Rich Hall's Inventing the Indian

This programme contains some violent scenes and some strong language.

On May 2nd 2011, approximately 6pm Eastern Standard Time,

as President Obama sat in a terse situation room with Leon Panetta, head of the CIA,

and Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State,

the tension was broken by a Navy Seal transmission

from 6,000 miles away in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The transmission said, "Geronimo EKIA."

Geronimo. Enemy. Killed in action.

Now if you were a Native American, you could infer two things

from this statement.

One, that Geronimo, the most revered of Apache warriors

was being equated with the world's most vicious terrorist.

Or that Geronimo was just a term the US Army

has been using since World War Two

when paratroopers first started jumping out of planes.

Geronimo times out perfectly between leaping and pulling the chord.

In other words, it's just a word.

So if that's the case, why didn't the operative just say

"Fats Domino EKIA."

Now who's upset? Fat pianists?

No-one! Nonetheless, it shows you that 520 years

since the discovery of America,

120 years since the Massacre at Wounded Knee,

and roughly 20 years since the release of a film

called Thunderheart, an execrable piece

of apologistic, overly sentimental, misty-eyed cinematic tripe

starring Val Kilmer as a part-Sioux FBI agent,

native Americans are still getting the short end of the stick.

-'They sent him to a foreign land.'

-What's my cover?

-'In the middle of America.'

-You're going in there as who you are.

An American-Indian Federal Officer.

'To uncover the truth.'

Federal Officer, hands on your head, do it!

-Who are you?

-Walter Crow Horse, Tribal Police.

-You must be the Indian FBI?

-That's right.

-What nation?

-The United States.

-What's your name?

-Sure as Hell ain't Geronimo, chief.

No other Indian figure has been more misrepresented, misappropriated,

reinvented or just conjured from celluloid scratch as Geronimo.

In 1939, the director John Ford stamped an indelible image of him

as a bloodthirsty savage in Stagecoach.

He burns down cabins and butchers women and children,

for no apparent reason.

No historical perspective, just a name that invokes fear, Geronimo.

Nowadays of course, he's used to lure butt-weary travellers

off of Route 66 here to pull into places like this and spend

all their money on genuine Indian souvenirs

made in Malaysian sweat shops.

It's possible Billy Connolly has already covered this

in his travelogue but at least I'm explaining it to you in English.

Is it possible in a four-minute scene

featuring an Indian attack on western settlers

for America's pre-eminent western director

to get at least ten things wrong? Well, let's count them.

Stagecoach is supposed to take place in Lordsburg, New Mexico,

an area where Geronimo spent much of his life.

Clearly, this setting is Monument Valley, Arizona.

Apaches wore wide cloth headbands,

which covered the entire tops of their heads.

These were invented by a costume designer

to hold the actors' wigs in place. How do you get close enough

to shoot an arrow into a guy's chest without everyone hearing you coming?

Apaches never attacked in broad daylight.

They sneaked in under cover of darkness.

They didn't run around pointlessly firing their guns into the air.

They're not Iraqis.

If you want to stop a stagecoach, you shoot the lead horse.

Number six - Apaches didn't jump off their horses onto other horses.

The only person who could do that was a stuntman named Yakima Canutt.

That man under the horse is Yakima Canutt.

How is it possible to shoot two Indians with one bullet?

Number eight - throwing rocks at your horse

doesn't make it go faster.

Apaches didn't have saddles on their horses.

Only soldiers had saddles on their horses.

And finally, that is one ugly baby. Wow.

The 1962 version of Geronimo took painstaking steps

to tell the story from Geronimo's perspective,

that of a leader forced to surrender to US authorities

over promises never kept.

His people are made to endure vast indignity.

I'm not an animal that has to be branded.

In that version, Geronimo is played by a blue-eyed, pumpkin-tinted

TV star and ex-professional baseball player named Chuck Connors.

'Chuck Connors makes a complete departure

'from the role that made him famous to create the heroic figure

'of the Apache warrior who strove against impossible odds

'for dignity and freedom.'

Let me feel him kick.

Careful there, Chuck. Your aim looks a little too high.

In 1993's Geronimo: An American Legend,

Hollywood finally hit on the idea of casting an American Indian

in the lead role of a movie about an American Indian.

The Cherokee actor Wes Studi gives a much more definitive portrait

of the Apache warrior and his band of followers

who spent five years trying to elude capture and forced settlement

by the US Government.

When I was young, the white man came and wanted the land of my people.

When their soldiers burnt our villages, we moved to the mountains.

When they took our food, we ate thorns.

The film stars Jason Patric, Matt Damon,

Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman

and Wes Studi as Geronimo.

In that order. The title character gets fifth billing.

In truth, it's probably impossible to tell the story

of the Indian on film because an Indian's notion of time itself,

like travel, is always circular.

The real Geronimo was offered the services of a car in 1905

after he was incarcerated at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

He turned the offer down.

He didn't want a goddamn car. He wanted to be free.

Four years later at the age of 79,

riding back to his assigned home in the snow, he fell from his horse.

A week later, he was dead of pneumonia.

That's the real story of Geronimo.

For the record, Bin Laden's code name wasn't even Geronimo.

It was Jackpot. The code name for the operation was Geronimo.

See, we're still getting it wrong.

# They put Geronimo in jail down south

# Where he couldn't look the gift horse in the mouth

# Sergeant, sergeant, don't you feel

# Something wrong with your automobile?

# Whoa, take me back

# I want to ride in Geronimo's Cadillac

# Woah, take me back

# I want to ride in Geronimo's Cadillac. #

"OK, Rich are you going to spend this entire documentary

"pontificating about how the Indians got a raw deal?"

Because we all know the Indians got a raw deal.

Is that what you're thinking?

"Or are you going to let some Indians weigh in on the issue?"

Well, this is Dallas Goldtooth. He is Dakota and Dine.

-Hi.

-Howdy.

-What do you think?

-About what?

The whole Geronimo EKIA thing.

I really don't know who Fats Domino is.

He was a piano player. First name self-explanatory.

Ah, Gotcha.

You know, Geronimo is one of our heroes. This blazing figure

in the memory of Indians everywhere and this whole usage of his name

and association with Bin Laden, it's another notch in the proverbial club

that we shall use one day against the white-skinned, blue-eyed,

cowboy hat-wearing, unibrow-having nation of people,

like you.

So that whole John Ford thing, what do you think about that?

Strident foreshadowing?

You're doing good, man. You're doing really good.

When it comes to portraying the Indian on film,

how has Hollywood managed to get it wrong every single time?

Because cinematically,

the Indian had to be killed off before he could be reinvented.

It begins with popular literature.

In 1826, James Fenimore Cooper, a Connecticut writer,

was vacationing on Long Island, New York,

when he succumbed to sunstroke.

Under this delirious condition, he began penning the second part

of his trilogy of Leatherstocking Tales.

The story is called Last of the Mohicans, effectively

implying a tribe's extinction even before the first line of the book.

The hero is a white frontiersman named either Natty Bumppo

or Hawkeye depending on who's talking to him.

Hawkeye knows the backwoods even better than his Indian counterpart

Chingachgook, even though Chingachgook and his people

have been around a few thousand years longer.

This is the trope of White European superiority that will reappear

again and again in books and films which, by nature of their titles,

should be about the subject mentioned in the title.

Unfortunately, the Indians in the book

are more or less just a dramatic backdrop.

Cooper, quite possibly because of sunstroke,

couldn't quite seem to remember which specific tribe

of Algonquin Indians he was talking about -

either Mahicans or Mohegans -

so he just blended them together and called them Mohicans.

The book is a bloated, turgid, orotund work

of spectacular historical misrepresentation.

Naturally, it became massively popular,

both with British readers and those Americans who could read.

It's been made into a movie at least five times.

Whatever thin credibility the book retained was lost to the movie,

where the principal Indian characters are nothing more

than cardboard, slightly hysterical stereotypes.

It's complete bollocks, man. Is that what your people say?

Not my people. Toward the end of the story, Chingachgook invokes

the title by saying, "When my son, Uncas, follows in my footsteps,

"there will be no more blood of the Sagamores,

"for he is the last of the Mohicans."

Thus Cooper effectively consigns an entire tribe to the trash heap

paving the way for popular literature and later cinema

to re-invent the Indian as it sees fit.

And boy, have they ever.

By the way, the Mahicans are still around.

As are the Mohegans, who own the Women's NBA basketball team,

the Connecticut Suns. Also, the Mohegan resort and casino

in Uncasville, Connecticut.

What is this stuff?

That fried bread? It's fried bread.

Man, I owe Scotland an apology.

Although white moviegoers may have not been that savvy,

Indians must've realized early on they were being contrived for the sake of a convenient story.

When I was a kid, I'd sit on my dad's lap

and we'd watch westerns, Rin Tin Tin or John Wayne, and he'd grumble.

"Ah, those aren't Indians, look how he's walking, the way he's moving."

All white man prayed.

I think the image of American Indians in America

is nothing short of slanderous, they ridicule the way we laugh,

the way we sing, the way we dance.

Our prayers, our names. Everything is ridiculed.

Now I know why they call him Sitting Bull.

We're talking about a figment of somebody's imagination, really.

When you watch cowboys and Indians, like, as a kid you can't help

but get caught up in it, you know? We played cowboys and Indians.

I always ended up being a frickin' Indian.

You always frickin' died as an Indian.

Cousin always wanted to be a cowboy

and he wouldn't let us kill him because cowboys don't die.

Fuck. It kind of sucked being an Indian, now I'm thinking about it.

Regardless of what terminology you choose -

natives, first people, aboriginals or savages -

the undeniable fact is there were hundreds of thousands,

probably millions of indigenous people inhabiting the Americas

before it was "discovered".

The Indian was invented at the very moment

we invented the word "Indian". We call Native Americans Indians

because that's always where Columbus thought he had landed.

He wasn't the first explorer to reach the Americas

but he was the first to stick around and realise

that it wasn't the paradise he'd envisioned.

Which is kind of the difference between an immigrant and a tourist.

Americans are brought up to believe that Columbus

was America's first hero, because he embodied that very essence

of mythical character. Explorer, adventurer, prospector,

pacifier of savages, lawmaker, townbuilder.

You know, cowboy.

Driven by a sense of destiny and ambition,

he crossed the sea of darkness

in search of honour,

gold and the greater glory of God.

500 years after Columbus landed in what we now call the Americas,

Ridley Scott attempted to put the Hollywood spin on him

by casting him as a compromised hero.

A man rebelling against the screwed-up value system of Europe.

Columbus is portrayed by that renowned Italian actor

Gerard Depardieu, as a man whose religious fanaticism

leads to the tragic demise of the Taino Indian nation.

The extraordinary story of the discovery of a new world.

1492: The Conquest of Paradise is turgid apologist hokum,

but Americans want to believe anything but the truth

about Columbus, because after all, we named a city in Ohio after him.

And a Capital district. And a river and a Carry On film.

But Columbus wasn't just America's first cowboy.

He was a New World, God-bothering, long-haired, Jesus freak

bible-humping cowboy.

He loved Willie Nelson, he never kicked a puppy,

had steerhorns on the front of his boat.

He believed in his heart he'd been chosen by God

to convert savages to Christianity.

His journals depict him as a man desperate

to find gold for Queen Isabella.

But the Taino repeatedly tried to tell him there were other islands

nearby where there was much more gold than sand.

They were trying to get rid of him

because frankly he was annoying the hell out of everyone.

But Columbus kept coming back.

For the next couple of centuries,

the Indians of both North and South America

would be systematically plundered and enslaved,

both individually by the Spanish Conquistadors

Cortes, Pizarro, De Soto,

the English pirate Sir Francis Drake,

but also corporately by the French Company of One Hundred Associates,

The Dutch East India Trade Company,

The British Hudson Bay Company.

It wasn't just a rape. It was a gang bang.

So when you get a moment, thank an Indian.

For what? Oh, I don't know... Gold. Silver.

Those rubber wellies you like to wear.

Thank an Indian.

The Indians gave us aspirin.

Quinine for malaria.

Got a coke habit? Like to toke on a fatty,

maybe drink a little mescal tequila? Thank an Indian.

Thank an Indian for beans on toast, for cotton,

corn flakes, chocolate,

fish and chips, pasties.

60% of all the foods we consume are Indian in origin.

Maple syrup. Corn syrup.

Anything made from corn.

It was the Pueblo Indians of this very area who discovered that

if you soak corn in lime and ash,

it made an alkaline solution that let the body absorb the nutrients.

Thank an Indian.

Potatoes. You like potatoes?

Course you like potatoes, Britain.

Mashed up, slathered in gravy...

Well, you didn't use to.

Brits thought the potato caused leprosy.

Russians, French, all deathly afraid of that misshapen devil.

Only those loveable starving Irish took a chance on the potato.

The Indians had over 60 varieties of potatoes,

but the Irish took all their potatoes

and put them into one potato basket.

Then when the blight came, they all starved.

A lot of them had to move to America.

One-fifth of the US Cavalry

that fought the various Plains and South-western Indians

for over 50 years was made of transplanted Irish.

So thank an Indian for killing an Indian.

Here on the Navajo land,

the word for thank you is ahe'hee.

You could also apologise for the 500 years of abuse

and humiliation and systematic displacement,

but it probably wouldn't do any good.

Cos there's no word in Navajo for "sorry".

The colonial expansionist movement was relentless in the New World.

Their interactions with natives were at times amicable,

but the over-arching agenda

for those who came to the Americas in ships was to claim the land

and the resources as their own by any means necessary.

The Founding Fathers were looters.

Jesus Christ, fucking looters.

We always say that everything Americans have,

they could've had it anyway, if they'd just asked!

I mean, Jesus Christ, all you had to do,

there's a saying somebody said,

"Why do you obtain by hate? You could obtain by love."

So we said, "Welcome," this and that

and everybody just went apeshit, you know?

So that's the building blocks on it.

White expansion in America continued at a relentless pace

throughout the 19th century.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson instituted

the not-so-subtly named Indian Removal Act,

which more or less declared Indians were an obstruction.

Entire nations, particularly the Cherokee and the Choctaw,

were forcibly removed from their lands in Georgia, Alabama

and Tennessee and resettled

onto arid hardpan reservations in Oklahoma.

And for his efforts, Jackson now graces the 20 dollar US banknote.

E Pluribus Unum. That's the motto that appears on all US currency.

It means "out of many, one". Unity.

The entire thrust of US history has been to preserve the Union.

We fought a Civil War over it. Union won.

Disunion got its ass kicked from Richmond to Vicksburg to Atlanta.

When the war ended, the word became emblematic of progress.

Western UNION Telegraph, The UNION Pacific Railroad.

Naturally, this driving motto, "out of many, one"

was applied to the Indians.

The US government could not quite seem to accept that

Native Americans weren't too keen on this.

Forced unity went against the very grain of true freedom,

something the US had long lost sight of.

America's policy toward Native Americans

is still pretty much the same and that policy is,

"Why can't these people get with the programme?"

Oh, the programme! We never wanted to be Americans.

People come here, they want to be Americans.

We never wanted to be. We have our own thing to this day.

We're sovereign people and we don't want it.

We have a better way of life to this day.

And the other thing with Americans, they love going round the world,

"We're giving these people freedom, we're giving them freedom."

Indian people have always been free.

We couldn't live that way.

They tried to make us.

The government cannot understand the Indian way of life.

They think they could change their language

and their way of life overnight.

But they can't.

They tried to teach them English, and they tried to...

I used to go to school when they washed my mouth out

with soap and water if I spoke Indian.

And they used to whip me for it.

Also, in the Declaration of Independence to this very day,

it says "savage Indians" in it at least three times

and I would say you'd think they'd have the wherewithal

to change it to "savage Native Americans", at least. Shit.

That's another word I never liked,

because we are older than America,

so how can we be native of something we're older than?

The majority of indigenous peoples have creation stories

that place them in a certain location at a certain time.

It's not just like, "Oh, my people moved here."

No, we were, we came out of that mountain right over there.

That was where we emerged, and we're going to be here, you know?

So the tragedy of being forcibly moved

is not just about the suffering they had to endure

during that movement, but actually being displaced from their land.

Heck, yeah.

I mean, it's a part of the human condition

to bond to your location, I feel. You know?

# Jesus told me and I believe it's true

# The red men are in the sunset too

# They stole their land and they won't give it back

# And they sent Geronimo a Cadillac, come on... #

They ought to shoot those darn Redskins

while they've still got the chance.

Yeah. The sooner they get rid of them,

-the safer this country'll be for us Americans.

-You bet your life.

Right now, were we too weak from hunger,

for our men forget ways of war.

Apache never forget ways of war.

Hollywood has always been less concerned about what an Indian is

than who an Indian is.

They assumed that viewers wouldn't be able to identify

the individual aspects of any Indian tribe

because they were lazy.

So they just created this Frankenstein amalgam

of what they imagined an Indian to be.

They took Sioux war bonnets and stuck them on to Navajo warriors

and then put them in Texas.

They took the Indians' ceremonial body markings,

usually used to indicate a social or marital status,

and just called it "war paint".

They stuck tipis in the desert.

These characters generally communicated by whooping,

or a series of protracted grunts,

or some kind of anthropomorphic gibberish.

For instance, in Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet,

a film about the US Cavalry confronting the Chiricahua Apache,

Walsh employed Navajo actors to play Apaches.

He told them just to make up their own dialogue.

So, only if you were fluent in Dine Navajo,

which Walsh clearly wasn't, would you even be able to understand

what the Navajo were really saying.

HE SPEAKS NAVAJO

He's saying,

"You're going to be a snake crawling through your own shit."

HE SPEAKS NAVAJO

"Obviously you can't do anything right now,

"because you're going to be a snake crawling through your own shit."

Seriously?

Yeah, seriously.

Cos I don't know whether to believe you or not

cos you're wearing a headdress.

That's irony, man.

Indians can't do humour, but we sure as hell can do irony.

'OK, Indians do irony, but they don't do humour.

'Photographer Edward Curtis certainly knew how to capture

'the ironic American Indian. He took thousands of photographs,

'every one as stoic and resolute as a postage stamp.

'So we need to ask the question...'

Why don't the Indians have a sense of humour?

In the treaty of 1868 with the government,

we signed it away.

We were tricked. We didn't know.

Indians, we got to keep our dignity.

Humour? It's not dignified.

Chris Ayres' 1998 Smoke Signals,

based on a Sherman Alexie short story,

is one of the most highly-regarded indigenous films ever made.

And probably the funniest.

First of all, quit grinning like an idiot.

Indians ain't supposed to smile like that. Get stoic.

'Its humour is sly. It comes from the characters' self-awareness

'that the world's perception of Indians generally vacillates

'between sympathetic and romantic.'

You got to look mean or people won't respect you.

White people will run all over you if you don't look mean.

You got to look like a warrior!

You got to look like you just came back from killing a buffalo!

But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen.

What?!

You want to look like you just came back from catching a fish?

This ain't Dances With Salmon, you know!

Thomas, you got to look like a warrior.

One of the great things about being an Indian is that if you've seen one

in a film, you're going to see scores,

and that means jobs, jobs, jobs.

The sight of a band of fully costumed warriors,

astride their magnificent steeds, thundering into the valley

was the very cinematic essence of the term "spectacular".

And nobody knew this better than Thomas Ince.

Hollywood's first real mogul,

Ince built a massive studio in the Santa Monica mountains,

and he oversaw dozens of productions at once,

crediting himself with directing every one.

His most popular movies were cowboy and Indian two-reelers,

and to keep up with demand for extras,

Ince struck a deal with the federal government

to import Oglala Sioux

from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

This was 1913. Only 23 years earlier,

this same government had massacred the Sioux

near Pine Ridge Reservation.

To the many categories of Sioux that already existed -

Oglala, Miniconjou, Hunkpapa -

was added a new tribe, the Inceville Hollywood Sioux.

They settled into tipi villages

perched right outside Ince's studio overlooking the Pacific,

and when they weren't working,

they just kind of wandered around Los Angeles.

According to Ince, they developed an affinity

for brightly-coloured props.

He kept having to go into their tipi camps

to retrieve bits of his set.

So many Indians were being used in the early reign of Westerns

that studio owners struggled to fill the cast.

Consequently, there was an endless parade of darkly complected Syrians,

dusky Lebanese, effulgent Jews,

tawny Mexicans, swarthy Italian Americans,

adumbral Filipinos...

I don't even know what that word means.

Irradiated lifeguards, burnished surfers

and other guys with sable-tinted skin

skirting the edges of skin cancer passed themselves off as Indians.

One of the most outspoken critics of this practice

was none other than Jim Thorpe,

often cited as one of America's greatest athletes.

'An Oklahoma Indian lad whose untamed spirit

'gave wings to his feet and carried him to immortality.

'Here in the mighty cavalcade of sport

'are all the giants who faced this champion among champions.'

Thorpe was an Oklahoman from the Sac and Fox reservation

who astounded the sporting world by winning gold medals

in both the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics.

He would go on to play professional baseball and football,

and after his retirement, he began a new career as an actor,

appearing in supporting roles that required a Native character.

In the early 1930s, upon discovering

that roughly 40% of Hollywood's so-called "Indian" actors

weren't really Indian, Thorpe emerged as the leading activist

against the practice of hiring non-Indians to portray Indians.

He formed his own company of true Native American actors

and hired them out to studios,

thus guaranteeing the integrity of their bloodlines.

'Jim Thorpe, all-American, the man of bronze who became...'

Thorpe's life, both its ups and downs,

was commemorated to film in 1951 in Jim Thorpe - All-American.

The part of Jim Thorpe, athlete, actor and activist

who stood up for native American authenticity...

was played by Burt Lancaster.

'It's Burt Lancaster as Jim Thorpe, the nation's all-American pride.'

In 1951, you couldn't call up the bank

to complain about identity theft.

The annals of popular film are studded with white faces

tanning up to play Indian parts.

Burt Lancaster couldn't stop playing Indians.

Tony Curtis starred in The Outsider.

-How many scalps in your pocket?

-I'm a Pima Indian, sir. We don't do that, sir.

Natalie Wood in The Searchers,

Burt Reynolds as Navajo Joe,

Charles Bronson in Chato's Land,

Elvis Presley in Flaming Star,

Lee Van Cleef as Captain Apache,

and this guy.

But never is the Indian's character plumbed for any degree

of shading or nuance or background.

They're just superficial constructs, malleable metaphors,

big chunks of Play-Doh to be moulded

into whatever is convenient to the story.

If we want to show a tragic Indian, we make them a drunkard.

Whaddya need, a sideshow?

And when we want to show a savage Indian

we just let John Wayne lead us to them.

They outnumber us four to one. Do we talk or fight?

GUNSHOT

This is the invented Indian. Written cinematically.

Based on adventure yarns, diluted stories of early contact,

filtered through the sunstroke delirium

of some pudgy guy sitting at a holiday beach resort,

pulped in the dime novels of Ned Buntline

and other cardboard fantasists,

and then re-invented in travelling Wild West shows,

shifted, distorted, polarised for entertainment purposes.

And always at the margins. Why?

Because they're Indians.

Beautiful ladies, what do you say? Bring 'em inside.

Are you guys all Navajo?

Yeah. You?

I'm Navajo and Dakota.

Oh, Dakota. You do sundance?

-Yeah.

-Right on. Pierced?

Yeah.

As we've already established, Indians did not, as a rule,

hang underneath their horses or jump from one to another

Stagecoach-style.

The only time this does happen is

when they're about to be trampled at the rodeo.

You guys riders? You riding tonight? What's the top prize?

-Almost 200.

-200?

-2,000.

-Really?

2,000 first?

Good luck, man. Take care of yourself.

But in a backhanded way, Hollywood does give credit to the Indians

when it comes to horsemanship.

In 1680, the Pueblo Indians revolted against the Spanish

and drove them off their land and back to Old Mexico.

The Spanish were forced to leave their horses behind.

So the Pueblo Indians began to breed the horses and then trade them

to other tribes, particularly the Kiowa and the Comanche.

The confluence of horse and buffalo

represents one of the most profound changes in the Indians' history.

Being mounted allowed Indians to hunt buffalo more adeptly.

And it was buffalo that provided food,

shelter in the form of tipi hides,

winter protection in the form of hides and footwear.

The Plains Indians would have become extinct if it wasn't for buffalo

and the horse allowed them to travel vast distances, chasing the buffalo.

It gave them a tremendous advantage over tribes

who still travelled on foot.

But the buffalo are a protected species

and Indians don't roam the range on horseback any more.

Nowadays their mode of transport

is more likely to be a rusted-out Dodge.

How, folks.

This old cowboy's on the warpath with heap big savings.

All our choicest stock.

Come on down off the res or the ranch and check out your pony today.

Jonathan Wacks' Pow Wow Highway, made in 1989,

was considered a landmark film because it was one of the first

films made by an Indian director with an all-Indian cast.

And it dealt with contemporary Indian issues.

I want to buy one of your fine ponies.

Take a look around.

One of its most sustaining images is that staple of modern Indian life,

the res car.

Whose car is this?

This is Protector, the war pony.

Oh.

ENGINE STRUGGLES TO START

Hang on.

This is how white man learns.

HE CHUCKLES

OK, do it.

ENGINE STARTS

White man got it started.

THEY LAUGH

White man got it started. Great job.

There goes our war pony.

So this is a res car?

Sounds like it, it is.

Love this car, man, draws a lot of attention round here.

Gets the girls too.

It's taken me long ways, you know, different reservations,

different women.

That's the old president's house there, you know.

The Navajo nation.

Beautiful country.

God's country.

I'm feeling the spirit right now.

-Feeling every bump.

-Mostly in my ass.

Ahh. That's good.

About half of the native American population live on reservations

and these areas of land total 55.7 million acres -

that's just over 2% of the land area of the United States.

You can see why American Indians are a little pissed off.

There's no stop signs, these roads are all corroded,

corrupted, we're an impoverished nation,

almost like a third-world country, but we do all right.

Still, it's better than Sunderland.

Like any impoverished area, Indian reservations are stricken with

chronic unemployment, depression,

ennui, health and nutrition problems and domestic abuse.

Five of the top ten causes of death among Native Americans

are related to the abuse of alcohol.

On most reservations it's illegal to buy or consume it.

We're running on fumes - we need to get some gas.

White man, go do your work. Slave amongst us warriors here.

So what's this, er, white guy doing down here?

Is he trying to reinvent the Indians?

He's doing it on behalf of er, of er, British people I guess.

-Ah, those people?

-Yeah.

-Jeez!

You know, they drink tea.

Oh, yeah. They like their tea.

-"Top of the morning to you" kind of people, you know.

-Oh, yeah.

ENGINE SPUTTERS AND STOPS

Uh-oh.

-Trouble, trouble.

-Come on, war pony.

-Come on, baby.

-Come on, war pony.

-Is there some chant that works here?

-Throw your flashers on.

When a res car can no longer function as a res car,

it usually becomes something else, quite often a dog house.

After that, a storage shed.

Thus the res car is the most environmentally efficient

vehicle on the planet.

It preceded the Prius by several decades.

But its initial breakdown often leaves the Indian on foot

which, given his historical perspective,

isn't really all that unusual.

Navajo are used to walking.

There was a time they had to walk much, much further.

But before we tell that story it's probably a good idea

to tell you a few things about the Navajo.

They are first and foremost, artisans.

When the Pueblo Indians ran the Spanish off back to Mexico,

the Spanish were forced to leave their horses and sheep behind.

Well, the Navajo had no use for horses - there were no buffalo -

but sheep? Now you're talking! Wool, blankets, rugs, all tradable items.

Quite often the man they traded with was Kit Carson.

Kit Carson was a trapper, scout, Indian agent,

soldier and authentic legend of the West.

Few trappers became more integrated into the Indian world

than Kit Carson.

He travelled and lived extensively among them.

His first two wives were Arapahoe and Cheyenne women

and the Indians called him Rope Thrower.

But Carson would become one of those, you know, compromised heroes.

In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War,

Kit Carson was conscripted by the Union Army.

What happened after that

is not generally viewed as heroic amongst Indians.

Kit Carson was recruited to come into Navajo Country

and subdue the Navajos once and for all

on what he called the Scorched Earth Campaign.

The Navajo grew peaches, right down in that canyon.

They had 5,000 peach trees. Only the Navajo ate peaches.

No other Indians.

So Carson divided his troops into two regiments

and entered from each end of the canyon.

The idea was to round up Navajo.

But the Navajo hid up above and just threw rocks down at his troops,

also curses.

Carson did a lot of things to the Indians.

He gave them blankets riddled with smallpox.

He made them walk 300 miles to live on an unarable piece of land

outside Bosque Redondo reservation. He let them starve along the way.

But for Christ's sake, how can you burn someone's peaches?

Carson kept trying to resign but the Army wouldn't let him.

His troops devastated the Navajo land and its people.

Those that survived the onslaught eventually surrendered

and in January 1864,

6,000 Navajo Indian were ordered to take the Long Walk.

That is a point in time that is pivotal

or momentous to Navajo people.

Our ancestors were herded like animals.

Everybody had to walk

because there were no wagons for anybody to ride.

If you were a child, if you were elderly,

people who slowed the group down were shot on sight and left behind.

People were not allowed to slow down, stop and bury them.

A lot of babies died because under stress the mothers could not...

Their bodies couldn't make milk.

By the time they had arrived 18 days later at Bosque Redondo,

200 of them had perished.

Carson is buried in a cemetery outside Taos, New Mexico.

Every night, Indians make a slightly unsteady procession

to his gravesite to urinate on it.

Yep. Indians are used to walking.

What?

Really, Rich? Indians are used to walking?

Well, I didn't say they enjoy it, did I?

I just said they're used to walking.

You know something amazing, being a part of this documentary

I'm actually learning a lot about Indians I already didn't know.

You did a good job on Google there, Rich.

All right. Convey to me the essence of the nomadic Indian.

Well, see, there you go right there, it's a generalisation.

Not all Indians were nomadic.

You can't make generalisations about Indians. That's dangerous water.

You start with generalisations, you start making stories up,

and that hurts us as a people.

Do you know where we are, Rich?

Goodwater Indian Site - that's what the sign said.

There was a massacre, Rich.

In 1866, the three great nations of the Inuit,

Lakota and the Seminole met at this very point to settle a blood feud

that had lasted for 100 years.

To make a blood pact.

We were going to unite the nations on this great continent.

General Tex Amico heard of it and in the middle of the night

he circled the village and without warning

released this 35-foot raptor upon the village...

..attacking the women and children.

Ate 'em.

He didn't ate 'em - raptors don't eat meat.

He just kind of licked 'em with his tongue

and used its mandibles to inflict damage.

It was disgusting. Point is, Rich, not everything's a joke.

These aren't called mandibles.

# Cos we'll go driving away from home

# 30 miles or more

# And we'll go moving away from home

# Without a care... #

This is Pine Ridge, Shannon County, South Dakota.

When news shows want to show you the ground zero

of Native American grievances, they always come to Pine Ridge.

When they want to show the centre of Native American activities,

they come to Pine Ridge, the home of the American Indian Movement.

Three out of ten people here have jobs.

Anyone here have a job?

-No.

-Me.

OK, one out of ten people here have jobs -

most of them are with the Bureau Of Indian Affairs

or the Indian Health Services, who are funded by Washington DC.

Or they work for the Oglala Tribe, which gets its money

and subsidies and treaty payouts from Washington, DC.

For the record, the richest town in America

is Leesburg, Loudon County, Virginia.

Most of the people there work for agencies

and sub-contractors to the federal Government.

They get their money from Washington DC.

So answer me this - why doesn't Pine Ridge look like Leesburg?

-Because Pine Ridge is different...

-I found one of those green things.

It's as good an answer as anything.

Here on the Oglala reservation, I've already learned a lot of useful tips

that you can apply to your own life.

If a dog runs after you, yell "wahampi!"

That means "soup". The dog knows that

if he doesn't back off, he's going to become soup.

Before moving your house on to a new set of blocks,

cover the bricks in dishwashing liquid,

then the house will slide on slicker than deer guts on a doorknob.

Ashes can remove blood from any wooden floor.

Warm a drum hide head with a blow-dryer before you play it

and it will sound ten times better.

A knock on the door and no-one's there?

Someone you love is going to die soon.

Nebraska, the good life.

It's only 40 yards from the Nebraska state line

back to the Pine Ridge Reservation,

but when you walk back to South Dakota,

the temperature's the same but the life expectancy drops by 12 years.

The town of Whiteclay, Nebraska, population 12,

is a vortex sucking the life out of the Sioux people.

The four liquor stores here sell 4.5 million cans of beer a year.

From sun up to closing time,

the town is clustered with small dark clouds

of bleary-eyed, paralytic, zombified drunken Indians,

each one waiting for the next beer to appear like a minor miracle.

Now, if you're British you're probably looking at this thinking,

"Hey, when did this show become a holiday travelogue?"

But before you book your ticket to Whiteclay, Nebraska,

bear this statistic in mind -

the biggest killer of people on the Pine Ridge Reservation

isn't cancer, heart disease or diabetes, it's car crashes.

Pine Ridge doesn't have a problem with just drink-driving.

Pine Ridge has a problem with drink-walking.

Do you find the town of Whiteclay over here to be a nemesis

to keeping safety and sanity in the reservation?

It's creating a lot of pain and hardships here.

Last year for... Well, actually,

for the last part of six, seven years or so,

we've been on the highest as far as car crashes

in the nation for fatalities.

Majority were the result of alcohol.

Do those signs indicate a fatality?

Correct.

Even if you see a cross, because a lot of them

don't have the X-marks-the-spot sign

so a lot of them will actually have a cross

or you'll see some flowers or candles in the road ditch

and that simulates the same thing, that there was a fatality there.

In the last year, a concentrated police and community campaign

to enforce seat-belt safety and child restraint devices

has lowered the Oglala fatality rate considerably.

Last year we had 47 fatality car crashes. This year we had six,

so we're not at the top any more.

# Call him drunken Ira Hayes

# He won't answer any more... #

The existence of a place like Whiteclay, Nebraska

underscores the widely-held belief

that Indians are tragically susceptible to alcohol.

There's never been a shred of scientific evidence to prove this.

Whisky.

The Hollywood image of the Indian as a hapless victim of alcohol

without ever showing the underlying conditions,

such as poverty, depression and unemployment,

only proves one thing - that Indians are susceptible to stereotyping.

Perhaps the main reason

the American Indian has been so historically taken out of context is

because historically they've never had a lot of text to begin with.

Traditionally, the history of the Indian has been

passed down orally from generation to generation.

In traditional form, storytellers were taught from the very beginning

of their instruction that you need to remember every word by its word,

you can't change the facts, because there are these critical moments

in our history that we all as people recognise

this impacted our people to such a great degree

that we need to remember this.

You don't change the oral history

because that's how we learn, that's how we remember.

Astoundingly, it wasn't until well into the 20th century

that anyone came up with a scholarly idea

of documenting the Indians' history by actually going to the source.

That source was named Black Elk.

In 1930, an American poet and writer from Nebraska named John Neihardt

spent 18 months interviewing the Oglala Sioux spiritual leader.

Neihardt published a book and called it Black Elk Speaks.

Instead of a short interview,

Black Elk gave Neihardt a complete narrative of his own life

and that of his people, the Oglala Lakota.

It was a story of burned-out tipis, slaughtered buffalo

and slain relatives.

It also includes Black Elk's personal description

of the events of Wounded Knee.

While Neihardt was living with and documenting Black Elk's life,

a two-year drought had taken over South Dakota,

so Black Elk took Neihardt to the top of Harney Peak,

the highest mountain in South Dakota.

In a feeble, faltering voice he uttered a Lakotan prayer

and suddenly the skies opened up.

This prayer appears word for word in Niehardt's book.

This life-giving essence appears to be both

the perfect ending to a book and to an old man's life.

The only thing was, Neihardt hadn't brought his interpreter along

so he couldn't possibly have known what Black Elk really said.

Also, Black Elk wasn't as feeble as he was letting on -

he lived another 17 years.

Roughly 40 years later, Black Elk Speaks would become

a bestseller, the official hippie bible,

not for its historical content, but for its environmental aesthetic.

# And the seasons, they go round and round

# And the painted ponies go up and down

# We're captive on the carousel of time... #

It was an aesthetic that hippies, folksingers

and mystical magpies could easily distil,

slather in patchouli oil and put a few chords underneath.

# Round and round and round in the circle game. #

Religion is not a concept that Indians use

because Indians don't use the word "religion".

If they do, it's for our appeasement.

They don't run up to each other and say,

"Hey, what religion are you?"

Because religion implies that things are always going to end badly -

holy wars, crucifixion, annihilation.

Indians believe in spirits and spirituality.

Spirituality consists of two things, nature and creation.

This circular logic is broken down into quadripartite divisions.

Sun. Moon. Sky. Stars.

Red. Green. Blue. Yellow.

Four seasons. Four Winds. Four directions.

These are things that Dallas Goldtooth has told me.

That's right, that big galoot,

that guy who looks like a waterlogged version of David Walliams,

has actually taught me a few things.

There's no manual there to explain what spirituality means

for Native people because there's hundreds and hundreds

of different viewpoints on the world

and to try to accumulate that all into one definition is really hard.

Me, I'm a Dakota man and our word for the Creator,

the essence, the energy that created all things, people say Wakontaka.

That simply means, "the great sacred, the great mystery,

"this unknown power that is out there," nothing beyond that.

There's no research being done in Lakota colleges, Dakota colleges,

trying to figure out what is this unknown being. What is it?

It just is.

It's this unknown power that has created everything around us.

It's all one, who we are, our essence.

Don't have any separation of the culture or the religion.

We have the sun, the wind, Mother Earth.

We pray and use different plants and different herbs to pray with.

And the wind takes our prayers.

These are some of our beliefs. We don't have cathedrals.

Our cathedrals are the great south west

or the Black Hills where the Lakota, the trees and the waters...

Black Elk lived in a lot of different places

in the Dakota territory, including this cabin.

At the age of 16 he was designated a healer and a medicine man.

Five years later he would embark on a totally new experience.

In November of 1886, Black Elk the medicine man

joined 133 other Lakota and boarded a train from Rushville, Nebraska

to Showbiz Land.

Black Elk became a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

Each Lakota was paid 25 a week, once they'd agreed to be baptized.

It's probably safe to say that none of the Indians who appeared

in The Wild West Show, which at times included Sitting Bull,

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and Geronimo,

were actually driven by an acting bug.

Sitting Bull was forced to perform in the Wild West Show

because he was a prisoner of the United States -

it was a chance to get off the reservation.

The modern day equivalent would be if a Guantanamo detainee

suddenly had to appear on X Factor.

The Wild West Show performed at Madison Square Garden

in New York City for four months, to monster reviews,

and on March 31st, 1887, the entire Lakota entourage

set sail for England.

On the transatlantic voyage, Black Elk was by turns fearful and amazed.

He actually thought that the boat was going to

sail off the edge of the world because, you know,

he was 21 - he wasn't presumably thinking circuitously yet.

When the boat hit a heavy storm

and the crew had to pass out lifejackets,

the Lakota started chanting their own death song.

What's a death song?

Huh?

I don't know, everyone has their own.

Do you have one?

Yeah.

HE WAILS Creator!

I don't want to die! I don't want to die!

HE SOBS

On May 11th, 1887, Black Elk was one of five Lakota

included in Buffalo Bill's command performance for Queen Victoria.

The train left London for Birmingham and then Salford,

but Black Elk didn't make it because he and three friends got lost

wandering around London and were actually arrested by police

as suspects in a murder

that was eventually attributed to Jack the Ripper.

So then Black Elk joined The Mexican Joe Shelley show,

which was a knock-off of the Buffalo Bill Show but paid twice as much.

Then he headed for Europe, all the while forming

a clearer understanding of white Christianity and its practice.

One day, at a breakfast table in France,

he suddenly fell off his chair, unconscious.

A doctor showed up and pronounced him dead. A casket was ordered.

But Black Elk was actually having a dream vision and in that dream,

he was back home,

circling high above his mother's perfectly round tipi.

He saw all his relatives mourning his death.

Then he woke up, announced he was fine

and a week later, boarded a ship back to America.

Black Elk couldn't quite understand the significance of the dream.

Three years later, in the aftermath of Wounded Knee,

it would all make sense.

It wasn't Black Elk's death the Lakota people were mourning.

It was their own.

Tensions had reached a plateau between the Lakota

and the US Government.

More of their land was being signed away

and the tribes were being systematically rounded up

and moved to camps.

It was a time of suffering and degradation

and the Lakota were looking for something, anything to believe in.

The attempts to baptize and indoctrinate them into Christianity

had crystallised into a mutant strain of evangelism

called the Ghost Dance movement.

'Now they resorted to a new faith

'and a dance was part of that faith. If they danced with fervour,

'they renounced war and loved all people,

'the buffalo would return, the white man would be swept away

'and the dead rise.

'It became known as the religion of the Ghost Dance.'

Convinced the Ghost Dance was a prelude to all-out war,

the Army decided to move in and shut the ritual down.

Instead of discouraging the practice,

the ban actually expanded it.

Fearful of a total uprising, federal troops were

brought into Pine Ridge to round up the Ghost Dancers.

500 Lakota were arrested.

The cavalry - in fact, the entire Northern Plains Army -

was already in a fairly vindictive state.

Only two weeks earlier over on the Standing Rock reservation

they'd killed Sitting Bull, the former star attraction

of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Travelling Show.

Now, many other Lakota were fearful of further reprisals.

On December 23rd, 1890, a group of 300 Hunkpapa and Miniconjou Lakota,

led by the Miniconjou leader Big Foot,

left their Cheyenne River reservation to join up with

Chief Red Cloud's Pine Ridge reservation Indians.

They mistakenly thought they'd be safer.

This only made the cavalry more nervous

and orders were quickly made to disarm the Sioux.

They were intercepted by the 7th Cavalry on December 28th

at the site of Wounded Knee Creek, a few miles from Pine Ridge.

Leonard Little Finger is a teacher

from the town of Oglala, South Dakota.

His grandfather survived the massacre.

Chief Big Foot and his family were going to be loaded up onto boxcars

and taken to Florida.

The rationale of the military at that time was

if they took the leaders out

then the people would quietly enter the reservations

and be there for the rest of time, so to speak.

In the morning, all were gathered together

and my grandfather was with the group

and although he was 14 years old at the time,

he still would be considered as a warrior.

He was told by an interpreter that they wanted to demonstrate

what they would do in the event that

some of them broke away from the group and tried to escape.

All of the soldiers were lined up opposite

and he kept his eye on the one that was immediately facing him.

He noticed that as they pulled the bolt of the rifle backward,

a shell went into the chamber and he locked it,

and at that instant he knew that they were going to shoot him

and so he took a running jump at that soldier and he said,

"I hit him as hard as I could and I knocked him down."

And point blank, the shooting started.

They were literally slaughtering all these people,

mostly women and children.

Leonard Little Finger's grandfather was shot twice

but managed to escape.

Many didn't live to pass their stories down.

150 Lakota men, women and children were dead,

amongst them Spotted Elk. Army casualties numbered 25.

Eyewitnesses said that the Army officers lost control of their men

as they randomly shot women and children

who were running for cover.

He said, "My thought was, these are cowards.

"They're not soldiers, they're cowards."

The Massacre at Wounded Knee, many of whose victims

are buried in this mass grave,

marks the end of 50 years of hostility

between the cavalry and the Plains Indians.

And the Plains Indians were and still are

vastly relegated to reservations.

In 1890, the unofficial American policy of containment

and manifest destiny of Indians turned to subsidising them -

subsidised housing, subsidised rations, subsidised education.

From here on in, it was cheaper to feed an Indian than to fight 'em.

In February 1973, Wounded Knee would regain historical prominence

when 200 Oglala Sioux, followers of the American Indian Movement,

seized the area and took up arms against Government policy.

The Wounded Knee massacre site was cordoned off

by Tribal Police and then the FBI.

The stand off between activists and Government officers

lasted 71 days.

The term Wounded Knee - what does it mean to people,

to Indians in particular?

This place represents in its full embodiment, you know,

the struggle of native people, you know, at two different time frames.

In both cases, native people were the terrorist threat to America

at this location.

We were the terrorists that needed to be rubbed out.

That we threatened the very ideals of America, at this location.

And in one instance...it was death

and the other instance it was a sort of triumph,

that feeling that we finally took control of something.

The phrase "bury my heart at Wounded Knee"

comes from a Stephen Vincent Benet poem about American place names.

In 1970, the author and historian Dee Brown

used it as the title for his book.

It became a phenomenal bestseller

and a definitive text on Native American history.

Americans went from knowing nothing about Indians

to thinking they knew everything about Indians.

You could read it and swallow a giant guilt pill.

With this newfound acknowledgement of the Indians' existence,

it was only a matter of time

until it would morph into wholesale commercialism,

because America's way of apologising to people they've screwed over

is to stick 'em on a T-shirt or a package.

Madison Avenue learned along time ago that there was money to be made

in exploiting Native American spirituality - after all,

Indians were the first Green Party, weren't they?

Thus, if Indians were to make, I don't know, cigarettes,

well, they'd have to be more spiritual than regular cigarettes,

wouldn't they?

Because smoke was sacred to Indians. It always has been.

It's used as a medium to send prayers to the Creator.

So the makers of Natural American Spirit cigarettes

want you to believe that not only are you filling your lungs

with chemicals and nicotine,

you're actually sending great big billows of prayer to the sky.

The only thing is, these cigarettes aren't remotely Indian.

They're just another RJ Reynolds, British American Tobacco product.

You know, they're cigarettes with a fucking Indian on the front.

The Indian became a shibboleth, a brand, a flavour,

a mascot, a fashion.

Everyone under 30 suddenly discovered

they had a little Cherokee or Cheyenne in them.

Usually on their great-grandmother's side.

Because suddenly Indians were cool.

It pisses me off, man.

It gets up to the very core of a lot of Indian people's anger,

this idea that our culture, our stories, our history, is up for sale.

And I think that's where the societies butt heads all the time.

You know, it's just making a mockery of who we are as a people.

When you're making fun of a people through characters and...

Like professional sports - you know, you have football teams,

they call themselves The Washington Redskins, Kansas City Chiefs,

bucktooth characters of Indian like Cleveland Indians.

That's degrading and humiliating to be doing that to a people,

and you don't see them doing that,

making fun of African Americans or doing that to Hispanics.

Every summer in South Dakota, I think there's like 80 Sundances.

It's also the same time that thousands of Europeans

flock to western South Dakota.

'In the past, the Sundancers fasted and danced continuously

'for several days and nights.

'The Sundance was one of the most important tribal ceremonies

'of the Plains Indians.'

They come in droves to experience this. They come just all prepared,

you know, they have frickin' buffalo robes

and they smell like frickin' sandalwood and they don't shower.

It's all a means of them trying to access in their mind,

some connection, some better connection to,

I don't know, the druids? I don't know what culture they have.

But they're frickin' cultural raccoons. Cultural vampires.

We got people coming in from - I don't want to offend you guys -

but from Europe coming here, singing our songs.

Really?

And sometimes know those songs better than our own people. Why?

Because they want to feel whole, they want to be part,

I guess, of this universe, of Mother Earth.

A lot of them pay for Sundance,

but if they do that, that doesn't mean anything.

There's no spiritual there, spirituality there -

they're just dancing for nothing.

'Today, the Sundance is fully understood

'only by the older members of the tribe.'

Hi, wannabes.

Are you tired of being left out in the cold with no native heritage?

Unaware of your Indian roots, or perhaps you have no Indian roots?

Feel uncomfortable at pow-wows?

Well, soon you'll be out there

singing and dancing with the rest of us, thanks to Generokee.

This is a dreamcatcher.

Do you know who has one of these tattooed onto her ribcage?

Miley Cyrus.

-That's right - that Disneyfied

-BLEEP

has taken an Indian symbol and put it onto her body.

It makes a perfect target for when you want to punch her.

But tourists love to snap these things up,

thinking that by buying some made-in-China spider web

they'll be connected to the spiritual world.

Well, they're not.

The dreamcatcher was originally used by Ojibwe Indians -

they hung it above their children's bed to keep away nightmares.

That's it. It's a charm.

So when some crystal-waving New Age poodle

hangs one of these from their rear-view mirror,

all it really indicates

is that they tend to fall asleep at the wheel a lot.

"That's very interesting," you're thinking, "Rich,

-"but did you really just call Miley Cyrus a Disneyfied

-BLEEP?"

Yes, I did. What you gonna do about it, Miley?

Oh, run tell your dad, that one-hit wonder, mulleted hillbilly?

Come on down here, Billy Ray, come on.

I'll give you an achy breaky jaw.

Generokee - now, you may not be able to prove it

but you'll know it in your heart.

Caution - side effects may include suicide, poverty, disease

and general loss of land.

It's one thing to be almost comically unaware

of why you are appropriating someone's culture.

But to take the heart and soul of a people's spiritualism

and to turn it into a white man's artefact is another thing entirely.

In 1970, a drunken, irascible Irishman named Richard Harris

reduced the Lakota Sundance ritual

to ham-fisted auto-erotica by appearing in A Man Called Horse.

Probably no film has pissed Indians off more.

Harris plays a British fop named John Morgan, who is bird hunting

in the Dakota territory when he's kidnapped viciously by Sioux.

Richard Harris is a man called Horse.

For most of the movie,

Morgan is tortured and humiliated by the Sioux,

spends a lot of time showing off his torso

and delicately obscuring his junk

with the help of various dingles, dongles and editing tricks.

The film was promoted as "the most authentic description

"of North American Indian life ever filmed".

If your idea of authentic is a Brit screaming obscenities like he's

just been served an under-cooked roast in a shit restaurant.

Christ, I've had enough, you bunch of bloody bastards.

I am not a horse. I am not an animal.

A Man Called Horse's most memorable scene is when he is strung up

and suspended by his chest to prove his macho courage.

Thus the filmmakers turn the Sundance Ceremony,

the most sacred of Indian religious rites,

undertaken to prove a man's humility to the spirits

by mortifying his flesh, and turn it into torture porn.

SCREAMING

Now, having been accepted by the Lakota, in no time he proves

that he's pretty much better than them at everything they do.

In the end, the film manages to perpetuate the idea

of Euro-Caucasian superiority.

The movie's scenes are exquisitely confounding to most Indians,

particularly this one,

where Morgan appears to be shooting Ozzy Osbourne.

So while Richard Harris was being hung by his man boobs

apparently for no other reason than to prove his man-boobliness,

in the real world something far more significant was taking place.

Namely, the Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island in California.

Suddenly the Indian issue was at the forefront.

What was the Indian issue?

Well, that depends on which viewpoint you take.

The white, benign viewpoint was that current Indian rights

needed to be clarified.

But the Native American viewpoint was not only that existing rights

needed to be defended, but that past rights needed to be reclaimed.

On November 20th 1969, at the height of anti-war activism

and dissidence in the US,

a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island

outside San Francisco

to stake a claim to land that was previously theirs.

Well, we're trying to hang on to our culture,

to our religion, to be Indians.

The occupation of Alcatraz preceded the stand off at Wounded Knee

by over three years.

Alcatraz was the beginning of the American Indian Movement or AIM.

AIM is both an ideal and an organisation,

whose existence to this very day

is still a contentious issue to the US Government.

I hitch-hiked out there when I was a student.

It took me two days but I wanted to see what that was all about.

That was my start in the Indian Rights Movement.

We were looking for events that would allow us

to participate in them and give voice.

We have to do our part to educate white society

that we have these feelings, we're upset with the way...

The conditions and the treatment of our people.

The occupation lasted until 1971

and was forcibly ended by the US Government.

But it was seen as a victory by those taking part

because it brought Indian issues to national attention.

Belatedly, of course, Hollywood woke up and took notice.

The cinematic Indian and the real Indian had reached a confluence.

Soldier Blue uses the Indian as a proxy for the massacres

at My Lai in Vietnam.

It shows a graphic annihilation of the Cheyenne

at Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864.

In fact, the brutal scene is what most people remember about the film,

and because it is used metaphorically it manages once again

to distort the Native American's existence.

-Why? Why? Why?!

-Shut up! I'll shoot you!

Why?!

Rubbing people's faces in bloodshed wasn't really going to do that much

for a nation that was used to watching the real thing on television every night.

The modern Indians' real appeal was discovered by youth.

Rebellious youth. Disaffected youth. Pay attention to kids.

They're not looking for victims.

They're looking for heroes, and in 1971 they found one.

When Jean and the kids at the school

tell me that I'm supposed to control my violent temper,

and be passive and non-violent like they are, I try.

I really try.

Though when I see this girl...