How r we so destined to be so sad?
When I [insert NDN word] with the Elders we,
hold hands and practice [Insert spiritual belief]
with ancient fire of dizzying grace.
Cackling grandma, the object of [Insert tribal term for
beauty] and I think, wow, I'm so lucky to be in relation with
[Insert tribal name for specific landscape] that I sing a
primordial song. Chanting, wailing, chanting, wailing.
-from “NDN Millionaire Be Like” by Jake Arrowtop, Rez Void
I keep thinking about that guy I met at a networking event, the one I’d characterize as “like, super gay” in a tone my dad would acknowledge with a defeated, guarded hum. We’ve met guys like that before, guys whose eyes turn into abysmal, hungry pools the moment we’re kind to them, because apparently there’s an overrepresentation of malicious intent, mean spirits, and generally douchey behavior in the gay community, and, like puppy mill dogs, these men fawn at our warmth. The cruel irony in this is that the cloying, the suckling, the neediness of them, often results in us–my father and I are very similar–walling off, growing short, laughing a little too hard for a little too long. Anyways, this guy was kinda like that, but the thing I keep thinking about–besides his weird, New Age brand of Zionism–is how he asked what my ethnicity was (gay guys love asking people’s ethnicities) and when I told him, he went, “Are you sure? You look almost–”
Latino. Asian. Exotic.
It’s an old story, beaten to death, dragged out on stage perennially by the lightest skinned, most angular slam poets to beat some more in front of an audience of poets to thunderous applause and demure snaps. For those of us not well-versed in poetry, we settle on infographics, t-shirts made in sweatshops overseas that say little quips and aphorisms about how strong and Indigenous we are, or deep-fried Facebook memes of coffee cups in variable stages of creaminess with the caption ALL INDIGENOUS.
When I first moved to Baltimore, it was really, really important to me that everybody in the entire world knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was Native. Part of this was due to the absolute tragicomedy that was my retreat to Minnesota after spending an arduous young adulthood in Ithaca, New York. Back home, it wasn’t just ethnically ambiguous gay guys grilling me on my heritage, it was my own family. It got to the point that I felt I wasn’t myself at all. My thoughts were the thoughts of a white Native influencer, feverishly cataloguing every racial experience into a curriculum vitae nobody will ever read. I was hung up on every “Are you Native?” and wishing, praying, manifesting that one of my relatives would stick to the Instagram script the Pretendian Hunters perfected, “Who claims you?” because at least being “claimed” sounds sexy.
After I eased into my home here, I found–or perhaps was found by–a surprising new path, at once familiar and strange to me. No matter how many times I couched my aspirations–which were, just like everybody else’s, “creative” and “artistic”–in a kind of dry, detached “pragmatism,” i.e. I will get my college degree finally. And get a Real Job. the land and its people herded me into what Artists U and Ruby Lerner call “making a life as an artist.” I applied to the University of Baltimore and was accepted before I received a prestigious Rubys grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. I deferred enrollment to UBalt by a year–the Rubys, like Creative Capital, require their grantees not currently attend a degree-earning program–and threw myself into my projects, the historical metafiction No One Gets Out of Here Alive, funded by the Rubys award, and the ethnographic memoir Let Them Despise Us, soon to be workshopped by Tin House as part of their winter program. And all the while, Natives entered the mainstream, troubling the narrative like my birth-state’s namesake, mni sota–cloudy water.
Reservation Dogs had taken a graceful final bow, three perfect seasons ending just when they were meant to, which, as a recovering adolescent Supernatural fan, meant the world to me. Its same-breath, cutesy sibling, Rutherford Falls, on the other hand, had been cancelled on a cliffhanger after two seasons of Office-style shenanigans by a mostly-Native cast. Indians were resurrecting the floating, bloated corpse of Star Wars like deft necromancers, finding value in the scraps they were thrown. Using every part. Marvel finally capitulated and released a couple Native superheroes into the premium wilds of Disney Plus, though I’m not sure who was watching.
Some of this–specifically the IP dregs–is due to what I started calling “chungles theory.” That’s what my older sister calls the tiny half-and-a-quarter pieces at the bottom of a bag of potato chips. Chungles. I came up with “chungles theory” to explain what people smarter than me were already trying to name, and probably name better, which was the Mouse’s propensity to finally churn out content–films and television–marginalized fans were begging for a decade ago, like a Black Widow movie or a Native superhero played by an authentic American Indian or, more likely, First Nations actor, and releasing these projects long after their rabid fanbase died or moved on.
It’s good business, for one, and protective. The rabid fans have rabies. We all saw, we all continue to see, how Star Wars nerds treat literally any actress, particularly actors of color. But it’s good business. Why bother risking your paycheck for a couple of Indians when you could put Brunette White Woman number Eighty Five on a poster and make a zillion dollars for way less? But once the bag of chips is almost eaten. Once you can really hear the crinkle of the plastic. Sure, why not. The Indians never left. They’re still outside your studio doors, but while you were spending your careful billions on Hollywood’s golden boys and watching, with horror, as they burned your franchise to the ground, the Indians were shooting their own stuff in your parking lot. And it was good stuff. Really. A shot of adrenaline to an industry whose heart’s been out of step for twenty lonely years. Maybe you can use them. Maybe, though you’ll never admit this, you need them. You can’t admit you need them, though, because the next step, the next ruthless step, is to realize they don’t need you.
Hollywood, undead
I think it’s cute when I meet a producer and they laugh at me for being a filmmaker. They–usually a man, usually white–do this little gracious scoff, their sour breath the only auric field I can sense on them. Then they break eye contact and say, nodding firmly, “Well, it’s a tough business. It’s a tough business, let me tell ya.”
This always sounded like bullshit to me. Like hearing someone’s grandpa say “it’s not like the good old days, that’s for sure,” without ever explaining what, exactly, the good old days entailed, what set them apart from now. Lately, though, it’s taken on a different tone.
It sounds like a mantra.
“It’s a tough business.”
It was, once. And to an extent, it still is, though “it” is no longer an “it” by any stretch of the imagination, nor is “it” a “business.” “It” has mutated. Metastasized. Eroded. Galleries and museums have expanded to include contemporary time-based media within their permanent collections, the festival circuits are less and less about acquisition and more about personality, about Being Seen and Known and Remembered, while the cinema is still on the long path to recovery post-lockdown, when the vultures of the streaming industry saw a big, wide-open window and pounced.
A caveat here. Because film is an empathy machine and everything is a story, so, too, is this blog post. There are a lot of Big Ideas here I want to add proper citations for, do my due diligence on, put quotes in and the like. But I’m comically underemployed right now and that kind of work requires time and money. Time I have. Money I don’t. I’m running my mouth on memory: the memories of a prepandemic industry that once held me, buttressed my teenage body up onto some pretty big stages before I really knew what that meant. The memories of mentors telling us never to sell to Netflix or HBO, before mergers and acquisitions and streaming and streamlining killed every studio. The memories of the movers and shakers who know better than to have their faces out there, you know, the really rich assholes who funded everything back before everybody died, back before DEI and its current reactionary backlash, before left and post-left, before Red Scare and Dimes Square, before Ellen stopped being the death knell for viral videos, before viral videos got hungry, before TikTok influencers were invited to red carpets alongside people with actual talent.
How can I believe this is a tough business when the Rizzler gets to sit across from Jimmy Fallon? How can I believe this is a business at all? I look at the old guard and I see all the bite marks on their ankles have gone necrotic. The old guard has turned zombie.
A dismal inheritance
When we talk about Native representation in Hollywood, a lot of us like to bring up our history as told by Reel Injun. And, genuinely, Reel Injun is part of the Indigenous canon for a lot of very good reasons. But no documentary ever tells the whole story. The very nature of nonfiction storytelling is that of threads in a vast tapestry, many voices coming together in argument, in agreement, in cohesion and discord. Human history, Western history, personal history, it’s all so muddled and murky and difficult to communicate. But we can still try.
Once upon a time, there was a camera and a land. The land was full of people. People who were dying. People who did die.
The man with the camera knew he wanted to remember these people, the future-dead, so he captured them. Funny thing, filmmaking. Everything is “captured” and “shot.”
These people were Indians, and the people who wanted them gone couldn’t get enough of them. The inescapable romanticism of annihilation.
There was another people. They were being captured and shot, too, remembered and catalogued, but theirs, when told by the colonizer, was a story of disgust. The people who wanted us gone wanted them gone, too, but they couldn’t live without them. These people built the country. Their blood was in the land and our blood was in the land and there was all this blood and hardly any of it belonged to the cameramen.
Until, of course, we got ahold of our own cameras.
Legacy Russell writes in her book Black Meme about the inextricable bond between the titular Black meme and the horrific way the American consumes Black lives through cameras, through photography and video. I name this not to add on to her already brilliant theses, but to–putting it in filmic terms–get my coverage. I am writing this from the perspective of a nonblack Native person who knows, if ever there came a time when the subaltern could collect our bloody Hollywood inheritance, Black people would be just as entitled to those dismal crops as we are. Our histories, our bodies, our cultures and our fates are intertwined. Our liberation–which will not, I must emphasize, come from representation, in Hollywood or elsewhere–and our future are one.
Or, to put it in a crueler way, you’re not going to hear me whine, like some of these other cry-around Indians, that Black people get all the attention and we don’t.
Native, but not to here
I’m a settler in Baltimore. That’s what “transplant” is code for, when I say it, is “settler.” The Indigenous people of Baltimore City are Black people. Yes, this is also Piscataway land, this is also Lumbee, this is also Susquehannock, this is also Algonquin, but it’s a Black city. It belongs to them and I am a guest here.
I’m used to this kind of thing. When my parents moved to Ithaca, they looked for the Cayuga elders and asked them for permission. When I moved here, I asked the land for permission, and it grabbed hold of me. I talk to the elders, when I see them, I say hello. Sometimes I see other transplants, particularly white people, miss this social cue, and it’s gutting, the secondhand embarrassment. Miss Charlie, who works at the supermarket near my apartment, greeted this white woman behind me as I was bagging my groceries. The woman said nothing, her wild blue eyes off on some faraway nowhere place.
“And how are you?” Miss Charlie repeated, letting the conveyor belt eat away at the woman’s plastic chips.
The woman grit her teeth. “Fine.” She stared at the floor.
“When someone talks to you,” Miss Charlie said, smiling all the while, “you say hello.”
“I’m in a hurry,” the woman muttered, annoyed.
“Oh, honey,” Miss Charlie said, sounding genuinely sorry for her. “No one’s that important.”
Pity & prejudice
Eventually, I stopped trying to convince the world I was an Indian. I’d go on social media and see these wet-faced influencers dressed up in their regalia, crying into their cameras, crying all by themselves, or looking very stoic while the TikTok AI said the dates of whatever massacre had happened–
God, this is so funny. I interrupted writing this part because I was going to make some snide remark asking how many of these people do we think actually call their grandparents or have any relationship with Nativeness outside of “educating settlers.” Then I called my grandma and talked to her for forty-five minutes.
People swoon all sacred whenever I say I’m about to go see my grandma or talk to my grandma. That trope of the wise Native elder, the untouchable, gentle woman who carries all the culture. But my grandma recently asked my sibling what tribe she was.
“I don’t know about any of that, any of that stuff,” our grandma had said. “I just knew I was skin.”
Before you get all sad on her behalf, she goes to the band office every month to pick up her check with her siblings. She knows. She just doesn’t label herself in the way we’re taught to label ourselves, in a way that’s marketable.
That’s my point. I used to get all up in arms about the Pretendian Hunters. Really up in arms. Now I just feel bad for them. For everyone, really. I feel bad for the people who guilt-fund the arts and end up getting conned by some Italian or Hispanic theyfab with dyed-black microbangs. I feel bad for the racialized Natives, the ones who don’t look like half-Japanese supermodels, the ones who look like my cousins and struggle like my cousins and are my cousins. I feel bad for the racialized Natives who “make it,” smearing foundation on their acne scars and beating their faces every morning and covering their beautiful little Native potbellies in Dentalium-patterned nylon or lycra or spandex. I feel bad for the Natives with the inescapable rez accents who hear their slang thrown back at them tenfold by zhaags who binge-watched Reservation Dogs. I feel bad for the lineal descent people and the mostly-full bloods and the half-breeds and the sunburn clan. I feel bad for the Native girls dating white men who post on Instagram and TikTok that they’re getting our land back, as if the Dawes Act never happened, as if the truth’s not the literal opposite.
I feel bad for myself. I look at my face all the time, on Instagram, in the mirror, in theaters and lecture halls and galleries, and I wonder who, exactly, that face belongs to.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get pissed at the Pretendian Hunters for a myriad of reasons. Chief among them, if you’ll pardon the pun, is that they’re by and large pathetic, and it breaks my heart. I have a hard time with pathetic people. The chairperson of their pissy band of intertribal police can only find sustainable work at the New York Post, which is a tabloid way too many people are tricked into believing is real news because it has the words New and York in the title. The other reason, though, is they’re fighting the wrong battle, in my opinion. A battle they’re doomed to lose. And if they win, well. We all lose.
Any and all arguments the Pretendian Hunters make against the sudden influx of Pretendians in The Industry (which is what I call the cliquish, cross-contaminated chimera of Native film, Native art, Native lit, Native academia, Native Instagram, Native TikTok, and the Santa Fe Indian Market) boil down to this: do not give your money to the false idols. Give it, instead, to us.
Give it all to the authentic Indian.
Authenticity capital
As the necessary boundaries between our public and private lives have been eroded, we have developed a new set of social norms and mores. These are irretrievable and unrecognizable to our elders. Our essential facades, which protect us and honor the autonomy of our peers, have been replaced by a greedy entitlement to the love, motivation, hope, fear, past, present, and future of all we deem under our jurisdiction. If celebrities or microcelebrities get a divorce, we take sides and demand details from them, justification for all the time we’ve spent following their romance. We refuse to forgive any trespasses, we do not absolve, nor do we apologize for our entitlement. Everybody owes us everything all the time, but we are inundated with memes telling us that we ourselves owe our fellow human beings nothing. We hate small talk. We have to talk about “deep shit,” we have to build altars in our spaces or risk having “bad vibes,” we have to be good, we have to be pure.
The Indian is not good. The Indian is not pure. The Indian is often uninsured and cannot afford to go to therapy. The Indian is also, usually, allergic to prozac and other drugs we’re expected to take to function in end-stage capitalism. The Indian has a past. The Indian is deeply cancelable. The Indian is often holding a grudge against another Indian because their families have a long-standing beef. The Indian knows too much about your favorite actor because that actor probably went on a bender in the Indian’s mom’s house back in ’92. The Indian watched your favorite singer dry out in their cousin’s house a couple times. The Indian is a liability to Hollywood because Hollywood is in a codependent, psychosexual, needy, hungry, toxic relationship with the Indian, and Hollywood knows this, but cannot stop.
Marlon Brando once stayed in this Lakota family my family knows’s home for a week or so, and they thought it’d be hilarious to put a severed horse head under his bed.
He didn’t find it all that funny, but he still loved those Indians. It’s hard to stay mad at us, if you’re Hollywood. We have too much dirt on each other. We’ve been through too much together. AIM and Standing Rock and whatever the hell Taylor Sheridan is subjecting us both to.
We’re a deeply ugly people, sometimes, which makes for good trauma porn and bad movies. But trauma itself is a kind of currency, and we have it in spades, so we’re supposed to pimp that trauma out whenever and wherever we can.
This is a difficult thing, the longer it goes on. Everyone gets tired of it. A major publisher I know even said, “We’re done telling Native stories.” Did they mean it? I doubt it. You always come crawling back. Only time will tell.
This expectation you put on us of perpetual death and victimhood creates the perfect conditions for the grifters and culture vultures who pick at our corpses for content. Grifters like that German and Hispanic theyfab who went from claiming Choctaw to saying the real reason Indians hate them is because we don’t count South Americans as Indigenous. Grifters like that trans masc I always got compared to who had the two million dollar Netflix deal before their very public, super racist psychotic break. Grifters like the hippie who claims to be good medicine while posting pictures where they look pungent as hell, stretching their pit stank to the sky while they ululate to creator or Pachamama or whoever else they hallucinated on shrooms last week. All of these people are fluent in the language of pain and misery you, as the Industry gatekeepers, demand from us.
When we try to speak that language, it dies on our tongues. It comes out heavy and clumsy. We’re bad at lying and we’re bad at telling the truth. My lineage of pain and my past traumas aren’t poetic, they’re an abattoir where all the bodies I could have grown into hang on meat-hooks attracting flies. I’m not decolonial AF, strong or resilient, I’m broke and avoidant and trying to claw my way out of the bucket we’ve all been dumped in.
So I stopped.
I stopped calling myself “Indigenous.”
Making a name for myself
Back when I was baby-famous, Indian famous, not-quite-famous but on my way, people used to shamelessly name-drop me. It made me feel like a tool in every sense of the word. Sometimes I’d hear someone claim me and they had insidious intent in the claiming, as if proximity to me was all the proof they needed that they were a “safe person,” whatever that means. I had a reputation for being a wide-eyed, overly sincere ingenue. For being beautiful and “real” and easy to exploit because I was grateful, really, truly, so grateful, thank you, thank you so much for the opportunity.
I stepped away for a while, changed my name, and then acted all somehow when I tried to come back. Some of this was due to my own refusal to process what had been done to me when I was here the first time. Some of this was outrage at the flagrant violations of ceremonial protocol I’d see on my little touchscreen, people filming closed practices, people shooting sweat lodges and smudging, people memeing Okan and sundance. Some of it was my own bitterness at feeling like I’d been late for a bus, somewhere, a bus that came to pick up everyone I loved and missed terribly, just to leave me behind.
That’s my real problem, at the end of the day. I went into the film industry not out of a desire for a career, but because I fell in love. I fell in love with a whole lot of people and I wanted to spend time with them as much as I could, and where better to do that than ImagineNative, SkinsFest, TIFF or SIFF or the other Sundance? But “hanging out” is not a good or sustainable career plan. It is especially difficult for funders and gatekeepers, most of whom are white and monied, to understand, and I get why.
When I first started out, I tried on a few different names. There was the brief and embarrassing “Keahna Kennings” phase, which I leaned into because, at seventeen, I didn’t think “Cleo” was feminine enough to land me those oh-so-sought after “disposable sex worker” or “girl who gets violated on screen” roles, which were, back in 2015-2016, pretty much the only roles Native girls were offered. Then, of course, Cleo Keahna, who I turned into a brand before that was expected of everyone. Lucky for me, “Cleo” was a boys’ name, too, and the longer I was on T, the less people called me “Chloe.” After a fashion, though, the dysphoria caught up to me, and I switched to my middle name, “Francis,” “Frenchie” and “Fritz” for short. With my acting days seemingly behind me, lost to a lethal combination of transphobia and my own lack of discipline, I returned to my roots as a writer. But I couldn’t see myself published as Francis Keahna. My namesake, Frances Goodwin Keahna, had big shoes I knew I’d never fill.
That’s when Karen Goulet and my mother, Tish Keahna, suggested Shaawan.
Shaawan had been my nickname when I was a student at Waadookodaading, an Ojibwe language immersion school in my hometown of Hayward, Wisconsin. I’d disliked my name back then, though whether that was because I was always getting in trouble and hearing it hollered at me by some traumatized Native teacher three times my size or because my cousin used to say “Shaawan is a shower” over and over again until I almost throttled him is anybody’s guess. Looking back now, it might have been because I was upset about how obvious an outsider my name made me–if I had been named in the dialect of Anishinaabemowin I was expected to learn, my name would have been Zhaawanobinesi instead of Shaawanobinesig, the former one of my uncles still calls me to this day.
But when Karen Goulet, in true auntie fashion, went ahead and inked the name Shaawan Francis Keahna on the wall of the Miikanan Gallery at my first grown-up art show, something clicked. My mom was right. This made sense. This wasn’t the name of a legendary basket weaver, nor the name of a powerful medicine person. This was something wholly my own. The dialectical difference that had troubled me all those years ago now set me apart from all the Zhaawans in the Midwest. There was still the small issue of pronunciation, but my father, Shaawano, had already blazed a way through that for over a quarter century. All I had to do was copy him, make my voice that big and inarguable.
Living in Baltimore under a new name set me free from the expectations of my old life. I took a job as an intern on a feature film that shot over West for fifty bucks a day. I kept my mouth shut when I was being taught something I already knew so I could better learn what I didn’t. I behaved myself, even when being back on set reminded me of old wounds. The upward spiral led to an astonishing payoff, but it also made one of my cousins like, so mad. Word got around my family in the Industry and they called each other up to visit about me, which led to my we’enh reaching out.
Ancestor Island
We were at ceremony on Gullah Geechee land in South Carolina. I’d never been to any Black tribal ceremonies before, but I’d heard of them. My we’enh made sure, whenever she had me alone, to teach me all she could about the importance of Black culture. I was raised on a steady stream of true blues, in her house, on documentaries about the Mardi Gras Indians and music videos she deemed canon and felt compelled to share with me. Before Rumble came out, with its effusive cast of multiracial musicians discussing the cross-pollination of Black and Native music, I was getting my own private education in that exact curriculum by an auntie who had books on books for me to take home.
I’d just been on my knees on Ancestor Island, praying in the only way I knew how, when my phone rang. I was far enough away from the main event, standing on the turbid edge of a slow-moving creek, that I could answer. It was my we’enh, a woman who raised a couple of your favorite Indians and then some.
When I told my we’enh where I was, I heard her make a noise that meant she was proud of me. Good thing, too, because she launched into some tough love about my absence from the Industry, how upsetting it had been for my cousins and uncles to hear I took the fifty-dollar a day gig when, and she quoted, “Everyone knows who he is.”
I argued with her because, at twenty-seven, I’m still a petulant child, but I shut up and listened when she argued back, “You are not a film person.”
“You are a creative,” she said, pronouncing every syllable in “creative,” her tongue hitting the back of her teeth hard on the “T.” “That’s why you’re so vulnerable, I mean, it’s not just your work that’s out there. It is your whole being. Your whole self. You have made a path for yourself and you have been very brave about it, you’ve made some very public declarations and you’ve stuck by them. You will find your way and people will help you because you will prove yourself, you will prove that you are a consistent and trustworthy person. But you are not a film person. You are not just an actor, or a writer. You are your whole self, out there. There are no borders between you and the world.”
I stared up at the stars. This far south, this far from the city, they were innumerable. I saw what the pan-Indians call the “wolf run” and I call the spider’s web. I saw the Pleiades, where my people came from an unimaginable number of generations ago.
We always say “we are still here.” We do it every November. We do it whenever we want something. We do it whenever we’re sick of hearing liberals say “we are a nation of immigrants” or conservatives saying “all the Indians are dead, the ones who are left don’t even look Indian.” We say it as a knee-jerk reaction and we say it as a mantra.
We say it, but do we really know who we are or where here is? We say it, but do we really know what “still” means?
Still here
Another group who says they’re still here, but less and less, these days, are gay people.
I say “gay” rather than “queer” for reasons I could spend hours talking about, but in short: it’s a political statement. When I talk about gay people I am specifically thinking about gay people, trans-inclusive, who have been lost to AIDS or gay-bashing or Don’t Say Gay or any of the other zillion ways this country’s tried to kill us.
“Us.”
It’s so weird, saying that. I didn’t rush to call myself a gay man. I’d been brought up by matriarchs to be fiercely independent. I’d had a few girlfriends in high school and found boys abhorrent. I was high femme and mean about it, and any latent bisexuality was swiftly destroyed by the sheer fucking dullness of the boys I got close to. The vacancy, the emptiness of them. Girls were always much more interesting to me. Girls of all genders.
So when I transitioned, early days, I got with a couple boys not because I wanted them, necessarily, but because they looked exactly like the kind of guy I wanted to look like. I thought I could rob them of their genders and come out unscathed. Silly me, I ended up terrified of my own shadow. When I detransitioned, I went back to girls.
You can imagine my surprise, then, my total abject refusal, when, male again, flat-chested, deep-voiced, I found myself in the company of gay men. I arrived at men when I myself was indistinguishable from them. I didn’t need to convince myself my otherwise heterosexual partner was secretly queer. I was thrust into a world that had been previously forbidden by the cardinal sin of my body.
It was thrilling. It was disgusting. It was horrifying.
It was mine.
When I moved to Baltimore, a ghost found me. He began to tell me a story. I asked him why he’d tell me this story. I’m not a “real” man, I said, I’m not cis. He just laughed at me and sat with me until I understood. Until we entered into a covenant. This friendship, this prayer, became the basis of my Rubys project, No One Gets Out of Here Alive. Writing him, writing his story and the stories of his friends, taking my daily Truvada and going to St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church every Sunday with one of my boyfriends, I began to occupy a different role. A role I felt better about communicating, advertising. Branding. It helps me build my home here, build trust with the people who’ve been doing the good work here all this time. Coming in quiet. Listening good.
I never fully bought into the idea of “selling myself” as a Native creative. Being an Indian is hard work, as my namesake always said. Thankless, often, and meaningful in that it doesn’t assimilate. That it’s not easy to categorize or label or quantify. People have tried. People still try. But it’s impossible. It will always be impossible. The longer we hold out, the longer we keep our secrets, the longer we stay in community, the longer we work to learn our languages, we’ll have ourselves. We’ll be able to sing ourselves back.
Sex, I can talk about. Love, desire, history, all the art we lost to the virus–both viruses. All viruses. I can share this with you. I can share it with you all night, if that’s what you want, and then some. I can’t be your Indian.
But a gay guy? Easy money. I could do that. I could be that. I could tell that story. I will tell that story. They are paying me to tell that story. Yes, my Nativeness is inescapable. It shapes my ontology, my speech patterns, the way I tell stories and the way I don’t. But it’s not for you. If you want it, if you want me to share that with you, you’re going to have to earn it. I won’t come begging for you to see me or my kin for what we are.
We don’t need you. You need us.
Chasing you
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
-from “the Rival” by Sylvia Plath
Almost all the famous young Natives right now have come from open casting calls and the grueling, only recently institutionally acknowledged work of the casting directors who find them. This alchemical process is gibberish to Hollywood. As is the insistence these casting directors have upon retaining their relationships with the people they find. Midthunder Casting and Abby Harri stand out to me as groundbreaking forces of nature when it comes to revising how casting is done for bigger, better-funded projects. They maintain their ties, are careful and intentional with their wording, and, at least for one (I won’t say who, because I’m already being weird enough in name-dropping them), they are deeply, deeply loved by the people who know them well. Because of these changes and other aspects of the paradigm shift, there are more than two Indians on screen at any given time. There are Native people working in STEM fields who get cover stories beyond AISES. There are Native writers at Big Five publishing houses whose work gets sold at Target. There are Native fashion designers working in Paris and Italy and there are Native people writing about them at Vogue.
Because of Abby Harri posting a casting call for Baltimore locals, I was able to make my presence known in the Baltimore film community less than a month after I moved here. The shoot lasted until three in the morning and reminded me, through that particular sting of misery and ecstasy, how much I missed being on set. So I started going to the Parkway. I started putting out for more jobs. I shot a film in DC and did my best to edit it. As I write this, I’ve just wrapped, in delirious gratitude, my first ever short film based on a screenplay I wrote all by myself. Nora Hyde directed it and her partner, Michael Brown, was our director of photography. I played across from a mixedblood actor I met at a Crew Call networking event just over a month ago who, during our first rehearsal, confessed a sense of displacement to me, a displacement we both share and found comfort in sharing.
It’s a far cry from the Hollywood I tried to cut my teeth on a decade ago. Back then, I was already too late. They put me up against a woman who looked like me, kind of, but was shorter. More correctly female. Then, when I transitioned, there were men who were more correctly male. I’m grateful for the ones who told me to my face what was going on and why. I’m grateful for the gatekeepers who pushed me away and said, exactly, what I’d done to deserve this. It protected me from seeing my fellow artists as rivals or yassified mirrors. It protected me from developing the mental issues that lead the aforementioned Pretendian Hunters down frenzied Wikipedia rabbit holes, trying to find some discrepancies in the blood of their “betters.”
It protected me from you.
You, with your constant reboots and your live-action versions of your best-selling animated movies. You, with your rotted funhouse and your nostalgia bait, your AI and your overworked VFX teams churning out ten to twelve dying blockbusters a year. You, stuck in a creative rut and finally, finally reaching out to touch your point of origin, the Black and Native people you shot and captured and chased across the silver screens until we started chasing back.
You, bereft of anything new to say.
It’s not a tough business. It might, however, be the perfect time for us to do business with ourselves. To make the groundbreaking, boundary-pushing, gorgeous and ugly work we’ve always wanted to make now that we’re all so overqualified and underutilized. All this talent locked out of the studio, mingling and pooling our resources. Those of us who’ve endeared ourselves to you, who know how to talk our way through your heartbreaking, backwards Platonic caves, who know how to be good relatives to you and your broken spirits. Those of us with resources, even the smallest pot of gold at the end of the quickest rainbow, we reach down and pull our cousins up with us, because we never stopped looking at each other. We never went away.
Of course we’re still here.
The question is:
Are you?
Leave a Reply