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