Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 247

October 12, 2017

October 12, 2017: Columbus Day Alternatives: Zitkala-Ša



[As I’ve detailed at length here and elsewhere, to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]On the complex, challenging, and vital cross-cultural perspective of one of America’s most unique women and voices.In one of my earliest blog posts (and many since then), I wrote about journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (Barnett), calling her “A Voice from the Nadir.” I wanted that title to sum up two seemingly distinct and even opposed yet in fact interconnected and mutually dependent ideas, not only about Wells but about inspiring Americans more generally: that from the darkest moments in our histories (such as was the turn of the 20th century “nadir” for African Americans) often emerge the brightest and most inspiring lights. “Yet the shadows bear the promise/Of a brighter coming day,” wrote Frances Ellen Watkins Harper during this same era; and as I argued in that Black History Month post on Harper, I believe—and argued at length in my most recent book—those lines means precisely that it is in the shadows that we must find the light, to the darkest histories that we must turn in search of hard-won hope.While many historical periods could vie for the title of nadir when it comes to Native Americans, I think the 19th century’s last few decades likewise have a very strong case: the “Indian Wars” were culminating with the final and complete defeat of all remaining independent nations; the removal and reservation systems were concurrently enveloping every nation more and more fully (with even the well-intentioned  Dawes Act playing into those trends); and, perhaps most egregiously, the system of “Indian boarding schools” was taking young Native Americans away from their communities and trying to force cultural assimilation and the loss of heritage on them. It was in direct response to and representation of those trends, and particularly the destructive boarding school experience, that Sioux author Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) emerged onto the national literary scene, with autobiographical pieces such as “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” and “School Days of an Indian Girl” (both published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900); since most of us American Studiers still encounter Šathrough those works in anthologies (as I did), it’s easy to define her through them, and thus to see her as a complex and talented chronicler of this nadir period for her community and culture.Yet the individual perspective that comes through in those pieces, and even more in 1902’s “Why I Am a Pagan” (also published in the Atlantic), is that of someone who will not be defined, and certainly not limited, by any single experience or category. And indeed Ša spent the next few decades extending her career and activism in a variety of compelling and significant ways: compiling, editing, and publishing Old Indian Legends (1901), a collection of Native folktales and stories; working with composer William Hanson to write and stage The Sun Dance Opera (1913), one of the most unique and pioneering works in American cultural history; and founding (in 1926) and serving as the first president of the National Council of American Indians, an influential political and social organization that lobbied on behalf of Native American rights and citizenship throughout the 20th century. In these and many other efforts, Ša illustrated just how fully she had transcended the depths of the nadir, and exemplified the potential for all cultures and communities—and, most importantly, for America itself—to similarly find hope for a stronger future: in our histories, in our cultures, and in our most inspiring identities.Final Cross-Cultural Day nomination tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts, responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
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Published on October 12, 2017 03:00

October 11, 2017

October 11, 2017: Columbus Day Alternatives: W.J. Harsha and Sarah Winnemucca



[As I’ve detailed at length here and elsewhere, to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]On two very distinct but equally cross-cultural late 19th century literary works.
William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is probably one of the most controversial, and definitely in many quarters one of the most reviled, novels of the last fifty years. The most obvious and certainly one of the most central reasons for the attacks which the book has received from African American writers and historians and scholars (among other critics) is that Styron focuses the psychology and passion of his fictionalized Nat Turner on a teenage white girl, ignoring potential (if ambiguous and uncertain) evidence for a slave wife of Turner’s and greatly extrapolating this relationship with the white girl from a few minor pieces of evidence in the historical record. Yet having read at length the critiques on Styron, including those captured in a book entitled Ten Black Writers Respond , I have to say that an equally central underlying reason for the impassioned attacks on the book is the simple fact that Styron, a white novelist (and a Southerner to boot), had written a novel in the first-person narrative voice of this complex and prominent African American historical figure.
The issue there is partly one of authenticity, of who does and does not have the ability to speak for a particular community and culture. To me, while there may well be specific reasons to critique Styron’s choices and efforts in this novel, on that broader issue I believe that one of, if not the, central goal of all fiction should be to help readers connect to and engage with identities and experiences and communities and worlds; seen in that light, Styron’s novel is, at least in its goals, hugely ambitious and impressive. But it pales (no pun intended) in comparison with a similar, entirely forgotten novel from nearly a century prior: William Justin Harsha’s Ploughed Under: The Story of an Indian Chief, Told by Himself (1881). Harsha, the son of a prominent preacher and pro-Indian activist and himself an impassioned advocate of Native American rights, published this novel anonymously, and since it is narrated (as the subtaitle suggests) in the first-person voice of a Native American chief, his project represents an even more striking attempt to speak from and for an identity and culture distinct from the author’s own. The novel is long and far from a masterpiece—it features in a prominent role one of the least compelling love triangles I’ve ever encountered—but in this most foundational stylistic and formal (and thematic and political) choice of Harsha’s, it is to my mind one of American literature’s most unique and amazing efforts.
And yet was it necessary? Just a few years later, Paiute chief and leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins would publish her Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1886), a work of autoethnography and history and political polemic that, like all of Winnemucca’s life and work, makes clear just how fully Native American authors and activists and leaders could and did speak for themselves in this period (as they had for centuries, but with far greater opportunities to publish and disseminate broadly those voices than at any earlier point). Winnemucca, like the Ponca chief Standing Bear whose lecture tour inspired Helen Hunt Jackson’s conversion to activism and like numerous other Native American leaders (including Inshta Theamba, also known as “Bright Eyes,” who wrote the introduction to Harsha’s novel), spoke and worked tirelessly for her tribe and for Native American rights more generally, and her book illustrates just how eloquent and impressive her voice was in service of those causes. Although her individual and cultural identities became, in both her life and the text, quite complicated as a result of her experiences as a translator and mediator between her tribe and the US army and government—complexities that are the focus of the Winnemucca chapter in my second book—such complications are, if anything, a further argument for the value of hearing and reading her own voice, rather than trying to access it through intermediaries or fictional representations.
Everyone should, indeed, read Winnemucca’s book, and if we had to choose one Native American-focused text from the decade to cement in our national narratives, I’d go with hers without hesitation. But we don’t, and we don’t even necessarily have to decide whether her voice is more authentic than Harsha’s narrator’s, or Jackson’s Ramona’s and Alessandro’s, or Theamba’s. There may be some value in that question, but to me the far greater value is in reading and hearing as many voices as we can, from this period and on these issues and in every other period and frame, to give us the most authentic understanding of the whole complex mosaic of American identity. Next nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts, responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
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Published on October 11, 2017 03:00

October 10, 2017

October 10, 2017: Columbus Day Alternatives: Ely Parker



[As I’ve detailed at length here and elsewhere, to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]On the cross-cultural relationship and experiences of one of 19th century America’s most inspiring figures.
There are many reasons why I began this blog with a brief (now tragically lost) entry on W.E.B. Du Bois, and have returned to him so many times since. But I guess what it boils down to is that as I have thought about my long-simmering concept of an American Hall of Inspiration, Du Bois would be one of my first, unanimous inductees. Not because he was perfect—he wasn’t, far from it—but because, I suppose, of a trifecta of core details: he spent his life trying to do things he felt were significant; he committed to each of those things with passion and seriousness and a desire to do them as well as he could and appropriate levels of (and balance between) ambition and humility; and he remained, even into his later years, very open to the voices and perspectives of the people both with and for whom he was doing them. Yup, those are pretty much the measuring sticks for induction into Ben’s American Hall of Inspiration.
I’ve known that I felt that way about Du Bois for a long time, at least since my sophomore year of college when I read a lot by and about him. Some of the other people who would be on the short list for inaugural induction I’ve known about for even longer, and would come as no surprise to anybody who knows me (Bruce, John Sayles, Val Kilmer) (just kidding about the last one, I love the dude but I’m afraid he falls short on that whole balance of ambition and humility item). But another one is a more recent discovery who has rocketed toward the top of the list: Ely Parker(1828-1897). I learned about Parker while working on a couple page portion of my second book—the opening couple pages of my chapter on the 19th century focus on Lewis Henry Morgan, the pioneering anthropologist who worked extensively on the Seneca Iroquois and was even adopted into the tribe; and Morgan, who is pretty impressive and inspiring in his own right, admired the heck out of Parker and helped him enter many of the worlds (engineering and work on the Erie Canal; law and politics and the fight for the tribe’s homeland and sovereignty; the military and service in the Union Army, through which he ended up drafting the Confederacy’s surrender terms at Appomattox Court House) to which he contributed his tireless work and passion from the late 1840s to the end of his life.
Any one of those worlds and efforts would be a good starting point for Hall of Inspiration consideration, and the cumulative effect of them is pretty overwhelming. But as with Du Bois, what I find particularly interesting and inspiring about Parker is something less explicitly heroic or impressive, but even more (to my mind) American—his complicated location amidst and between multiple communities and identities, and his determination not to simplify that position nor reject one or another of his identities and worlds. The name he was given when he was made a sachem of the tribe translates to “Open Door,” and I think that’s very apt (as was Morgan’s tribal name, which translates to “Bridging the Gap”—they were spot-on with those names, the Seneca), both in his own life and in his role as a mediating figure (anthropologically, politically, legally, militarily, ideologically, you name it) between the tribe and the American government on multiple levels. As was sometimes the case with Du Bois, Parker’s attempts at mediating and unwillingness to simplify either his own identity or his connections to both his ethnic and his national communities (such as in his post-Civil War marriage to a white socialite) were, at times, met with harsh criticism from more fully ethnically focused peers (and Parker himself apparently questioned, toward the end of his life, some of the work he did as the first Native Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a position he held in the scandal-filled administration of his old general, Ulysses Grant). But despite such specific critiques, I don’t think anyone familiar with Parker’s life and work could question for a second his thoroughgoing commitment to improving the lives of his fellow Americans, native and otherwise.
The last years of Parker’s life were defined at least in part by losses (financial, on Wall Street, and in other ways) and self-doubts (particularly about whether he had been able to maintain as well as he had hoped that balance between the different communities to which he dedicated his life). But they were also defined by another dialogic and mutually beneficial relationship, one very much parallel to his with Morgan—he was approached by a poet named Harriet Maxwell Converse who had an abiding interest in his tribe, and the two developed a friendship that helped Parker reexamine his life and identity and communicate them to an interested European American partner once more. If I can help him continue to do the same, even a century after his death, maybe I’ll have helped pass his inspiration along. Next Cross-Cultural Day nomination tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts, responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
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Published on October 10, 2017 03:00

October 9, 2017

October 9, 2017: Columbus Day Alternatives: Brothers Among Nations



[As I’ve detailed at length here and elsewhere, to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]On a different and more inspiring vision of the era of European arrival.If you’ve been well trained by a literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I first advanced in this 2011 post (and many others throughout my writing here) might be “So what?” I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be transformed by my ideas back in this “Whatwouldchangeseriesof posts (published the same week that the book in which I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like “All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query, fair reader. But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.
When it comes to the arrival and contact period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the first (well, first post-Viking) European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedyand Ronald Reagan have used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative, Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto/Tisquantum) who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades, driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely negative and critical, as illustrated by the many proteststhat met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s “discovery” for those cultures.
There’s certainly both historical accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America,1580-1660 . Van Zandt’s book is exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into the remainder of the 17th and 18th centuries, that does not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without them and because, through a more 21st century lens, they provide inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the only options available to early American cultures.
Next Cross-Cultural Day nomination tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts, responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
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Published on October 09, 2017 03:00

October 7, 2017

October 7-8, 2017: Indigenous Performers in Popular Culture



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters, leading up to this special weekend post on indigenous performers in popular culture!]On three performers who help us trace the evolution of 20th and 21stcentury American popular culture.1)      Nipo Strongheart (1891-1966): I could very easily write this whole blog post (and probably a whole blog series) about Strongheart, the Yakama artist and activist who began performing with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a child (his father was likely a white performer for the show while his mother was a Yakama Native American, although these biographical details seem ambiguous), launched his adult career giving presentations on Native American culture for the YMCA War Work Council during World War I, became a very successful lecturer and performer on the Lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, and served as a technical advisor for both silentand talking films. Moreover, while on the lecture circuit Strongheart gathered numerous signatures on petitions advocating for Native American citizenship, an effort that helped produced the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act that finally allowed Native Americans to become US citizens. Quite simply, for all these reasons you can’t tell the full story of Native American or American culture and history in the early 20th century without including Strongheart.2)      Jay Silverheels (1912-1980): Strongheart continued to advise films throughout the 1950s, but that decade also witnessed the rise to popular prominence of Canadian amateur athlete turned actor Jay Silverheels (born Harold Preston Smith on the Six Nations Reserve of Ontario). After a successful 1930s career as a traveling lacrosse player and boxer, Silverheels landed a series of film roles in the 1940s and 50s, including in such prominent, diverse films as Humphrey Bogart’s Key Largo (1948) and Jimmy Stewart’s Broken Arrow (1950). But it was his role as Tonto, stalwart friend and companion of the Lone Ranger on the 1949-1957 television series (and in two spinoff films, The Lone Ranger [1956] and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold [1958]), that made Silverheels one of the century’s best-known native performers. Like the show’s Western form itself, Tonto straddled the line between serious and silly, respectfully complex and stereotypically simplified. But compared to the brief, often one-note appearances by native performers in many Western films or shows, Tonto played a central role throughout the show’s run, giving Silverheels a chance to invest this character with a depth and humanity that were striking and remain hugely influential half a century later.3)      (1952- ): Born on the same Ontario Six Nations Reserve as Silverheels, Graham Greene has gone on to enjoy a lengthy and impressively varied career in both film and television (including as a Canadian sheriff in two episodes of Murder, She Wrote!). I would highlight three particular roles as demonstrating both his breadth of talent and the evolution of parts for native actors in the late 20th century: Kicking Bird, the 19thcentury Sioux leader who becomes a vital friend to Kevin Costner’s John Dunbarin Dances with Wolves (1990); Walter Crow Horse, a 1970s Sioux tribal policeman who starts as a frenemy of Val Kilmer’s FBI agent in Thunderheart (1992) but ends the film [SPOILER ALERT!] as a crucial co-protagonist; and Malachi Strand, a disgraced Cheyenne police chief turned criminal mastermind who has served as one of the chief villains on the last few seasons of Longmire. That I could have picked countless other Greene roles and performances as well is a good bit of the point: thanks in part to the groundbreaking work of performers like Strongheart and Silverheels, as well as to their own talent, indigenous actors like Greene have become a central and unremarkable (in the very best sense) part of American popular culture.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other Native American texts or images you’d highlight?
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Published on October 07, 2017 03:00

October 6, 2017

October 6, 2017: LongmireStudying: Nighthorse



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native American popular culture!]On the scene that embodies a character’s—and perhaps the show’s—contradictions.As I wrote in Monday’s post, and as most of my posts this week have likewise highlighted, what I particularly love about Longmireis its ability to combine the pleasures of genre storytelling (in both the mystery and Western genres) with a multi-layered and thoughtful representation of community, culture, and identity (especially for, though not at all limited to, the Cheyenne). Although sometimes those latter elements work as background or environment for the genre storytelling, enriching but not central to an episode’s main plotlines, more and more as the seasons have progressed the mysteries and action have become intertwined with the cultural aspects. A significant portion of Season 4, for example, focused on a serial storyline and mystery about a young Native American girl named Gab; while Season 5 focused at length on one of my topics from yesterday’s post, Cady Longmire’s move onto the reservation and a number of related stories she encounters there. I’m excited to see how the sixth and final season continues to weave these disparate storytelling threads together.There’s one potential problem with that emerging pattern, though, and that’s the character of Jacob Nighthorse(A Martinez). For genre purposes, Jacob has consistently been positioned as Walt’s nemesis: as a criminal mastermind a la Professor Moriarity for its mystery side; and as the black hat against whom the protagonist continually battles for its Western side. Yet from the cultural perspective Jacob looks quite different: even before he hires Cady to open a legal aid office on the reservation in Seasons 4 and 5, we see him working to use his planned (and then completed) reservation casino to change the lives and fortunes of the Cheyenne community. In one Season 1 episode, we also see Jacob as the Dog Soldier, a Cheyenne avenging angel who delivers justice outside of the legal system (and thus, in genre terms, in opposition to Walt). Even supporting characters connected to Jacob can have multiple distinct sides in this same way: such as Sam Poteet, a Cheyenne plumber and member of the tribe’s White Warrior spiritual community who from a genre perspective seems to be the villain’s henchman but from a cultural perspective is a potent and complex member of the Native American community (even before we find out he is the father of Season 4 main character Gab).It’s of course entirely possible for any character, and certainly a central one like Jacob, to occupy multiple roles. Yet some scenes ask us to choose where we place our allegiance, and there these questions become trickier still. I’m thinking in particular about the closing scene of Season 4’s first episode, “Down by the River,” where Jacob and a group of allies visit Walt at his cabin to order him to stop his investigations into Jacob. In genre terms, this is the mastermind or villain using his henchmen/goons to threaten our hero, and our sympathies are clear. But in cultural terms, Jacob’s dialogue in the scene—as he describes what is possible when native peoples come and work together to express communal solidarity and resist those who would destroy them—has significant historical meaning, and it’s difficult for this AmericanStudier not to understand and even sympathize with him. Again, Jacob’s evolving connection to Cady suggests that such audience sympathies might not be misplaced—but that’s not at all what our protagonist, our mystery detective and Western hero, believes. While I’m sure the show’s final season won’t resolve all of its many threads, it seems clear that there will some form of closure for Jacob and Walt, and I’ll be anxiously watching to see whether it’s more on the genre or the cultural side of the story.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Longmire, or other shows, you’d share?
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Published on October 06, 2017 03:00

October 5, 2017

October 5, 2017: LongmireStudying: Vic and Cady



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native American popular culture!]On the similarities and differences between two complex, compelling characters.From its opening episode on, Longmire has balanced the male friendship and comraderie of Walt and Henry (and of the Western genre as a whole, which has been depicted as a boys’ club at least since Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn lit off for the frontier wilderness at the end of their respective stories) with two very well drawn and interesting central female characters. There’s Victoria “Vic” Moretti(Katee Sackhoff), a former Philadelphia cop who has relocated to Wyoming after she blew the whistle on crooked cops and who has badass and stubborn streaks to match her new boss Walt’s. And there’s Cady Longmire (Cassidy Freeman), Walt’s adult daughter and a talented lawyer trying to make sense of both her personal and professional lives in the small Wyoming town of Durant (and in the aftermath of her mother Martha’s death, a challenge she shares with Walt). Both are of course defined through their layered and evolving relationships to our protagonist and title character, but both are from the outset fully formed and compelling characters in their own right, and add significantly to the show’s ensemble and palette of characters and perspectives.Yet while both Vic and Cady have remained key figures throughout the show’s five seasons to date, I would have to say that the evolving storylines have done more justice to Cady as a complex character in her own right. Vic’s two most consistent roles (other than as a very capable police officer, to be sure) have been as a damsel in distress and a potential love interest. For the former, she was threatened for multiple seasons by Ed Gorski (Lee Tergesen), a rogue ex-Philly cop (and ex-lover of Vic’s) who turns up in Wyoming seeking vengeance; but she has also spent a number of episodes as a potential target of both crazed survivalist Chance Gilbert (Peter Stormare) and her fellow deputy Branch Connally (Bailey Chase). All of those distressing situations have played into the will-they or won’t-they romantic dynamic between Vic and Walt, but she has also consistently been defined through her romantic relationships with first her husband Sean (Micheal Mosley) and then post-divorce with fellow deputy Eamonn O’Neill (Josh Cooke). Sackhoff gives all of these relationships and storylines depth and nuance, and of course both threats and romances as part of any human life as well as any story. Yet in all these situations Vic has been portrayed more as reacting to men in her life than pursuing an arc of her own.In Season 1, it seemed as if Cady might suffer a similar fate, as her character was largely used as a wedge between Walt and Branch Connally (with whom Cady had a secret romance while he was running against Walt in an election for sheriff). But the dynamic of her evolving knowledge of and perspective on her mother’s death already added distinct layers to that role, and in subsequent seasons, with the Branch romance a thing of the past, Cady’s character has acquired a number of other compelling layers as well. More exactly, over the last couple of seasons Cady has become interestingly and importantly linked to the Cheyenne reservation, first through particular relationships and storylines but now in an ongoing role as a reservation lawyer (working, to add one more level of complexity, for Walt’s longtime enemy Jacob Nighthorse, on whom more tomorrow). While of course Walt’s friendship with Henry links him to the Cheyenne community (as do many particular episodes and mysteries), Cady is the first white character we’ve seen move fully into the world of the reservation, and the rareness and significance of that move has been noted by a number of Cheyenne characters. I’m interested to see where the final season takes both Vic and Cady, but have to admit that Cady’s arc is to me both the most uncertain and the most compelling of them all.Last Longmire post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Longmire, or other shows, you’d share?
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Published on October 05, 2017 03:00

October 4, 2017

October 4, 2017: LongmireStudying: Standing Bear



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native American popular culture!]On two historical contexts for my favorite Longmirecharacter.As I wrote in Monday’s post, Lou Diamond Phillips’ Henry Standing Bear is not only a wonderful counterpart and complement to Walt Longmire, but an incredibly rich and compelling character in his own right. There’s a lot that makes Henry so great, including a wry but warm sense of humor that I’m quite sure comes from Phillips himself. But I’m particularly interested in the complex and crucial question of Henry’s relationship to his Cheyenne tribe and community. On the one hand, Henry does not live on the reservation, choosing to live above the bar he operates off of the res; he’s also lifelong best friends with a white lawman, which as many Cheyenne characters point out is at least somewhat suspicious to the native community. It’s perhaps for these reasons that, in the Season 2 episode “Tell It Slant,” the truthtelling clown known as the Contrary Warrior keeps calling Henry a “shiny red apple.” Yet at the same time, Henry is deeply committed to the reservation community and the Cheyenne people (and most especially its most vulnerable members, such as children and abused women), a commitment we see in storyline after storyline and that is affirmed most fully by his friend May in this quote about the true meaning of his name from the powerful Season 3 episode “Miss Cheyenne.”Those distinct yet interconnected sides to Henry’s character echo, to my mind, a couple of historical and cultural contexts from late 19th century America. In many ways, Henry’s in-between status makes him a cultural mediator, much like the Paiute chief Sarah Winnemucca who worked as a translator between her tribe and the U.S. government and army (and about whose cross-cultural memoir Life among the Piutes [1883] I wrote at length in both my first and second books). Winnemucca’s efforts frequently put her at odds with both the U.S. government and her tribe, and at times in the course of her life and memoir it feels as if she has become entirely separate from the Paiute community. At the same time, she could not easily assimilate into the European American community even if she wanted to, and I don’t believe she did, although in the course of her life she did marry two Anglo military officers and government officials, Edward Bartlett (briefly and unhappily) and Lewis Hopkins (far more happily). This in-between, liminal space certainly can feel unsettled or uncomfortable, yet in her memoir Winnemucca consistently defines it instead as a place of opportunity, a way in which she can advocate for her tribe and “their wrongs and claims” (the book’s subtitle) while navigating her own late 19thcentury society and life. To this reader, at least, Winnemucca’s cross-cultural Native American identity is a powerful and inspiring one, much like Henry Standing Bear’s.Winnemucca wasn’t the only prominent late 19th century Native American activist, however, and another such figure bore Henry’s name: Standing Bear, the Ponca chief whose speaking tour on behalf of his tribe’s land claims and rights resulted in the groundbreaking legal decision Standing Bear v. Crook (1879), which established Native American personhood under the law. Although Henry has from Longmire’s first season on had an ability and willingness to speak out about the injustices and oppressions dealt to the Cheyenne (as illustrated with particular force by a monologue in the wonderful first season episode “Dog Soldier”), as the series has progressed he has become a much more vocal and impassioned advocate for the tribe, pursuing both legal and extra-legal remedies to fight those wrongs. In so doing, Henry not only has exemplified even more fully May’s Season 3 quote about the meaning of “Standing Bear,” but has come to embody that historical figure of the same name, and to carry on the legacy of his and Winnemucca’s battles on behalf of their tribes and of Native American rights and claims more broadly. Next Longmire post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Longmire, or other shows, you’d share?
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Published on October 04, 2017 03:00

October 3, 2017

October 3, 2017: LongmireStudying: Walt



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native American popular culture!]On clichés, classic and revised, and a character who straddles the line.However far back you want to go to define the origin of the cultural genre known as the Western—Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) is a popular choice, but you could go further back to the Gilded Age’s Wild West shows or dime novels, among other possibilities—one central feature has been a very particular type for its protagonist: the strong, stoic, stubborn cowboy-lawman, good with a gun and horses, true to his word, a noble and mythic frontier archetype. By the early 20th century moment of Wister’s novel that type was already largely a relic of an earlier era (if it had ever existed at all—as many Western historians have noted, neither frontier lawmen nor cowboys were much like the myths), and thus quickly became more of a cliché than anything else, a shorthand way to signal a specific kind of hero and storytelling. But few American cultural clichés have had more resonance or staying power, as illustrated by one of the 20th century’s most iconic and influential actors: John Wayne, that identity itself a persona or construction of .While that type has found its way into various late 20th and early 21stcentury cultural texts as well—Timothy Olyphant’s Marshal Seth Bullock on Deadwood, as well as his modernized version of the same character on Justified, come to mind—many of our recent Westerns have offered complicatedly revisionist depictions instead. These revisions don’t tend to undermine the Western hero type exactly, so much as to suggest layers and contradictions while nonetheless keeping core elements of the cliché and myth intact. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s retired gunfighter turned quasi-lawman (for hire, at least) William Munny in Unforgiven (1992), or Val Kilmer’s dying and sarcastic gunfighter turned lawman Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), or Christian Bale’s rancher turned reluctant lawman Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma (2007), among many others. Sharon Stone’s gunslinger out for revenge Ellen in The Quick and the Dead (1995) and Will Smith’s smooth-talking lawman James West in Wild Wild West (1999) offered gendered and ethnic revisions of the archetype, but still retained many of those core elements. Despite their many differences, all of these characters and texts reflect a desire both to carry the Western hero forward and to look for layers or quirks beneath the mythologizing. Robert Taylor’s Walt(er) Longmire, the titular sheriff protagonist of Longmire, is in many ways a classic Western hero. All of the descriptions I employed in the opening sentence above apply quite precisely to Walt, and in a couple moments in the show’s most recent season (five) he was characterized directly as a man born in the wrong time, one who would have been more comfortable in an era long past. But at the same time, Walt features layers and contradictions beyond those most mythic Western qualities, character traits often highlighted by his closest friends and loved ones (his daughter Cady, his deputy and potential love interest Vic, and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, on all of whom see future posts in this series) but also seen in encounters with his perceived enemies (such as the ambiguous casino developer Jacob Nighthorse, on whom ditto). Without spoiling any of the details of that most recent Season Five, I would say that the tension between the most heroic and the most complex sides to Walt has become a defining thread as the show moves toward its conclusion. And while I’m generally in favor of complexity and revision, in this particular case I won’t mind if it’s Walt the Western hero with whom we end the wonderful story that is Longmire.Next Longmire post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Longmire, or other shows, you’d share?
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Published on October 03, 2017 03:00

October 2, 2017

October 2, 2017: LongmireStudying: Genre Plus



[Later this month, the sixth and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs as well), Longmire , drops on Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native American popular culture!]On how a cultural work can be both entirely traditional and strikingly groundbreaking.I’m very late to the game on the Western mystery drama Longmire—the TV show, based on the series of Wyoming-set mystery novels by Craig Johnson, has been airing since 2012; the first three seasons aired on A&E, while the fourth and fifth (and forthcoming, final sixth) seasons have shifted to Netflix—which is surprising because it’s right up my alley. I was raised on a steady diet of both mysteries and Westerns (literary, televised, and otherwise), and was a particular fan of Tony Hillerman’s Southwestern mystery novels that thoroughly combined the two genres; similarly, Longmire uses to perfection so many traditional tropes from both genres that it seems at times created in a laboratory to please this AmericanStudier. Even those aspects that might seem like limitations in this era of innovative television—such as the fact that each episode’s mystery is wrapped up neatly by the time the hour is done—are done so well that they feel more like very traditional strengths.I say all that partly to highlight why I find this show so naturally enjoyable, but also partly to make clear the strikingness of this next idea: Longmire is also, in its depictions of Native Americans, one of the most groundbreaking TV shows I’ve ever seen. There have of course been Native American characters on television shows for decades, and some, such as the Lone Ranger’s sidekick Tonto, were vital parts of nearly every episode and plotline. While Sheriff Walt Longmire’s lifelong, Cheyenne best friend Henry (played with dry wit and a great deal of comlex depth by the always wonderful Lou Diamond Phillips) is far more of a three-dimensional human than Tonto ever was, so much so that at times he feels like a main character right alongside Walt, that’s not the main difference on which I’m focused here. Instead, I’m thinking about just how many episodes and mysteries focus specifically on the Cheyenne community (on and off the reservation), and how many other episodes likewise feature Cheyenne characters and stories in significant roles. Longmire works to depict many different sides of this 21st century Wyoming world, but none are more consistently central to that world than its Native American communities and issues.There’s certainly no reason why a show can’t be entirely traditional in some key ways and impressively groundbreaking in others. Indeed, that combination could be seen as a goal: luring in non-native American viewers with the familiar pleasures of genres like the mystery and the Western, and then hitting them with a healthy dose of Native American community and history when they least expect it. Yet at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if Longmire’s status as a less overtly innovative (and thus perhaps to many current viewers less interesting) TV show, particularly when compared to so many of the prestige dramas of the last couple decades, has kept it from getting the attention it deserves when it comes to this key and under-represented American issue. If so, that’s a serious shame—partly because a show doesn’t have to be something entirely new under the sun to be worth our time; and partly and most importantly because in its depictions of Native American characters and communities, Longmirecan and does stand alongside The Wire , Treme , and any other contemporary classic that has engaged with racial and cultural issues.Next Longmire post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Longmire, or other shows, you’d share?           
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Published on October 02, 2017 03:00

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