arapaho culture and place.

Throughout the movie, Jeremy Renner never fails to tell the Arapahos about their own situations. He is constantly telling Elizabeth Olsen and the Native people who live there, how tough it is on the reservation. He never stops doing this. Seriously, he even is allowed to jump into a police car and lecture his best friend Martin’s son about how hard it is on the reservation. Chip can only sit there and take it, plaintively crying “this place, this place.” He even tells the killer how it is for the Arapaho on the reservation for some reason. Then, he kills him. Why explain the reservation to someone you are going to kill anyway? Yes, you read that right. Probably the most heinous thing in this story is that Jeremy Renner is allowed to commit a murder. While he does kill to save Elizabeth Olsen as heroes do, but at the end, he kills someone who is virtually no threat to him. I mean, to me, this makes him no different than the mystery’s revealed killer.

It would have really upset the cliché, the trope to bring the murderer in for justice, especially on the reservation. Then have the white citizenry rush to defend the murderer, as would sometimes happen in real life. But Sheridan is not interested in asking those types of questions. So, Renner is allowed to get away with murder. Why exactly? Once again Prats leads us there. Because of revisionism of the Western form: “Images of white brutality thus set off the hero’s own claims, both about his Indianness and about his exemption from complicity of Conquest”. You can say that justice was meted out upon the rapist, but this is a falsehood, a lie. If it were justice, then Gil Birmingham’s Martin should have been the one to kill the rapist. “Wind River” once again points to this old Western movie idea that only the white hero is the one who sets morality.

Why not have Martin be the main character looking for justice, using his “innate Native skills”, steering Elizabeth Olsen in the right directions, telling her how tough it is here, cussing out his own son Chip about his life choices, before saving the county deputies and the BIA chief and Elizabeth Olsen in the end, before bringing in the rapist to the police. Plus, there is this racist idea that pervaded the Wyoming I grew up in, that this movie promotes, reinforces, that the Natives cannot take care of their own problems and need a white man to do it for them as when Jeremy Renner revenges Natalie’s death for Martin.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Reservation

These directors like Sheridan, Jim Jarmucsh, and Kevin Costner, are not doing Native people any favors presenting us the way they do, by maintaining that authority over how audiences see us. Which only comes through their very specific gaze, truths be damned. Because in the end, it is never really about “asking questions”, it is about Tyler Sheridan asking the questions. To be seen doing so, which only makes Native Americans invisible once again in the very story he wanted to tell “about them”, like all those western movies did decades ago; so much for this “New Western” idea.

This has been problematic throughout Sheridan’s work. The first time I saw this subtle misrepresentation of Natives was in the film he had written, Hell or High Water, about two bank robbing brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) being chased by two Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham). Birmingham, who is once again, very solid as the half-Mexican, half-Comanche sidekick, and is made present if only to pass on his identity to, well, white people in general. The scene where he is wistfully looking at the next bank that may be a target for the brothers, announces, “150 years ago all this was my ancestors land. Everything you could see, everything you saw yesterday. Until the grandparents of these folks took it. Now it's been taken from them. ‘Cept it ain't no army doin' it, it's those sons of bitches right there.” [He then points at Texas Midland Bank.] Basically, passing his Native identity on, never implicating Jeff Bridges, and tacitly giving his forgiveness for conquest, right before his gets killed in the climatic shootout. But the major difference being that now Gil Birmingham’s Alberto is as dead as his ancestors, and the banks will let their customers live.

Sheridan seems to think that identifying as a Native somehow excuses the actions of the heroes. When Tanner Howard, the more volatile, violent of the brothers, bear in mind, is confronted by a Comanche man ubiquitously name Bear, who declares to him, “I am a Comanche. Do you know what it means? It means 'Enemy to everyone'.” Of course, in these new Westerns, the hero can take a Native identity very easily, because, why not, as Tanner replies, “Do you know what that makes me? A Comanche.” Bear then sadly shakes his head, relinquishing his identity to Tanner. Bear accepts his vanishment while Tanner assumes the identity of a new American Amalgam which renders Bear invisible in its new found authority.

It is an authority that Sheridan is all too pleased to take for himself. Sheridan to Rolling Stone Magazine about “Wind River”, “…the only way I could guarantee that these things were handled in a way that did not betray that trust was for me to do it. I've built enough of a relationship with that community that I could go, 'I'm thinking about doing it this way – is that ok?' Which was a question I asked a lot. A person who's never spent time in that world, or who would go at it in what some people call a 'Social Justice Warrior-y' kind of way ..." He stops and laughs. "There are certain things they're just not going to get."

Sheridan is among those whom do not get it because these films only serve to show me, the gross misunderstanding of Native cultures and people. For instance, the languages; as there are two tribes on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and when first introduced to Elizabeth Olsen, Martin utters something in Shoshoni, according to the credits “Shoshone language Consultant”, it is the only Native language spoken in the film and it is an insult aimed at Elizabeth Olsen, yet, Martin’s and Renner’s families are depicted to be Arapaho with all the Northern Arapaho flags waving around. Even the BIA Police Chief understands what Gil said. Reductionism of making all tribes into a single tribe has been a problem from the earliest Western films.

But if this where an honest depiction, the police chief could have said, “I don’t know what he said. I’m not Shoshoni” because many BIA policemen do come from other tribes and areas. The misunderstanding of Native peoples in this film also made me realize that no one ever understood the concept of face paint and how it still continues, or the old plains custom of cutting in grief and why no one does it anymore. These are nothing more than an “I’m puttin’ that in my movie!” thing, because maybe one of his friends told him about it once.

For some time I had been under the impression that he has friends on Wind River. But then, re-reading this quote made me rethink that. Then, I recalled a line of dialogue from the film “You have six officers patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island” and realized that he was pulling his information from this NewYork Times article! It is nearly verbatim. Even the end title graphic is lifted from this “Indian Country Today” article. It becomes obvious that Sheridan has never been to the Wind River Indian Reservation, as I thought, or he would have known what Natives would really do when there is a death in the family. “‘I have a good deal of friends in Indian Country," Sheridan explains [to Rolling Stone Magazine].”

So, Sheridan has probably never been to the Wind River Reservation and learned about it in that article, but because he has “a good deal of friends in Indian Country”, he is allowed to become the authority on the Wind River Reservation, my reservation. Yet, I cannot for actually being a Northern Arapaho from the Wind River Reservation. Sherman Alexie states it better in his review of Ian Frazier’s book, “On the Rez” when Alexie writes: “Does he ever admit that somebody from "the rez" has a different life experience than somebody who is just writing about the rez? Does he understand that the title of his book should have been "On Their Reservation?" Let us face facts folks, “Wind River” is not about the Arapaho, it never is about the Arapaho, these progressive movies never are, but about Tyler Sheridan’s own real and imagined pain of being Tyler Sheridan on the fictionalized Wind River Indian Reservation as represented by Jeremy Renner.

The truth about reservation life being something Sheridan controls here. It is his truth of the reservation. "I wanted the vision executed exactly as I saw it in my head. There was a lot in this story, in the wrong hands, could come off as offensive. I didn't know if I could make a good movie," he adds. "But I knew I could make a respectful one."

He forgot to mention making a “truthful movie”. In spite of any respect he thinks he gives, it is a truth filtered through the gaze of Sheridan, a man who has friends in the community, yes, but has never experienced living there for the entirety of his life, never experiencing the life of being an Arapaho person and everything that comes with that. He has never experienced how the world treats an Arapaho person. No, he gets to leave this reservation when he wants, to “ask the questions” and walk away leaving the Arapaho to continue to deal with what life gives them.

The biggest problem with the movie as it purports to be about the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming as shown in a bullet hole riddled highway sign. But from the beginning, there is nothing that rings true about the place and depiction of the area and peoples. To start, nothing was filmed on the actual Wind River reservation at all, opting instead for the more picturesque mountains of Utah. There is nothing evocative about this film to me. It does not look like home but merely a passing visitor’s remembrance of it. Much like Margaret Coel’s series, by presenting fragments of Native cultures as a whole, image much of what we learn from creators like Sheridan and Coel reduce Native peoples, in their cases, my Northern Arapaho people to merely desperate people whom cannot seem to get their shit together enough to solve a murder, and will allow a white hero to come in and do it for them.

The film represents my people in a way that is pretty standard for a “western” that Sheridan states he is remaking. I am very tired of having to say the same things over and over again. This is not a good movie by any means. It is not a culturally relevant film either. It is certainly not a “Native American film”. Let Native Americans make their own movies and tell their own stories. The soft reaction to this critique is that Sheridan is at least raising awareness with his film, that if not for him, the plight of the red man on the Wind River Indian Reservation would not be seen, and most certainly, not the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women. Yet, he barely does anything to address the truth of reservation conditions in his film and for all of his authority given him by receptive audiences, he does jack-shit about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) situation, only making them an invisible presence rendered absent again to sell his movie, and as a wise man once said, “raising awareness (or ‘asking questions’ in this case) is just another way of doing nothing.”

To try conclusions…

When I was a young teen, my family used to listen to the radio in the mornings. The small town station had a set play list and we knew when it was time to “go down to the gate” to catch the bus for school when a certain show or report played. Now, in that morning routine, we would be forced to listen to “Paul Harvey’s News and Commentary” in which he would just spout off nonsense about the news of the day, or yesterday in this case. What stands out in the jumble of routine memory is this particular morning, the esteemed Mr. Harvey stated, “If you want to get away with murder, go to the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. It is the Unsolved Murder Capital of the World.”

Now, this confused me a bit. Because, looking out the window, I saw no one getting murdered right then. But then, later on I realized the operative word he used was “unsolved”. What I learned from this was four-fold: 1. Having an esteemed authority figure state bullshit is not news, 2. Having an esteemed authority figure state bullshit does not make it fact either, 3. That media reinforcement of stated bullshit does impact how others who do not know you, or your people, see you, and, 4. That Paul Harvey is actually kind of an asshole. Think about it. He was encouraging listeners that if they come to my reservation they could murder with impunity.

What this did was made listeners also think that Natives were killing everyone all the time. But, if you examine the word “Unsolved” you see that maybe the unsolved murder rate is high due to that small population, because – any killing on an reservation falls under the jurisdiction of the government, and; do you think the government cares about solving murders on an Indian reservation since they have been trying to get the land for well over 500 years? I tried looking up the murder rate on my reservation and I all got were our tribe’s Wikipage, articles that some how found a way to quote that same New York Times article, and stories on this movie. What I also found is that none of the articles I looked at ever sourced their claim about Wind River’s high unsolved murder rates. Not. One. Article. So, Paul Harvey was full of shit. What does that have to do with the movie “Wind River”? I feel the connection would be obvious.

I hear you, ‘I don’t care about the “politics of race”. I just want a good mystery, a good story’. While “Wind River” on its technical merits alone, is a solidly made movie, its screenplay feels more like a college student’s presentation on Native America, where they would rather show off all the information they gathered about Natives rather than stick to the point – it is supposed to be a mystery but Sheridan seems to lose interest in building the mystery aspect of his “new western” to show off that “he knows people” and wants to “tell their story”. He states in Rolling Stone: "You have to remember, I was an actor in procedural television for 20 years, …so I know that structure really well." Which is why, I suppose, it played like a bad TV episode.

What makes a great mystery is that audiences are lost in the search for the suspect. Great mysteries focus on more than one suspect and the tension is about which one is the killer. Hitchcock excelled at providing the answer straight away and the tension came from if the protagonists would discover it in time or not. “Wind River” fails at being a mystery as its focus seems to be on the protagonist telling the Natives about their own problems, as if they did not know, or worse, too stupid to know.

I feel that most movie audiences are going to be fine with this because, unfortunately, not only do we learn history from movies more so than from school, we also learn about other cultures from movies as well. “Hidden Figures” being a recent example of general audiences learning something from the movies, yet the story and those who experienced it have always been here for decades. Many will take this film as a cultural learning experience, which it is not. It is a non-Native director just “asking questions”. Then, when such movies as “Wind River” become the cultural representation of a people rather than a gross misunderstanding of the people and place, history and culture that it is, we all just learn misinformation as truth. This is the biggest problem with “Wind River”.

Let’s face it; everyone does look at Native Americans differently than other ethnicities. When people look at African-American, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, Eastern Indian, Middle-eastern, they accept their oppressions, their troubles and triumphs, their stories and voices, and will stand behind letting these ethnicities tell their own stories; but not Native Americans. They defend Native pretenders and look the other way when we speak for ourselves. When we try to voice our own concerns, to own our own histories, traumas, triumphs, culture, to own our own stories, instead of power to represent ourselves, we get pepper spray, we get “you were defeated”, we get “you were conquered”, we get “your culture is vanishing”, we get “you’re all just drunks/druggies/criminals”, we get “I wasn’t there”, we get “just get over it”; and suddenly, we cannot “speak to all pain”.

All Native people ask for is an honest, balanced, human representation, blemishes, veneer and all – what other ethnicities seem to get. But that comes mostly from other ethnicities having control over those representations. Those fair representations never occur in “Wind River” in which all Native characters are either killed, arrested and taken away, or simply disappear from the story, after Jeremy Renner lectures them about the reservation lifestyle or treat Elizabeth Olsen like shit, as Tantoo Cardinal does in her only scene in which she scolds Elizabeth Olsen and serves to draw everyone’s gaze towards Elizabeth Olsen’s ass, (classy, Sheridan, classy) until all that is left is a suicidal, (because, “this place”) face-painted Gil Birmingham sitting in the dirt, impotent in his search for justice, getting permission to grieve from Jeremy Renner.

You are now probably thinking that I spent way too much of this writing telling you about how bad “Wind River” is in its Native depictions and not enough on genre and technical critiques. Then, you understand the problems I had.

Representation matters. Because when you portray Natives as the conquered bad guys for nearly a century, instead of fellow fallible human beings, then you cannot help but always see us like that, to paint us all with the same brush, view us with all the same gaze, filtered through decades of misrepresentation proclaimed as fact. Which gives many viewers the excuse to continue to see Native American peoples as always the enemy to defeat. Because then, there is the worst thing about this movie: Tyler Sheridan, writer of “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” begins his problematic directorial debut with this equally problematic quote: “Based on Actual Events”.

Tyler Sheridan’s “Wind River”: SKIP IT.

I will end this writing with a quote of my own, one that I hope to be found problematic in the right way; once again, from Prats:

“The harder I looked at the Western the harder it was to reconcile its moral claims with its image of the Indian.”

Respectfully submitted;

Ernest M Whiteman III (Northern Arapaho)

Suggested Reading:

Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, Armando José Prats

Willow Pengree's Post to Counter a Brutal Article

No One Ever Sees Arapahos (Full Essay)

No One Ever Sees Arapahos

Margaret Coel’s Representation of the Northern Arapaho in her “Wind River Mysteries”

By Ernest M Whiteman III (Northern Arapaho)

When I first viewed Orson Welles’ last completed film, “F For Fake” I was struck at one specific portion of the film, the ending, and the issues it raises on the presentation of the unreal as real. More specifically, how Welles presented information and relied heavily on his audiences’ reliance on the information as truth. Thus, setting up the viewer’s ego as the intellectual fall guy in a filmic magic trick I had never seen before or since.

This concept runs accord of my own line of thoughts on Native American depiction in media and Native self-representation and first-voice. The film, a self-described “essay film”, touches on a theory of my own concerning the “authorship of expertise” not only in art, but in Native American art, cultural information, tribal histories, as well as Native American self-representation and first-voice in media. I made the connection of this authorship in the representation of Native American cultures, perfectly reflected in the Wind River Mystery Series written by Margaret Coel.

This writing began as a review of Coel’s book Eye of the Wolf; it has since expanded as I found that I had much more to write about the series as a whole and the misrepresentations it contains. Also, of how that authorship of expertise almost allows for no other representation to be taken as true as Coel’s books, thus it expanded beyond mere review. I must also contend with the notion that her expertise and success has rendered this series “critique-proof” in the eyes of her readers.

I will admit right here that I had stopped reading Coel’s Wind River Mysteries after her The Shadow Dancer. Mainly, because I felt that more and more she was beginning to write less and less about the people and communities of the Wind River and Eye of the Wolf showed me that this has continued though at the beginning of the series I had more than a passing interest in the novels since they are set on the Wind River Indian Reservation in west central Wyoming.

I am a Northern Arapaho born and raised on the Wind River Reservation and spent most of my adult life there, leaving in 1999 to pursue a filmmaking career. So, my experience in reading Eye of the Wolf, while specific to me, seems to best illustrate the complex problem of Native self-representation in the media.

I will begin with a review of the book Eye of the Wolf (2005) before delving into the representations (Or rather, misrepresentations) of the Northern Arapaho people within the series and how it connects to the growing problem of commodification of Native American imagery and culture and how it lends to usurping Native American first-voice through the taking Native identity. Also, how the Authorship of Expertise allows this misrepresentation to be accepted as cultural truth.

The reviewer on the website titled Dancing Badger, which reviews several Indian Reservation mysteries and the growing genre, remarked that the Coel mysteries are more an intellectual exercise of the author rather than a well-crafted genre piece.[i] After reading Eye of the Wolf, I am inclined to agree. Margaret Coel herself is an anthropologist having published a book on the Southern Arapaho leader Left Hand. But for me, being a learned anthropologist does not equate a good mystery writer and certainly does not make one the spokesperson for a tribe of Indians. So, let us take a look at the book Eye of the Wolf itself before connecting it to the larger theme of Native self-representation.

An Older Review of Eye of the Wolf

The mystery is the eleventh book of her “Wind River Mystery” series and concerns the discovery of three slain Indian men at the site of the Bates Battle[ii], which has significance in Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshoni tribal history on the Wind River Indian Reservation. The battle took place on July 4, 1874 in which the US Calvary and Shoshoni scouts found an Arapaho encampment and attacked it. This was in retaliation for earlier violence and attacks on white settlements in the area prior. Later evidence suggested that this specific camp of Arapahos had nothing to do with that earlier violence. In Coel’s story, the battle is still a sore point for the two tribes after so many years and this is the driving thrust of the mystery.

Coel’s literary hero, Father John O’Malley discovers the three bodies frozen in poses at the battle site after a cryptic phone message for “the Indian Priest” sends him out there to look, rather than calling the police. He almost preternaturally realizes that the bodies are arranged to look like old photographs from the Bates Battle aftermath and knows instantly that this will somehow touch off an intertribal war on the reservation. This sends him on the trail of the murderer of the three men, identified as Shoshoni tribal members, the Arapaho’s “traditional” enemies, according to several characters in Eye of the Wolf and the tribe they share the Wind River Reservation with.

Coel’s other literary creation, Arapaho lawyer, Vicky Holden makes an unsteady entrance into the story defending a young Arapaho man named Frankie Montana, who, in a striking coincidence, is accused of beating the same three Shoshoni men prior to the start of the story. Thus, he becomes the story’s one and only prime suspect in the murders after the body of a forth Shoshoni man, once again discovered by O’Malley following another cryptic phone message, is found at the battle site.

The two story threads lie together uneasily and are only connected to each other by the character of Frankie Montana, an obvious red herring; the young man is so devious, callow and rude that you just know that he is not the killer. The fact that every other character in the book thinks he is, only added to my suspicion that he was really innocent of the crimes.

What I like about a good mystery, think Christie’s work, is how there is more than one prime suspect to confuse things. There are several characters in the story that have the motive and opportunity to kill the victim. Coel’s “Eye of the Wolf” and even after eleven novels does not have that type of experienced layering to bring that type of storytelling off. She seems to be getting by on her knowledge of Arapaho history. It seems lazy to me. Almost every Arapaho character had something historical to say about the murders.

One other thing that bothered me is that for some reason, every character in the book, in addition to saying Frankie Montana is guilty, thinks the murders will incite some sort of “war” between the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshoni and it is referenced to often (As often as Frankie Montana’s guilt.). This serves as the means to propel events forward. O’Malley, determined to prevent “war” then begins to investigate and get answers that propel his story arc forward.

Vicky Holden does nothing. She sits in a holding pattern for most of the novel up until the anti-climactic ending when the suspect needs a hostage, an ending that seems more a reiteration than a revelation. Of late, the series is becoming more and more about Father John O’Malley and his trials and triumphs in and among the people of the Wind River Reservation overshadow the life and loves of Vicky Holden, who along with the people and communities of the Wind River serve only to elevate Father John to savior status.

The emotional hurtles they both have to jump through seem unresolved after eleven novels. O’Malley is a recovering alcoholic who feels the need to drink whenever the pressure is on. Yet, he still faces the unpaid bills and unreturned phone calls and meetings he never seems to attend and a provincial assistant who will last only the duration of the novel.

Holden has now been relegated to an “Indian Princess” role, the naïve Native woman who needs the firm guidance of the white man. She also comes from a broken marriage to an Arapaho man and is untrusting of Indian men, untrusting even the man she is in a relationship with in Eye of the Wolf but seems to trust the white O’Malley implicitly. While their unspoken attraction to each other seems to be behind them yet they never seem to move on from their starting points in resolving their own personal issues that stem from the very first novel The Eagle Catcher. And as if to prove that the story, and O’Malley, does not need her, the two main characters of this series, a series promoted as featuring them as team, do not meet until more than half way through the book.

Holden, for most of the book, does nothing in service of the mystery plot and only questions her tribal loyalties throughout. Does she continue to support her tribe in defending Frankie Montana or does she take on “more important cases” with her new Lakota law partner? She also questions her relationship with that same law partner, the ubiquitously named Adam Lone Eagle. She does not bring any new information to O’Malley’s investigation of the crimes and serves only to point the glaring spotlight of guilt at Frankie Montana. Otherwise, she seems distracted by her relationship with Lone Eagle, like any successful Native American women would be, I suppose, or so the readers, who know nothing of Native peoples, would.

This lacking narrative left me uninterested in the killer’s identity. First and foremost, because of the characterization of the lead suspect Frankie Montana, the actual murderer is telegraphed in the scenes of its’ introduction. There is also a white supremacist thread, which gives the story a sense of currency at the time of the book’s release due to the fact that a major church of white supremacy had moved to Wyoming then, is introduced and basically goes nowhere. They are not even the killers. Father O’Malley’s interaction with an ex-girlfriend of one of the supremacists seems to come from an entirely different book, which is a waste of story as so much time is devoted to a thread that adds nothing to the mystery. This leads to the two biggest weaknesses of the book, the final act and the motive of the killer.

In the later chapters, Holden eventually discovers relevant information “off-screen”, as it were, as Coel does not even bother to follow Holden within the narrative as she does her own investigation and uncovers new information pertaining to the killer’s identity. Holden just shows up at the end when O’Malley needs her to fill in any missing pieces, which gives him the excuse to go into action. Holden has become the feminine Tonto, who did all the dirty work, to O’Malley’s Lone Ranger, who did nothing but peep in windows. Then, together they race off toward the face off with the killers. When the plot is revealed and the reason for the killings is brought to light, the information is so wrapped up in Whiplashian histrionics that all that was missing was the moustache twirling.

Besides a very weak reason for the murders (So weak that a single sentence summation by O’Malley near the end sounded just plain silly.), the killers acted so out of character at that point from what was established for much of the book. One actually begins to monologue like a comic book villain that thinks he has the hero trapped and stupidly reveals all before ineptly trying to kill the hero. Speaking of comic book troupes, the fact that a character is suddenly “bat-shit insane” is too easy a narrative convention overused in turning heroes into villains that it smacks of creative laziness and a lack of originality on the author’s part.

While Coel lays these threads together awkwardly, it is her characterization of Father John O’Malley that is the strongest point of the series. It is also the biggest hurtle in representing the Northern Arapaho people. Her writing for O’Malley has gotten stronger mainly because Coel writes him the most. I have noticed that a slew of secondary Arapaho characters in Eye of the Wolf, such as Chief of BIA Police Art Banner, and the Saint Francis housekeeper have all but vanished from the series at this point in favor of O’Malley’s turmoil. Now, in Eye of the Wolf the housekeeper only leaves notes for O’Malley at dinnertime, the only indication she is ever there and a perfect example of how Coel represent the Arapaho people. She makes them an invisible presence lost in the glare of O’Malley’s white savior heroics.

Though one has to admit, Coel does write Father O’Malley well. A scene in Eye of the Wolf where O’Malley connects with his new assistant (Who may stick around another novel) over their shared need to seek failure which gives them an excuse to return to alcohol is the strongest of the book and possibly the series. But as Spokane author Sherman Alexie points out in his review of Ian Frazier’s On the Rez, a non-fiction book about the author’s interactions with the Lakota, “He almost convinces us that he’s writing about the ...Sioux, about their rez, when, in reality, he’s mostly writing about himself, about his feelings, about his real and imagined pain.”[iii]

I find that here in Coel’s fiction about the Northern Arapaho. She is first and foremost, not writing about the Northern Arapaho people, but is writing about O’Malley’s experiences among the Northern Arapaho.

A weak narrative and motive reminded me once again of why I had stopped reading the series, though I should have a great interest in it. The series is mostly inaccurate representations of my people, the problems they face, the lives they live, and of the land we live on. Worse yet, the exploitation of those problems for the entertainment of her mostly-white audiences borders on grief porn. It also served to remind me of the problems this series has in perpetuating these misrepresentations while serving an uninteresting plot. An uninteresting plot is almost always forgotten in favor of the book’s fans remembering the more “interesting”, if inaccurate and garish, representations of the Northern Arapaho people, my people.

It was with trepidation that I picked up Coel’s Eye of the Wolf. First of all, I feared that because of my past experience reading the tedious plots based on the reservation I grew up and lived several years of my adult life on now seem wildly inaccurate. Secondly, because of my experience as a Northern Arapaho man who has since been awakened to non-Native representations of Native Americas in media, I feel that more and more, the Native American perspective is being taken away from Native Americans who are just as capable, if not better, in creating genuine representations than the establishment.

On the Wind River Mystery Series

As mentioned before, I had stopped reading this series after The Shadow Dancer mostly because the stories were beginning to be repetitive, not only in structure, but also characterizations. This may be fine for the standard tea-cozy mystery but for the burgeoning genre of Indian Reservation mysteries, it was becoming boring. There was nothing fresh. I will come back to The Shadow Dancer later in this writing when I discuss the series’ depiction of the Northern Arapaho man. Her characterizations of the Arapaho males have become especially repetitive and problematic up to this point.

First of all, the primary problem with Coel’s books are that they are not evocative of anything familiar to me, being a Northern Arapaho man who grew on the Wind River Reservation, where she sets her books. I find nothing familiar in the books. I know of the names of the places she inserts here and there, but nothing aligns with anything that is actually there. This is a gratuitous misrepresentation coming from a noted anthropologist. Even Tony Hillerman’s Navajo fans know that he is accurate in his descriptions of the landscape.

Yet, this seems forgiven here because “it’s fiction”. In Coel’s books, Ethete Road seems to be the only road in Wyoming that goes everywhere O’Malley needs to go. Saint Francis Mission is actually based on the mission, church, and school I attended from kindergarten through high school, Saint Stephen’s. I know this from the depictions of the place on her book covers. But her description of the grounds evokes Saint Michael’s, an Episcopal mission in Ethete, Wyoming nearly 40 miles west of St. Stephen’s, with its circular driveway that has been established in the first novels. She actually moves one location to another for the sake of the story, yet this is not the last time she will do that to suit her fiction, fold acreage like a map to suit her stories. Now, readers of this may say that my experience is specific to me and can be dismissed as overly critical to the details of the region and too laden with an emotional attachment to the area and people to give a clear and unbiased opinion.

And it will be dismissed. This is a work of fiction after all. And the irony is that my criticisms, as stated above, will be the very things Coel’s fiction will be praised for because “it’s fiction” and she has been given a sort of tacit authority as the expert over my experience as an Arapaho.

But easy dismissal of a Northern Arapaho’s experience in favor of a non-Native mystery writer’s fiction adds to the larger issues of Native first-voice and self-representation. Also, how non-Native authors, film makers, museum curators, and historians continue to take away the voice of and speak for Native Americans in an era when the sound is fading on the Native voice in the chorus of modern American society.

Why is my factual experience as Native American, in general, and as a Northern Arapaho, specifically, dismissed in favor of a generic, all-encompassing representation? Why is this the preferred representation of the Wind River Northern Arapaho over my own, or any Northern Arapaho tribal member’s own experiences? It is fiction after all and that seems to be the easy excuse for invalidating our experiences. As Prats writes in his book Invisible Natives, about the film “Northwest Passage” about a young artist going West to paint the Indian, “the artist who would have painted the Indians has rendered instead, the white hero; the story that would have shown the artist painting the Indian shows us, instead, his sketch of the hero while denying us a look at the Indian…” (Prats, 2002, p.20)

Which then raises the question, what about those representations?

On Representation – The “Romantic” View of Natives

The ability and opportunity to represent our selves has become a hot-button issue for Native Americans across the country at the beginning of the new millennium. At the table of policy-making, the Native voice has been so long absent. For so long the power over the voice and control of Native imagery and symbolism has been in the hands of non-Natives. For centuries, Native American culture, imagery, history, and representation has been the providence of white men.

You can see the best representations of this in the media, especially film, and it crosses over to books and music, even the cultural knickknacks on the tourist shop, trading post shelves. Since the beginning of the film medium, Natives have been depicted in some form, yet, are hardly ever in control of the image portrayed and are deeply criticized for asking for an accurate representation, or worse, to be able to control such representations for ourselves.

Early American media depictions portrayed Native Americans as savages worth their extermination for Westward Expansion, as early national newspapers told the stories of pioneers massacred by the Indian. The earliest films showed Native American dancers and scenes of “everyday living” though many where staged scenes for the public to view for a nickel. Many remark, and rightly so, that if it was not for those non-Native people recording these “early” lifestyles of long ago, they could have been lost forever. But this assume that Native Americans then did not have their own way of passing on this information, and that assumption carries over to today, that Natives cannot grasp the technology, or cannot understand media literacy. Which is a throwback to those paternalistic attitudes that Natives are still in the “Old Times” and must be spoken for. Forgetting also that some parts of Native culture are meant to decay and disappear (An idea museums cannot seem to grasp.).

Taking a look at how Coel represents the Northern Arapaho in her book, we can see the connection to that same attitude. We can also see how she misrepresents history. In Eye of the Wolf, the very first misrepresentation occurs within the Author’s Notes, even before the story even begins; “The Bates Battlefield is located in Hot Springs County, Wyoming, three miles from the border of Fremont County. For the purposes of this story, I have placed the site of the battlefield in Fremont County.”[iv] [Emphasis mine]

This, to me, seems unheard of, especially since Coel is an anthropologist and no doubt accurate facts are essential to her vocation. It may seem a small thing but this makes her writing suspect in the accurate representation of the Wind River Reservation in general. It seems she has been granted, through the success of her series, a freehand in re-writing the very Arapaho history she studies, to suit her fiction. If she changes actual historical information to fit the story, can we even trust her representations of the Northern Arapaho if they could be just as changed to suit the story as well? Sadly, her credentials will make these misrepresentations fact. Indeed, this sort of historical/cultural shorthand is how media works.

Coel is maybe allowed this luxury because she has stated her authoritarian credentials by writing a non-fiction book on Chief Left Hand, a Southern Arapaho leader. Somehow, her research has made her an ad-hoc Native Expert in the non-Native academic world of fiction and that lends to this idea that she is now excluded from the exploitation of the Northern Arapahos in her books, because as the “Expert”, she is simply telling our story. She has authored her own expertise on the Northern Arapaho by writing a book about a Southern Arapaho leader.

Then it is much easier to dismiss the voice of Native Americans because Native Americans are still placed in that romantic view of history – the roaming bands, the teepee, the horses, feathers, the nature-bound spirituality, the beads and buckskin, and the long hair and prominent cheekbones; or worse yet, the idea that they are too lazy or freeloading to do something as constructive as writing a novel when there are casinos to build. Indeed, my critique of her series will be seen as the enemy to defeat. Her authority will make her the defender of my culture rather than the exploiter of it.

Orson Welles played on our need to be an authority in his excellent essay film F for Fake. He played on our need to be viewed by others as the final word, that our views and ideas are somehow, magically, different from another’s. In a twist that is the second half of the film he turns the tables on we the viewer and tricks us because he states his authorship of expertise on Picasso. And in a way, Coel is also duping us because, well, it is fiction after all, not a representation. That is her excuse. That is her trick.

Even now, not only do Native Americans continue to struggle with the same day-to-day issues we as Americans face, but also must combat the paternalistic attitudes that seek to keep us in the wigwams, the casinos, and bars and out of American Society’s contemporary mind set. It is because of that paternalistic, romanticized view that makes it easy for non-Natives to dismiss Native American first-voice in media, and easy for Coel’s non-Native readers to dismiss my Northern Arapaho voice.

The most recognized way to do this is though iconography and stereotypes that bind Native Americans to that historical past as if it is somehow a saving grace for Native people today. Mentions of the “Old Times” abound in Coel’s mysteries. Almost every chapter makes some allusion to these “Old Times” as if the Northern Arapaho could somehow recapture it, and live in the teepee again, they, and the rest of America, would be better off. This, “enlightened” ideology conveniently forgets however, the terrible toll taken by forced assimilation and forgets the historical fact that when Northern Arapahos, and indeed all Native Americans, lived the “Old Times” culture of a hundred and twenty or so years ago, they were the target of extermination by white culture.

The stereotypes do not stop there as the novel also abounds with constant Native-nature analogies; “like an eagle” or “as the wolf” become descriptions for normal, everyday Native activity, like simply talking. Suddenly, the elders’ voices boom “Like a chief from the Old Times addressing the village” (Like anyone could know that.), always making that romantic connection to a past that no longer exists. There is a tendency to keep Native Americans in that sepia-toned past precisely because it makes it easier to dismiss them, their voices, and their points of view.

Armando Prats makes the point several times in Invisible Natives, of the western movie’s continually need to make the Indian present so as to make them absent in the face of American Progress and that mentality extends to these mysteries in that the Arapahos in the books are continually longing for these “Old Times” which places them in the past and only Father O’Malley can show them the way to it somehow. We see this every time O’Malley returns to the mission in Eye of the Wolf to find another note from his Arapaho housekeeper, once again made invisible; it is her absence in the space of the story that ensures the reader that she is indeed apart of the “Vanishing Race”.

Native Americans today must also continually battle to overcome the images of the savages in paint and feathers that must be confronted, or revered, as some New Age icon before trying to make a place in contemporary society. These assumptions continue in Eye of the Wolf as many speak of the outbreak of a “Tribal War” as if both the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes in the novel do not know any better reaction to murders on the reservation. The reaction is indeed a tribal, savage reaction. Why assume that the Arapaho and Shoshoni would revert to tribal divisions when they have worked hard to maintain a good, intertribal, relationship for decades? As Prats once again points out so well, it is this mark of savagery, that the tribes cannot do anything else but “go to war” that marks them for extinction, as their savage ways have no place in our modern society.

In the book, the Northern Arapaho also speak about the idea of banishment which seemed to be in vogue at the time the novel came out and is yet another throwback to the “Old Times”. Even though Coel knows that the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes have a judicial court system and law enforcement, Frankie Montana is threatened with banishment every time he talks with Holden. Though, according to Jeffery Anderson, a Professor of Anthropology at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, NY, a former instructor of mine, a friend, and another expert on Northern Arapaho society, having spent many years living with the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation, informed me that while there are historical accounts of banishment in Arapaho culture, even then, it was very rare and never permanent. I use Anderson’s points here as a demonstration of non-Native authority because you will never accept my own statements on banishment.

Anderson also stated banishment was used more among the Northwest Coast tribes as recent as 20 years ago when two Tlingit teens were banished to an island for a robbery they committed[v]. So, now this concept, once again can be attributed to Coel’s creative license. She can now pull cultural punishments from other tribes to suit her fiction. Yet all it is a form of reductionism, it reduces the Arapaho and Tlingit into a Pan-Indian, tribal singularity, which makes all tribes, the same tribe. It is fiction after all. That is her trick.

What about a non-fictional representation? Jeff Anderson is also the author of One Hundred Years of Old Man Sage, a biography of a Northern Arapaho elder Sherman Sage living on the Wind River Reservation through the mid 1940's. “I really tried to foreground Sage’s voice and soften my own,” states Anderson[vi], who complied all available published and unpublished materials and manuscripts. Anderson also interviewed Sage’s living descendants and other elders who knew Sage. “So the purpose was to try to ‘repatriate’ scattered archival and published evidence from and about Sage... into one volume.”

Anderson is well aware that he is not speaking for the Arapaho when presenting his biography, and he is keenly aware of his audience, whom are fellow academics. Still we know that while this is a balanced portrayal of a Northern Arapaho man, it is not a first-voice representation. How do we know this? Simple, who is the author and who holds the label of “expert” in either writing? Presenting an accurate view of a Northern Arapaho life seems unheard of. So how does Coel represent a Northern Arapaho life and what does it add to a contemporary view of Northern Arapahos?

Pratts discusses the gaze in Invisible Natives and how it represents Natives in western movies. That concept can be applied to all media with a point of view. Who holds the gaze, the view, the perspective in looking at the world, more specifically, when looking at Native American culture? Looking at Andersons’ and Coel’s works side by side, even though one is a work of non-fiction and the other is fiction, even though both purport to be a balanced, “positive” view on Northern Arapahos, both views, the perspectives are still of the non-Native gaze.

Because the gaze is non-Native, it informs how the Northern Arapaho are represented, especially in Coel’s fiction, more so, because both the author and the hero are white. As Prats writes, “The gaze that falls upon the land and its people is defined by the perspective of the white hero who is using it.”

Again while both representations are deemed “positive” ones, you must consider one simple truth in who holds the gaze over the Northern Arapaho culture in their works; that both Coel and Anderson also share the same attribute: neither are Northern Arapaho.

The Arapaho Male in “Eye of the Wolf” and the Wind River Series

The primary misrepresentation that inhabits the Coel Wind River Reservation is the “Angry Indian Man”. All of the Indian men on this reservation seem mad about something. From not living they way they used to in “The Old Times”, to how they have been treated by whites for years, to having Father O’Malley confront or talk to them, to whatever, they are mad.

In The Shadow Dancer, which was the novel that compelled me to stop reading the series, the Arapaho men were all easily-led sheep to a “prophet” promising to bring back “the Old Times”. For an author to depict an entire race of people in such a repetitive manner, it seemed lazy to me. Of course they all described the same way, as the men in her books appear to wear nothing else but plaid shirts and jeans with boots, or so at least in all of the novels I had read. Maybe now she has changed them to baggy pants wearing gangbangers. They also all have “prominent noses” and long black hair, and high cheek bones “indicative of” their people. The descriptions of every Indian male in her books are simply variations on this theme. All are “modern Indian warriors” and they all seem angry about something. From the angry Frankie Montana to the angry Shoshoni men in Eye of the Wolf whom actually run Father O’Malley off the road and promptly get their asses handed to them by the sudden Action Hero antics of Father John.

Frankie Montana is one of these stock caricatures, Coel’s idea of the Northern Arapaho male. Montana is a petty criminal not beyond constantly abusing his lawyer Vicky Holden verbally, and later physically. He is not beyond using his own mother to lie for him as an alibi. As the novel reaches its end and he is eventually revealed not to be the killer, his story thread is simply dropped and ends, going nowhere. Frankie Montana is an alcoholic, drug-using crook and he is simply left abandoned, drunk, and tied to a chair, in a house he broke into. Frankie Montana serving no other use than to depict another Northern Arapaho man as a lying criminal. He is thus abandoned, his task complete.

The biggest stereotype in the series prior was the character of Ben Holden, Vicky’s ex-husband. He seems to be the sobered, yet no less volatile, version of Frankie Montana. Because we need constant reminders that the woman Holden seeks these types of men out. She needs them in her life. What relegates her to the “Indian Princess” role is the need to have cruel men in her life, it lets readers off the hook in expecting her to be a strong female character, and it also renders her helpless, in need of Father O’Malley’s constant saving grace.

Ben Holden was written as an alcoholic and abusive, abusive even after being divorced from Vicky and sober for years. Indeed, Father O’Malley counsels many women on the reservation whose husbands’ behavior are the same as Ben Holden’s. O’Malley is constantly meeting with abused women or hosting a “talking circle’ of abused women. In every novel, until his obligatory death, Ben Holden’s temper always flared. He mostly expressed this by “gripping the table until his knuckles popped white”. He gripped the table whenever he tried to convince Vicky to re-marry him. Every time they met, in every novel, he was the same – a drunken, womanizer, promising better, gripping the tabletop until it is time for him to be killed.

So it seems with all the Arapaho men in the series. Temporarily excluding Vicky’s latest love interest in Eye of the Wolf, Adam Lone Eagle. But Adam Lone Eagle is Lakota, which could possibly help him escape the tedious portrayal rendered to the other Native men. Yet, Lone Eagle is also then described as a striking man, “a modern Indian warrior” whom turns many women’s heads. We have seen in the series that Arapaho men cannot be kind to their women, with Ben Holden and Frankie Montana representing the idea that Arapaho men in the series as drunken abusers. Here we finally do reach a point of separation of the Northern Arapaho man from the men of other tribes. Consider that all other Native men, the Shoshone and Lakota in the story are very sexy men, “modern Indian warriors”, all with long hair. Where Arapaho men are sexist abusers, the Shoshones and Lakota always take care of their women.

Moving back to the female, we can see that Vicky Holden, the last of the Northern Arapaho characters in the series, mainly due to the fact that she is supposed to be the “co-star”, is relegated to “Indian princess” role in Eye of the Wolf. In that, after all that she has gone through, she still only serves the plot in giving the male characters someone to save. One can almost also say that she has purged her Native-ness with her life experiences – she has chosen her live with the whites, has learned from their law schools, worked at their law firms, and has broken through to see that the Arapaho men around her now are not up to the standard that is Father John O’Malley.

Soon, not even Adam Lone Eagle, the only Native man in her life, can measure up to O’Malley. At the conclusion of Eye of the Wolf, when O’Malley and Lone Eagle go in search of the kidnapped princess Vicky, suddenly Lone Eagle is simply called “the Lakota”, as if to remove his singular identity and vanish him into a generalized tribal identity, when he wants apologize to O’Malley. Lone Eagle’s crude Indian-ness is laid bare in his misjudgment of O’Malley. Only a crude Indian man could make the mistake of misjudging the priest, only an Indian man, only “the Lakota” and not the person, the human Adam Lone Eagle. Because a person makes mistakes, but what about when an entire people does?  Now, the Lakota are culpable in the misjudgment of O’Malley, not just Lone Eagle, who suddenly now personifies his whole tribe in that generalized label. He once again becomes the lone Native voice in deference to the “Indian Priest” O’Malley.

This goes to show that there needs to be something, or someone, better for Vicky and, indeed, the Northern Arapaho people. But who can it be? Whoever it is, for Vicky, it cannot be a Northern Arapaho man, or simply no man at all, and for the Arapaho people, it cannot be a Native person at all. Maybe it can only be Father John O’Malley, the so-called “Indian Priest”?

The “Indian” Priest: On Stealing a Native American Identity

We see it over and over in film and books. The white man discovering the tribe, the white man being taken in by the tribe because he is suddenly unlike all the others they have encountered, the white man “learning their ways”, and then, the white man becoming a better Indian than the Indians. In films like Dances with Wolves and books as old as The Last of the Mohicans, we have been served a steady media diet of how a white man can magically become an Indian simply by being in proximity of them. Suddenly, they are imbued with some sort of secret tribal knowledge meant only for them because they are magically different than all the other white men, imbued with the clothing, long hair, the beads and chokers, and in some cases, like the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf, some smash-bang kung-fu moves. The white man can then accomplish what the Natives could not; like defeating the white man, in the case of Dances with Wolves, or, solving a murder on an Indian reservation, like Father O’Malley in Eye of the Wolf.

In Eye of the Wolf, Father O’Malley is suddenly saddled with an unearned Native identity. He is called “the Indian Priest” no less that twenty times by other whites throughout the entire novel and in one chapter alone is called so three times in less than two pages. He also references himself as one constantly, with thoughts like “My god, I sound like one of the elders”, as if that declaration makes it so.

“Indian by Proximity” as some of my Native colleagues call it. O’Malley is made so Indian by Coel that he can now even give an “Indian name” to the stray dog that loafs around the mission, giving it “a name of honor, in the Arapaho Way for his courage” (Yes, that is an actual line from novel.), to a dog, a dog, but not to another Arapaho, who it now seems are not as courageous as this one dog.

Name giving is usually a task reserved for the Arapaho elders who have lived a long life with respect earned by respect given to those around them, and only then, are names given in someone’s life to commemorate a special occasion. But the “Indian Priest” O’Malley can name the dog regardless of all this. For he is not bound by the traditions and ritual of the Northern Arapaho whom he claims to respect, “sounds like one of,” or is a part of. He can ignore the tradition and ritual that have existed for centuries and because he is more Indian than the Indian, and suddenly, even the dog is a better Indian than the Indian to have somehow earned an Arapaho name.

So, why is it that Father O’Malley cannot give an Indian name to an Arapaho? The answer is simple. He simply cannot, because, he is not Arapaho. Coel is very careful in making the distinction of calling O’Malley the “Indian Priest” because she knows that deeply, as we all know, what sets Arapahos apart from an Irish priest. Why not make O’Malley the “Black Priest” or the “Jewish Priest”? Even the white supremacist character in Eye of the Wolf, who is barely used in the story, is only used here to also call O’Malley “the Indian Priest” as if using the ugliest form of being a white person to reject O’Malley’s “whiteness” and allows O’Malley to easier slip on the identity of “the Indian Priest”. But to what end? Why do all non-Natives want that connection to Native Americans, or to be associated with them as a partner, knowledge keeper, or adoptee?

Why is Coel allowed to make her white priest an “Indian”? Is it because in the story, the tribe accepts him? As I understand it and experienced it, being adopted into a tribe does not peel your old ethnic identity from you, it does not make you an automatic member of the tribe. You are suddenly no longer German or Italian or Swedish when a tribal member adopts you. O’Malley is not suddenly no longer Irish because he is accepted by some tribal members. It should only speak of how highly a Native person or family holds you in regard. If anything, adoption in the “Indian Way” is more a testament to the generosity of Native peoples and not an excuse to trade one ethnic identity for another.

But it is never taken this way. Instead, it comes to mean something else: authority. Suddenly, the O’Malleys, the John Dubars, the Jack Crabbs, or the Natty Bumpos are the spokesperson for their newly found tribe, stealing the voice of self-representation from those who need it most because they want to be accepted as Indian. Much like O’Malley does, and to an extent, maybe Coel herself. Which is why O’Malley is suddenly able to declare that he “sounds like one of the elders” and the reader will grant him that status by his unearned authority.

Armando José Pratts once again provides context for this. Prat calls the white hero turned Indian, the Double Other because he “others” himself by accepting the Indian’s ways, separating him from his white own. Yet, he remains separated from the Indians too, despite learning their ways (if only to defeat them in most cases) and being accepted by them because he will never let go of his whiteness. In doing so, he can become the authority over the tribe and at the same time, while the tribe’s destruction is assured, O’Malley can accept no blame for it, even though he represents the church that has done quite a lot of damage to Native societies. Because, also in the tradition of the American Western, the Native American, or the Northern Arapaho, needs to be made present in these depictions so that the non-Native authority can then render them absent. As you remember in movie westerns, no one ever sees Indians.

Prats’ example of this is John Ford’s Stagecoach, wherein the small bastion of civilization represented by the white people inside the stagecoach, where much of the action takes place, that is under the constant threat of attack by Geronimo, who is never seen. But Geronimo’s absence is his presence, disconnecting the Chiricahua Apache tribe he is a part of and vanishing him into the faceless savagery represented by the nameless Indians who are gunned down by hero John Wayne. Think of Coel’s mission and priests as the stagecoach, and the Arapaho always on the edges of the space, ever the threatening enemy whose destruction is assured. This, as Prats writes, “makes clear the tendency of the Myth of Conquest to locate its Indian at the periphery of the contested terrain, out where he is least visible, less discernibly human – always as if the Indian, not the white hero, were the trespasser, an unwelcome interloper disrupting the smooth course of empire.” (Prats, 2002, p.74)

In this way, the white hero must take the identity of the Native more so to exclude him from the dissipation of Native American civilization. Since O’Malley is now the “Indian Priest” he is no longer connected to his race’s destruction of Native society. Yet, if you know anything of the history of Catholicism in the context of forced assimilation of Native people, we can clearly see why Father O’Malley needs to be the “Indian Priest”: to absolve his Catholic priesthood from the continued (yes, continued) destruction of the Northern Arapaho culture and to exclude O’Malley, indeed, Coel herself, in their race’s role in that destruction.

But there is also another, more subtle, possibly more sinister reason – O’Malley, and Coel, then become the experts on this vanishing Northern Arapaho culture. Indeed, in Eye of the Wolf, when the crime is solved and the murderers are arrested, we then see the tribe become O’Malley’s, as members of the tribe surround him, reach out to him, asking for his return to the mission and thus their own salvation, looking up to him like he is some newly formed “Arapaho Christ” because finally, the Northern Arapaho people have found their savior, and he can only be a white man.

Yet, this is a false equivalence, because O’Malley can never be an Arapaho man. He will never experience the world around him as an Arapaho man. He will never grow up as an Arapaho person. He may find commonality, even acceptance, but he will never have the experience of being a Northern Arapaho man. Indeed, the world will never treat him as a Northern Arapaho man. He will always be treated as a white Catholic priest living among the Arapaho, which is why he then called the “Indian Priest”, to place generic, fake label of exclusion on him to allow the readers to buy into his expertise of the Northern Arapaho people and that is more damaging to the Arapaho because it steals their voice in their search for equal treatment in a modern society, it makes the interloper the authority of a cultural experience he has never lived.

“The Experts are the greatest fakers.” The Authorship of Expertise

Welles’ F for Fake makes a great point about how people are willing to believe in the fake because it somehow justifies their own expertise. His “essay film” is about how an art forger named Elmyr de Hory made his living selling forged Picassos to galleries all over the world. The point Welles made, and which seems to have take root here in Coel’s series as well, is that many of those same galleries who bought de Hory’s paintings, insisted they were genuine. Their expertise made them genuine. Even putting on exhibitions of the works because of their confidence of their expertise, which was justified by the Picasso exhibit they would put on.

Yet, when the paintings were found to be fakes, the egoism of the galleries extended to the points of stating that they knew they were fakes. Or, to simply deny they were fakes, because the truth would damage their credibility as experts. So, their artistic expertise is once again justified in confirming the forgeries; which becomes the justification of expertise. The authorship of expertise; is this why non-Natives crave association with Native peoples? Is it all simply a question of ego? While Elmyr had used their expertise to mock the system of the art market, Coel uses expertise to render her stories genuine, but it also renders the Arapaho mute in the telling of their own stories. Coel can state that she wants the Northern Arapaho to speak for themselves, but her expertise is too strong of a need, otherwise, she would have simply stopped writing them by now. Thus, Coel’s renderings of my Arapaho people become her own forgeries.

O’Malley and Coel inhabit a space of expertise about the Northern Arapaho culture. It is a space that, according to Prats, they own by simply their looking upon it, each carrying and enforcing their perspective of the Northern Arapaho. As Prats writes, “Perspective becomes an essential instrument of representation. Perspective enforces the Indian’s absence and defines the limits of Indian identity. …the Western’s Indian always appears before us as a projection of a perspective over which the Myth of Conquest exercises virtually total control.” (Prats, 2002, p.72)

It is through their gaze that renders the Northern Arapaho people an invisible presence in their own story. O’Malley takes on the false identifier of the “Indian Priest” to deny his race’s and church’s role in the destruction of the Northern Arapaho people while never letting go of his white identity, secure in his perspective as this tribe’s savior, that the tribe is now his, simply for being there and solving its murders. As Prats put it “The hero looks upon the land adoringly and hopefully, and, looking, he already possesses it – at least enough to tell himself that he is defending it, rather than invading it.” (Prats, 2002, p.75)

It is this tacit authority over Northern Arapaho culture that gives the reader their expert in both O’Malley and in Coel. Thus, giving them both expertise and confirms O’Malley’s “Indian Priest” label within the narrative. But this authority takes us into the dangerous and murky waters of Native identity fraud such as Ward Churchill, where my cohorts say I should fear to tread, but which Welles says best about these experts “…We bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.” (Welles, 1974)

To Try Conclusions…

While in the middle of the writing the review portion of Eye of the Wolf years ago, I had happened to see The Drowning Man on the bookshelves. Coel’s next novel in the series is about someone stealing the side of a mountain because it has a hieroglyph on it. She has since released many more since then, with such Old Times-attached titles as Killing Custer and Night of the White Buffalo. White Buffalo prophecy is primarily a Lakota cultural tradition, and though I have no idea how Coel plays it out in her eighteenth “Wind River” novel, I know, due to her “expertise” that she will get away with shoving it into a Northern Arapaho cultural context, once again reducing all tribes into a single tribe. I also know that looking over the series now with a sense of accurate representations of Native peoples in media, that I will not be picking up any more of Coel’s mysteries.

I am guessing, in the continuing story, that Father O’Malley, at some point will be asked, by an elder, to take part in Northern Arapaho ritual, like a sweat lodge. Then, that same elder will praise him for making through a sweat ceremony because “our young people are turning away from our Old Ways”. Maybe O’Malley will have a vision and because of that vision, he will earn an Arapaho name. I am sure it will happen at some point, or maybe it already has, all in service to make O’Malley more Indian, and therefore the righteous voice to speak for the Northern Arapaho, the true expert that only takes from the culture, owns it, only to assure that the Northern Arapaho of Coel’s writings are made invisible in the shining expertise of O’Malley’s, and maybe Coel’s, “Indian-ness”.

But let us never forget that this is a false claim. That O’Malley only sees the Arapaho only as Coel wants them to be seen. As Alexie writes about Ian Frazier’s experience, "Frazier claims ownership of the tribe based on his superficial admiration of certain aspects of their culture. …He admires the Oglalas because of who he believes them to be, not because of who the Oglalas believe themselves to be."

I am aware that these same points can be made about the late Tony Hillerman’s works. So, why not “attack” him? Simple, I am not a Navajo and will trust the Navajo people to speak up on such things, but they have better things to worry about, like mine leaks and uranium poisoning. Besides, all of Hillerman’s heroes are Navajo. I am a Northern Arapaho man, which is also why I tried to be less critical of the Vicky Holden character beyond the tired Native tropes that are forced upon her. Still, I must add as an aside, going into spoiler territory, the murderer in Eye of the Wolf turns out to be a woman who becomes suddenly insane over fame and fortune, in service to her husband’s writing career. Vicky Holden is also beaten and victimized in the story. O’Malley counsels many women who are victimized. What could this say about Coel’s own views of women?

Native peoples must fight constantly to figuratively rebury their dead. They must continually fight to have their voices heard when other are so eager to speak for them just to satisfy their egos. In the many classes I speak to on the topic of Native Americans in media, I find myself having to say what many non-Natives, and Natives, do not want to hear: the Native cultures from the Old Times that everyone seems to think Natives want to get back to, are gone. We can never get back to them no matter how much non-Natives wish it for us, or us for ourselves. We can never get back to that as Coel would have her readers think. We have been and continue to assimilate into American society, just as planned.

Look at myself – I am a Northern Arapaho man, yet I have short hair, I speak English, and I went to non-Native schools. Yet, I am still a Northern Arapaho despite it, because of something O’Malley and Coel can never get. I am a filmmaker, a writer, and an artist. I can use the tools and technology necessary to create art that speaks with my own voice, gaze, and perspective. The Native peoples alive today are the descendents of those tribes that were targeted for assimilation and extermination long ago. Yet, we have survived, we are still present, yet the representations out there only serve to keep us tied to the Old Times, which in turn make us invisible. We continue to fight hard to be a part of contemporary society while at the same time, create new connections to our past. That is our duty and choice to do so. And it is for no one else.

According to Armando José Prats, the Battle for the Western Frontier is never over, that for many, it has never really ended. We as a people, and as a democratic nation, are fed a steady media diet which still portrays Native Americans as an enemy to be defeated; such as how the news showed the protesters at Elsiboqtoq, or the members of the Ramapough Mountain Indians in the film Out of the Furnace. Yet, nothing is made of their struggles like the Oak Flat sale approved by the US Congress when they passed the National Defense Authorization Act[vii], or the high rate of Natives killed by police[viii]. We never really see an honest depiction of Native peoples because some still feel the threat of the invisible enemy. Which is why they fight for their mascots and logos, and because that steady media diet never tells them otherwise.

It tells them that Native Americans are still the silent, ancient, invisible enemy that this country still has to defeat over and over. Which, ultimately, leads to their “prize” for winning the West: the right to present those mascots and logos, those mystery stories, as genuine representations.

That fight continues because, when all is said and done, we do want the trauma. We want Indians to exist only so much that we can defeat them or feel sorry for them. My words written here will be taken as an “attack” on a woman author due to my savagery, or a plaintive cry for pity due to my “defeat”. For Natives depicted in media, there is no middle ground. In truth, all I ask for is simple consideration when confronting media depictions, not a happy, positive depiction, nor an evil, negative one, nor historical, but as a contemporary member of society. We want to be seen as humans too. But the steady diet of media misrepresentations of our culture and people has had its affect. As Elmyr de Hory remarks on his forgeries that have hanged in some of the world’s greatest museums, “If they hang there long enough, they become real.” (Welles, 1974)

Coel’s misrepresentations have been around a long time. Here, now, we come to the separation of literature and art. Now days, anything can be labeled “art”, which goes to show you how tenuous and tedious the definition of art can be. Literature was how we passed our most important cultural information for centuries. The printed word reigned for centuries as the dominant force of media for the passing of information. Our most important information was printed in books made to last forever so that future generations could look up facts and know they were true, simply by the very nature that it was printed. Fiction writing was not considered as important as academic writing because the purpose of the fictional form was to entertain and was therefore seen as a lark, and the other was/is how we looked at the world and wrote down what we learned.

“A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past.” Neil Postman writes in his excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business in the chapter dealing with the power of the printed word and how it is lost in today’s media spectrum. Look at the public reaction to Joseph Marshall III’s The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, his biography of the Lakota chief, culled from the various oral histories handed down from Crazy Horse’s own contemporaries. Yet, looking at the many negative reviews on public commentary sites, the consensus is that Marshall relied too heavily on “Lakota mouth of mouth”; completely ignoring the fact that this was how the Lakota passed on histories for centuries before the establishment of the country. But that attitude of having to be against the Native perspective runs accord with Prats’ point. Easy entertainment is too often the reason we give ourselves in overlooking the representations of Native peoples.

Perhaps Coel writes these mysteries knowing that this connection to the Northern Arapaho will exclude her from that fight and the continued assimilation of the tribe today. She can point to her books and say that she is the defender of the culture and not its corruptor. She needs Father O’Malley’s acceptance as the “Indian Priest” just as she hopes, maybe, to be labeled the Arapaho Mystery Writer. It is that acceptance that will exclude her fiction from both the constant misrepresentations of the Northern Arapaho, of all tribes, and the usurpation of their voices in trying to be included in today’s society in favor of the “experts” who want them tied to the “Old Times” where it is easier to ignore them.

Maybe, she writes these knowing they will have its defenders, both Native and non-Native, because it is fiction after all. They will defend the fiction as a way to justify their own need for that connection to Native cultures, which they seek to assume that “Indian Whatever” role that excludes them from the continued assimilation and misrepresentations everywhere; their “enlightenment” simply becomes a “morality pass” to the Native American’s cultural destruction and the commodification of our culture that goes on even today.

As we draw this to a close, I must state that I have no magic trick here, no unexpected twist to drive home the point. All I have is my Northern Arapaho heritage and my tribe. I only have my own experience in representing myself to you. But if you look through this series with my gaze, my perspective, you will see that my experience is my expertise, my heritage is my authority, and whether you choose my expertise over Coel’s is what it all comes down to. I have no magic trick to perform, as Coel’s work has already made me invisible.

But this is where Coel pulls her greatest trick, her greatest forgery; she is in fact not an anthropologist, as I assumed when I started this writing. She is a journalist.[ix] But her Northern Arapaho cultural expertise is now endorsed by the very fiction she writes. This mistake is on me, but what about her readers who do not know? Also, I cannot understand the contradiction – as a journalist, should she not be devoted to an exacting truth? My mistake, while an honest one, may be seen as a blatant misrepresentation of Coel herself; yet, no one will raise the question of how she presents a misrepresentation of my tribe as truth in her stories. Are not her misrepresentations on purpose? They remain her own forgeries, her trick to retain an authorship of expertise over my voice.

I myself have no such magic trick here, nor an easy answer, save one. I hope when people pick up a Margaret Coel Wind River Mystery, they should give consideration to the Northern Arapaho people, their culture and struggles presented within the pages. When they do, they should not be asking, “Why can’t a non-Native write this?” but should ask, “Why can’t a Native American write it?” Then, they should simply place the books back on the shelf.

The Northern Arapaho people are not vanishing, but our voice is fading due in part to non-Native representations that seek to make us absent, if only to become the experts on that vanishing culture, that only make us visible to render us invisible because, in Coel’s fiction, no one ever sees Arapahos. Maybe, in writing this, I do perform a magic trick: I make myself visible once again.

Respectfully Submitted,

Ernest M Whiteman III

Book/Film Reference                       

Coel, Margaret, Eye of the Wolf, 2005, Berkely Publishing

Marshall, Joseph M. III, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, 2005, Penguin Books

Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985, Penguin Books

Prats, Armando José, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western, 2002, Cornell University Press

Welles, Orson, F for Fake, essay film, 1974

End notes:

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[i] American Indian Mysteries: A Crossover Genre Not Quite There” – www.dancingbadger.com/indmyst01.htm

[ii] The Bates Battle – www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/jkmoore/batesbattle.htm

[iii] “Some of My Best Friends: A review of Ian Frazier’s On the Rez”, Sherman Alexie, L.A. Times, January 23, 2000: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/23/books/bk-56600

[iv] Margaret Coel, Eye of the Wolf, Author’s Note

[v] Two Alaska Indian Youths Banished to Islands for Robbery, John Balzar, L.A. Times, July 15, 1994: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-07-15/news/mn-15840_1_alaska-indians

[vi] Discussion with Jeffrey Anderson, personal correspondence, Mar-Oct, 2005

[vii] Selling Off Apache Holy Land, Lydia Millet, New York Times, May 29, 2015: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opinion/selling-off-apache-holy-land.html?_r=0

[viii] 5 Thing That May Surprise You about Native American’s Police Encounters, Joie Chen and Nicole Grether, Al Jazeera America, January 27, 2015: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2015/1/27/things-that-may-surprise-you-about-native-americans-police-encounters.html

[ix] Author’s website: http://www.margaretcoel.com/about_interviews4.php - the only biographical information found is in this interview.