600 Wilson, Pamela.

"Disputable Truths: The American Stranger, Television Documentary and Native American Cultural Politics in the 1950s." Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1996.

CHAPTER NINE: MEDIA ACCESS, ACTIVISM AND THE POLITICAL EFFECTIVITY OF REPRESENTATION
PLAYING INDIAN: HISTORIES OF (MIS-)REPRESENTATION In Diplomats in Buckskins, his account of the history of Native American participation in the political life of the United States, Herman Viola relates a fascinating anecdote which provides insight into the way that representations of Native Americans have been engineered in the public imagination. In 1936 (the heart of the supposedly-progressive Indian New Deal era), the Pueblo Indian people were engaged in a struggle over legislation and appropriations to prevent further alienation of their tribal landholdings which had been lost since the Dawes (Allotment) Act in the late nineteenth century. Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier--generally considered the most liberal and benevolent non-Indian Commissioner of the twentieth century--urged the All-Pueblo Council to send a delegation of articulate spokesmen to Washington to present their case to Congress and the American public. As Viola explains, To ensure sufficient attention from the news media, Collier suggested the delegates bring with them samples of their tribal handicrafts and perform a few traditional songs and dances as well. The Interior Department would pay all costs. According to Viola, the council members were somewhat confused by, and perhaps a bit indignant at, this suggestion--since until just a few years earlier the government had consistently tried to eradicate tribal culture, and many Indians now accepted and emulated the styles and values of mainstream white America in their lifestyles. Yet

601 now they were confronted by the Commissioner himself telling them to play Indian to protect their tribal rights and property. However, convinced that the strategy of performing before an audience would be honorable to support a worthy cause, the All-Pueblo council approved the plan. Viola continues: Collier immediately set in motion a media event of major proportions. He arranged for press and radio coverage; he persuaded Paramount Pictures to loan him documentary films on southwestern Indian life and to shoot special footage highlighting some of the land problems unique to the area. The key to obtaining the necessary publicity, of course, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Collier sent him a lengthy memorandum . . . to make Roosevelt realize that the delegation was worthy of his attention. I suggest that it could be made the picturesque and human occasion for a renewed statement having to do with the crisis of our natural resources. . . . In May of 1936, a delegation of 24 Pueblo, Navajo and Hopi Indians arrived in the Nations Capital, and they quickly became media darlings as they attended baseball games, met with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, attended a barbecue at Colliers home with the Secretary of Agriculture, met with the Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, appeared before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and entertained a variety of distinguished guests for four nightly performances of speeches and dances, with a grande finale performance for several thousand spectators at an open-air theater at the base of the Washington Monument. Collier was accused by some legislators of attempting to manipulate public opinion by using a troupe of show Indians who performed like trained seals but who did not reflect the wishes and feelings of the majority of southwestern Indians. Collier protested that these Indians were not show Indians--they were the governors and principal leaders of the Pueblos, hard-working, ordinary men who had come to Washington to protest the

602 impending breach of faith by Congress, contained in the Interior Department Appropriation Bill. Collier reassured the tribal leaders about the success of their visit, since the objectionable aspects of the Bill had been removed. He protested that the delegates had conducted themselves with dignity, and that their dances were beautiful and dignified, and added much force to the delegates plea. In a postscript, Viola notes that even today, delegates who come to testify in Washington dressed in tribal regalia often have the most success, since (quoting a BIA official), it impresses the Congressmen and it attracts the media. 1 Playing Indian for white audiences was a prevalent mode of self-representation for tribal leaders and representatives even as late as the 1950s and early 1960s. Almost all of the carefully-stages mainstream press photographs of tribal leaders, lobbying for tribal rights in Washington, show them posed in a juxtaposition of feathered headdresses and Western business suits on the steps of the Nations Capitol. One well-known example is the 1942 photo of Iroquois Chief Jesse Lyons and colleagues posing with white government leaders as Lyons declared war between the Six Nations of Indians and the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. 2 Even during the well-publicized Seneca protests against the construction of Kinzua Dam in the early 1960s, most of the staged photographs of protest displayed Native American men in full (Plains Indian) feathered headdress. 3 In their presentations of tribal issues to a non-Indian public, the donning of the ubiquitous headdress became the signifier of Indianness to white America. This is one reason why the use of a photograph of a tribal elder in full headdress as the print advertisement for The American Stranger--a documentary about Indians which lacked

603 even a single headdress--was both ironic and squarely in synch with the prevalent media discourses about, and representations of, Native Americans, even though the documentary itself strayed from such stereotyped representations in significant ways. Clint Wilson and Flix Gutirrez have discussed the historically structured absence of representation of racially diverse populations in the American media. Explaining the problematic lack of media produced for the consumption of American subcultural groups as well, Wilson and Gutirrez provide an historical explanation: As originally envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, media in the United States were supposed to operate in a free marketplace of ideas in which every political group, interest group, or anyone else with the wherewithal and motivation would be able to print and disseminate newspapers. . . . Media were seen as both the watchdogs of the government and the critical communication link on which the new democratic society would depend for communication. However, by freeing the press from federal restraints, the Constitution also forced the press to function as a business within the capitalist economic system; for this reason, the advertising-oriented mass media developed with an orientation to a mass-audience. As a result, they continue, media geared for political, national, or racial minorities have been consigned to economic second-class standing, and members of these groups have either been ignored in the mass media attracting the majority society or portrayed in ways that made them palatable to the majority. They claim that this has resulted in a mass media that has generally reinforced rather than challenged the established norms and attitudes of society. Groups which could not be easily assimilated into the melting pot were perceived as marginal to the focus of the mass audience, and their issues,

604 cultures and traditions have either been ignored or stereotyped. Native Americans, in particular, who have been an invisible minority in the American media, even today are still typically portrayed as either vanquished savages or a downtrodden social group overburdened with problems. For the most part, Wilson and Gutirrez explain, the images of the people the Europeans called Indians have been shaped by the movies, television programs and Western novels we have seen or read. . . , media not designed to be primarily informative, but to serve as a diversion for their audiences. 4 News media have rarely covered activities in non-white communities unless, in accordance with the surveillance function of news, members of these communities were perceived as posing a threat to the established order, or covered during colorful cultural festivals--neither of which jarred preconceptions, and which actually helped to legitimize and reinforce preconceptions. Wilson and Gutirrez delineate a number of phases of minority coverage in news: the exclusionary phase, the threatening-issue phase, the confrontation phase, the stereotypical selection phase, and the as-yet-unrealized integrated coverage phase.They claim that the changing demographics of American society--particularly the growing populations of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in urban areas--is forcing an awareness by the media industries of the need to market programming to these audiences in order to capitalize on the rainbow of races that will characterize the US in the future. 5 The relationship between any marginalized group and the media can be seen at one of a number of levels. These and similar issues have been raised by scholars and activists about African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians,

605 disabled persons, members of religious communities, and others. Issues of representation for all of these social formations share common theoretical concerns with those of Native American representations. 6 First, there is the question of mainstream media representation of the social formation and/or its members. Issues surrounding mainstream representation can range from absence/exclusion to stereotyped or limited misrepresentations to representations with more fully realized cultural understandings. Secondly, there is a question of access by minority groups to the modes and apparatuses of media production. The question of access raises many interesting questions about the degree to which having a minority presence in the production of a mainstream film or television show can significantly change the quality of the representation, given the constraints inherent in the mainstream industry systems. I will explore this question further below. Third, there is the option for a minority group to create its own media outside of the mainstream system, as either alternative or oppositional media, which increases the possibilities of self-representation. As in all of these cases, the phenomenon of alternative media raises the question of access to a culturally wide versus a narrowly-delineated audience: is the alternative medium targeted only at members of the group, or for a transcultural or multicultural audience? Each of these levels of representation carries its own set of ideological issues, problems, and quandaries in terms of the political effectivity of representation. In Representing Reality, a theoretical examination of the ideological underpinnings of documentary media, Bill Nichols conceptualizes the documentary or nonfiction media as a major site through which the cultural and political work of

606 representing the real gets done in contemporary society. He draws connections between documentary media discourses and other discourses of the real which function at the service of the dominant ideology: Like the constructed realities of fiction, [documentary] reality, too, must be scrutinized and debated as part of the domain of signification and ideology. The notion of any privileged access to a reality that exists out there, beyond us, is an ideological effect. 7 Nichols includes documentary media in a larger category of Western nonfictional systems of representation that he calls discourses of sobriety--which include such authoritative representational systems as science, medicine, economics, politics, history, education, religion and ethnographic anthropology. These systems have traditionally shared an assumption of instrumental power, a belief that they could alter the world itself; they have regarded their relation to the real as direct, immediate and transparent. According to Nichols, such imperialist discourses have been the vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowledge, desire and will. 8 Documentary [media] are part and parcel of the discursive formations, the language games, and rhetorical stratagems by and through which pleasure and power, ideologies and utopias, subjects and subjectivities receive tangible representation. In the beginning was the Word but now there is television--and photographs, movie theaters, the political campaigns of press conferences and photo opportunities, choreographed debates and paid advertisements, the spectacles of space shuttles, Olympic contests, and living room wars. 9 Nichols sees documentary practice as a prime site of contestation and change, with documentary traditions as institutional formations reflecting the sense of common purpose, the ideologically-charged technical conventions and semiotic languages for representation of their historically-, culturally- and institutionally-specific worlds. The

607 nonfiction media are produced and received within historically-specific communities of production (whereby ideology is encoded into textual practice) as well as interpretation. The creation and circulation of media texts and representations, then, are necessarily political acts, and the question of authority over representations becomes a defining issue in the cultural politics of colonial and postcolonial representational practices ranging from the production of academic ethnographic representations of tribal customs to the production of representations of Native Americans on television news. This chapter interrogates the political effectivity of the strategies of representation utilized by The American Stranger, situating the documentary within its historical context both as a television documentary and as a text closely akin to an ethnographic film in intent and method. It examines related strategies that indigenous peoples and other subcultural groups have used to gain representational control of the media in the years since the late 1950s--ranging from strategies of self-representation and media activism within the mainstream media systems (such as radio broadcasting, television and film) to the phenomenon of alternative and community-based media systems, including the formation of national native media networks and distribution systems.

AUTHORITY, REPRESENTATION AND THE OTHER: ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY MEETS TELEVISION JOURNALISM There is a tribe, known as the ethnographic filmmakers, who believe they are invisible. They enter a room . . . weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed--or, at most, merely glanced at, quickly ignored, later forgotten. Outsiders know little

608 of them, for their homes are hidden in the partially uncharted rain forests of the Documentary . . . [where] they survive by hunting and gathering information. . . . They worship a terrifying deity known as Reality. We, the urban white people, held, until recently, the film technology and the scientific methodology to record and analyze them: the non-Westerners and a few remote white groups. . . . Where travelers had gone to collect adventures, missionaries to collect souls, anthropologists to collect data and settlers to collect riches, filmmakers were soon setting out to collect and preserve human behaviors: the only good Indian was a filmed Indian. (Eliot Weinberger, 1994) 10

Given that journalistic representation and ethnographic film have generally been considered two very distinct genres of representation, it may at first seem odd to consider The American Stranger as an ethnographic film. However, such a comparison can shed critical insights upon certain journalistic endeavors, especially if they are seen to reflect an ethnographic impulse within the institutional constraints of the profession of broadcast journalism. Journalism, like ethnography, is a direct response to the experience of a specific cultural or historical actuality, David Spurr has claimed, 11 and the codified and conventionalized treatments of that actuality through the combination of expository writing and photographic documentation are two of the primary characteristics of both professional activities. The major differences between the goals of the two--supposedly a distinction in projected audiences, in academic versus nonacademic purposes, and most significantly in the accountabilities to different sources of funding--are actually fairly minor when the two undertakings are compared outside of their institutionalized environments. Within the historical context of television documentary programming of the 1950s, the NBC journalistic documentary style represented by The American Stranger

609 most closely follows the model for on-air investigative reporting created by the highly-acclaimed CBS documentary series See It Now, produced by Fred Friendly and journalist Edward R. Murrow, which ran from 1951 until 1958. This series, sponsored by Alcoa, was best known for its controversial episodes that used a combination of journalistic commentary and actuality footage to attack the influence and tactics of McCarthyism. Murrows other noted and controversial documentary, Harvest of Shame (produced by David Lowe for CBS Reports in late 1960), was strikingly similar in many ways to The American Stranger both in its approach to the cultural and political problems of migrant labor and in its resulting controversy at the government level. However, historians of television documentary such as Eric Barnouw have argued that See It Now represented only a fleeting moment of editorial independence in television journalism. During the Cold War period, Barnouw has claimed, television schedules reflected the military-industrial stamp. Many television historians have agreed with Barnouw that the commercial imperatives of the television industry during this time turned sponsors away from controversial topics and thus shaped television as a medium of tamed programming which avoided vigorous probing by investigative reporters in favor of documentaries which were suitable backdrops for advertising. Barnouw has described the documentaries of this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s as being authoritarian in style, marked by a newscasters omniscient narration which proclaimed objectivity: It quoted dissent, but regularly paired it with official refutation. Through mazes of controversy, newsmen walked a

610 tightrope labeled truth. . . . Documentaries became institutional, depersonalized . . . [tending] to rely heavily on official statements. 12 The American Stranger positioned itself, through its ambivalent and ambiguous discourses, as an anomaly in television documentary during this period, if we are to accept Barnouws characterization. In this 1958 NBC documentary, producers blatantly worked to discredit the perspectives of the official, military-industrial complex--an intentional oversight for which they were severely attacked by government representatives--and chose instead to sympathetically focus upon the dissenting voices of the anti-termination camp, which included many Native Americans and their non-Indian allies. The documentary also may be seen to reflect the influences of anthropological perspectives which were circulating in American society during the 1950s, and stylistically embodied what Ana Lpez has called the imperial authority of an ethnographic vision. 13 In fact, the year 1958 in which the NBC broadcast was produced was also the year in which contemporary American ethnographic film came of age, revived after several decades of inactivity with John Marshalls production of The Hunters, about the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Generally, ethnographic films have been considered those independently-produced filmic texts (produced within the institutionalized late-imperialist paradigm of academic anthropology) that try to interpret the behaviors and world views of one culture (classically a tribal or indigenous group) to members of a dominant, Western culture. In so doing, they have generally attempted to follow the Malinowskian anthropological mandate to grasp the natives point of view.

611 Interestingly, the themes of both 1958 films are uncannily similar in their narrative construction of the cultural Other. Weinberger characterizes The Hunters as portraying courageous men--it is always men in these films--surviving in a harsh environment: the !Kung are a quiet people engaged in a ceaseless struggle for food in a bitter land indeed where all the trees have thorns. 14 This story summary might be a metaphor for the portrayal, by the television documentary (and other contemporaneous social discourses), of the American Indian as a quiet, courageous and noble people engaged in a ceaseless struggle to retain their land and their culture against the thorny colonial regime that dominates them. Like other ethnographic films from the period, The American Stranger was a construction and celebration of masculinity as well--in this case, a masculinity which exceeds racial and ethnic divisions, as the film implicitly established a bond of 1950s masculinity between the social actors McCormick, Metcalf, Byrne, Wetzel, Swingley and McKay. Also following the genre conventions of ethnographic film, this documentary constructed a scenario of Indianness in which the people are remote and as timeless as geography, but will be revealed to be, in some ways, just like us--us, of course, being white Americans of the 1950s. 15

The authoritative journalistic style, which reflects a documentary heritage that Nichols has labeled the Voice-of-God mode of expository documentary and network news, still squarely dominated and provided the central authority for The American Stranger. However, the extratextual process of intensive empirical research undertaken by Robert McCormick, his personal immersion into alternative cultural

612 perspectives, and his textual gestures allowing for Native American self-representation (even though such authority was partially recuperated by the summary white voices) all position McCormicks experience as one which closely resembles that of the ethnographic filmmaker or author. In spite of the collaborative nature of television program production, through which a team of producers, executive producers, directors, camera operators, editors, narrators and others work together to produce the finished text, all extant archival materials indicate that this project was primarily built around the research and vision of one sole news reporter. Apparently McCormick and a camera crew produced all of the filmed footage, the production overseen from a distance by McCormicks superiors in NBCs News Division (McCormicks role in editing is unclear); it was at the strangely hybrid level of the actual live broadcast that most of the collaborative floor production took place. Because of the intensely personal involvement of McCormick, this documentary reflects an emotional, personalized immersion in the participant-observation process which is not so clearly evident in Edward R. Murrows documentaries, for example (since Murrow frequently stayed in the studio but sent reporters to do the field interviews). The American Stranger is a text which reflects many ideological contradictions similar to those of the anthropological endeavor--embodying colonialist discourses even while trying as an advocate to provide a space for liberatory voices. For me, having had access to the larger body of extratextual material, the sub-narrative produced by the filmic process is a very personalized one--the story of one middle-aged white male journalists political and intercultural awakening as he grappled with the ethnographic realities of the Indian experience and the injustices

613 perpetrated by his white government. However, like most journalists (and anthropologists) of his generation, McCormick perceived his role as merely that of the messenger, and did not textually foreground his own positioning. Documentaries about human groups inevitably construct a triadic relationship--and accompanying tension--between the subjects of the film, the film producers, and the audience (real or anticipated). To which is the producer most accountable? Nichols has noted that a central issue raised by the expository mode of documentary representation is the ethical question of voice, or how the text speaks objectively, persuasively, or as an instrument of propaganda: What does speaking for or on behalf of someone or something entail in terms of a dual responsibility to the subject of the film and to the audience whose agreement is sought? 16 This tension was responsible for many of the contradictory or seemingly incompatible discourses in The American Stranger. The film became a negotiated text which tried to satisfy the desires for the expression of similarly ideologically contradictory truths by the non-Indian professional cultural mediators (religious activists, Friends of the Indians, anthropologists, legislators) with whom McCormick could most closely identify, the desires for expression of culturally-specific truths by the tribal members interviewed, the economic and corporate imperatives of the NBC networks News and Public Affairs Division, and most importantly, the sociocultural expectations of the television viewing audience portion of the American public. The documentary was addressed to the general audience--but in so doing explicitly spoke to that audience as non-Indian (and specifically, white) through its discursive construction of a spectatorial position which was white (i.e. dominant), alternatively masculine and feminine,

614 bourgeois (in economic and educational levels), Christian, and politically liberal-leaning. This audience was interpellated (and the spectatorial position established) through a combination of verbal and visual strategies of film form and style. The camera in The American Stranger established an imperial gaze which was both surveilling and curious, desirous of the spectacle which the camera provides. As surveillor, the camera kept a detached distance from the subjects of its gaze. In the scenes without human subjects (the montages of landscapes and natural scenes from the Flathead and Menominee reservations), this task became one of surveying a geographic domain with a panoramic gaze--eerily and ironically repeating the same imperializing gaze or commanding view of the Euroamerican explorers like Lewis and Clark who, following the American call for manifest destiny, first looked upon these Western landscapes and in so looking became the controllers of them, in spite of the claims to the lands by their indigenous inhabitants. As David Spurr has noted, the commanding view can be the source of aesthetic pleasure, information and authority, a combination of pleasure and power which conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre. At the same time the commanding view is an originating gesture of colonization itself, making possible the exploration and mapping of territory which serves as the preliminary to a colonial order. 17 The implications of the gaze of surveillance become more complex when the camera turns to human subjects. As Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins have pointed out, the multiple levels of gazing embedded in photographic representations of the

615 ethnic Other--the cameras gaze, the viewers gaze, and frequently the countergaze of the photographed subject--are ambiguous, charged with feeling and power, and are central to the stories (sometimes several and conflicting) that the photo can be said to tell. 18 While many feminist film theorists, following Laura Mulvey and Jacques Lacan, have claimed a masculine positioning of the film spectator through the gaze of the Hollywood camera, Lutz and Collins extend this understanding to the way the positioning of the spectator potentially enhances or articulates the socially-constructed power of the observer over the observed. However, they also acknowledge that looking need not always be equated with controlling; following Frederic Jameson, they suggest that there may be legitimate pleasures gained in looking at Others which are unrelated to any desire to control, denigrate or distance oneself from the Other. 19 However, Homi Bhabha and David Spurr have described the gaze as a central strategy of colonial regimes and of colonialist discourses. As Spurr has noted about the essentially colonialist project of journalism: Reporting begins with looking. Visual observation is the essence of the reporters function as witness. But the gaze upon which the journalist so faithfully relies for knowledge marks an exclusion as well as a privilege: the privilege of inspecting, or examining, of looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation. 20 In The American Stranger, the surveilling gaze was dominant as it objectified, distanced and silenced the colonial subjects in such scenes as the introductory fly on the wall view inside the Vielle family home in impoverished Heart Butte, Montana, where members of this Blackfeet family actively turned their gaze away from the

616 intruding camera. This penetrating colonial gaze searched out the bodies and faces of its subjects to the degree that their avoidance of the probing eyes of the camera--and ultimately, the home viewer--led the family members to awkwardly pose in a simulation of natural-seeming activities. Later, in the Blackfeet tribal council meeting staged for the NBC cameras, this awkwardness and self-consciousness about their positioning as subjects of the cameras gaze was evident in the body language and speech patterns of the council members. A similar surveilling gaze led the viewer through the exterior portrayal of the poverty of Hill 57, where the panoptic gaze took in the substandard conditions of the ramshackle houses and the rotting corpses of rusting automobiles, and in which the occasional humans (all women and children) were looked at as merely another component of this economically and culturally deteriorated landscape. However, The American Stranger has moments in which the viewer experiences an occasional, though momentary, rupture in the comfortable system of looking-at-ness developed by the documentary. Spurr characterizes the colonial situation as one in which gazing is a one-way privilege, and describes the colonial subjects as powerless in the system of gazes: Gazed upon, they are denied the power of the gaze; spoken to, they are denied the power to speak freely. Yet Spurr acknowledges that the colonial subject of the gaze does have the power to resist or refuse the acknowledgment of the gaze which is desired by the camera. Bhabha has written that the relations of colonial looks creates tremendous ambivalence and discomfort because there is always the threatened return of the look by the colonial subject. 21 In The American Stranger, these occasional ruptures in which gazes

617 intersect were always instigated by Indian children--subjects who were innocently unaware of (or disobeyed) the unwritten rules of how to behave around cameras. The first of these moments comes at the end of the Menominee segment, when a girl with a hula hoop smiled directly into the gaze of the camera, locking gazes with the viewer. The other time was during the scene at Columbus Hospital in Great Falls, during an interview with the physical therapist in which the Blackfeet polio victims were meant to be merely props. Suddenly, one Indian infant disarmingly smiled at and waved into the cameras eye--twice. These are startling moments in the film, moments in which the entire realist underpinning of the film (which comfortably distances the detached observer) is exploded and in which the viewer potentially feels that she or he has been directly acknowledged by the young subjects of the film. The childrens intersecting gazes have the effect of shattering the one-way mirror illusion of the surveilling gaze--a seeming acknowledgment by the subject that I know youre looking at me, and a countergaze which briefly and subversively disarms the surveilling viewer. This brings us to the issue of the strategic use of children in the documentary to evoke sympathy, pathos and strong emotional reactions in the viewers. The text of the NBC documentary was especially powerful in its combination of appeals based in intellect and emotion. Although dominated by an omniscient, authoritative rhetoric which was almost purely political and in which the words overpowered the images (especially during the sections in the first half concerning the Menominee and Flathead termination efforts, in which the disembodied narrators voice articulated the political discourses of the anti-termination movement), the film also used powerful techniques of emotional appeal to elicit a gut-level response from the viewers. For

618 whatever reason, the use of children in persuasive appeals in American society, from the classic baby-kissing of political campaigns to the focus on starving Third World children by television news cameras as well as Feed the Children-type infomercials, has become a dominant trope of emotional persuasion in our media toolkit--and one that has generally worked in terms of generating nurturing responses of humanitarian aid and political sympathy. Children are signifiers of innocence, purity, goodness, vulnerability, sweetness, and basic humanity. The inscription of social and political issues onto the bodies of children is not purely theoretical by any means, but these images have frequently been exploited by the media to evoke visceral rather than rational or intellectual responses from viewers. The strategies of using images of suffering children as bases for persuasive arguments are a part of the larger representational (and ethical) issue of creating spectacle from the misfortunes of others--a technique that television journalism has developed to near-perfection in its half-century history. Newspaper columnist George Will has commented upon this phenomenon: Today, writes [Clifford] Orwin, because of television, everyones gaze can be fixed on--can hardly avoid being fixed on--the plight of distant people. This television window on the distress of fellow human beings is often thrown open as the suffering is actually occurring, and humanitarians hope that the instantaneous global dissemination of heart-rending pictures of agony will soften hearts and prompt humanitarian interventions. 22 The spectacle of suffering, like any spectacle, tends to objectify the subjects of the cameras gaze, and can easily create a to-be-looked-at-ness with an appeal rooted in curiosity and condescension that further wedges them from us in its sensationalized and exotic framing of the Other. However, the spectacle is also

619 designed to provoke viewers at an emotional rather than (or in addition to) a rational level--to connect to the gut or the heart or the nerves (whichever somatic metaphor one prefers) rather than to the cognitive mind or brain. Spectacles work to excite/arouse/stimulate us, and often directly provoke emotional (or visceral) responses of aversion, disgust, pity, guilt, shame, pride, love, lust or just plain awe. This also leads us to question the varied emotional responses an audience may have to a film, since such responses may either reinforce, or perhaps overcome, the rational, cognitive, deliberated response. The psychological aspects of such questions are outside my area of expertise, yet I believe it is an important question to be examined, particularly with respect to the reception of documentary films. Nichols discusses visceral reactions to some documentary films, noting that cognitive processing and bodily experience produce contradictory responses that disorient the mind. Visceral reactions occur that are not contained by the descriptive or explanatory grid utilized by a given film. He asserts that such displays of emotion are generally regarded an anomalous behaviors that cannot be assimilated into a cognitive frame: An aesthetic, visceral response translates into expressive excess, spillage from reactions unconnected to a self-reflective, consciousness-raising means of contextualizing and understanding them. Instead of comprehension, assimilation and interpretation these reactions surge past the mind in a guise that allows expression to what remains ultimately repressed within the unconscious. 23 Even thirty-five years after the original broadcast, a showing of The American Stranger to an auditorium of media scholars evoked a strong emotional response. There is indeed something moving about the film which is embedded into its construction, some emotional and aesthetic cues which are strategically inserted to

620 push the emotional buttons of its white viewers and evoke specific feelings of pity, grief, anger, indignation, sympathy, guilt, loss and shame. The dual appeal made by The American Stranger--through political argument and through emotional images of vulnerable and impoverished children--worked as a double-edged knife as it cut its way through the defenses of the audience members of the original broadcast. The strong political outpouring in response to the show was evidently a direct response to the persuasive political argument constructed by the combination of rational, articulate voices (both Indian and non-Indian) against termination. This is not to dismiss the emotional content of the verbal message either, however, since the passion of the arguments presented embodied more than merely dry facts. Indeed, the ultimate judgement of truth by the viewers was likely influenced by the passion of lived experience and the depth of feeling which was expressed in the testimonials by members of the Blackfeet Tribe, especially the historical account by Iliff McKay and the statements by the elderly traditionalists. One cannot say which particular voices had the most effect, since it is likely that different listeners were moved to action by the words of McKay than those moved by the rhetoric of Father Byrne. However, although all of the speakers represented a range of ideological positions, the master narrative constructed by the films structural and verbal argument, spoken through McCormick as omniscient narrator, worked to elide all of the various cultural and ideological positions into a single anti-termination argument for most viewers. It is evident from the responses to the broadcast that a significant segment of the active viewers who were aroused by the film were moved to perform a

621 humanitarian, rather than an explicitly political, action. There also seemed to be a distinct gender differentiation in these two responses, since more of what we might call the altruistic responses were from women viewers and more of the political responses were from men. I think that this indicates to us that the film was structured to interpellate a wide range of viewers of both genders through its incorporation of strategies which would elicit the socially-constructed civic behaviors of both attacking the political machinery and nurturing those portrayed as societys vulnerable victims. The elision of Native Americans with children, however, also had the effect of reinforcing the pernicious and longstanding stereotypes of infantilization and helplessness of Native Americans which have worked against many efforts for self-determination. This perception was reinforced by McCormicks explicit statement in closing that Indians still are, for the most part, unprepared for the hurly-burly of our competitive society. Their general health is bad, they are childishly susceptible to flashy con men and theyre still hamstrung by anti-Indian discrimination. . . . Such rhetoric by McCormick (and the other non-Indian speakers in the film such as Metcalf and Byrne) actively worked to construct an us versus them cultural division which was never questioned, at the time, as an underlying assumption of the documentary. Indeed, the construction of the audiences assumed whiteness (an extension of prevailing discourses which constructed anyone American as white), in tandem with the constructed racial/ethnic/class Other-ness of the Indian subjects, situates the documentary squarely in the tradition of ethnographic writing and filmmaking, which has involved a presentation of the Other through the lens of white, Western mediating interpreters. Ethnography is one institutionalized discursive

622 tradition which composes the historical discursive constellation that Nichols has labeled discourses of sobriety: The separation of Us from Them is inscribed in the very institution of anthropology and into the structure of most ethnographic film. They occupy a time and space which We must recreate, stage or represent . . . under the aegis of scientific responsibility (and power). . . . Ethnographic film, in fact, belongs squarely among what I have called . . . the discourses of sobriety. As systems of discourse, science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion, and welfare exercise instrumental power, they operate on the assumption that they can and should alter the world itself or our place within it, that they can effect action and entail consequences. . . . Discourses of sobriety treat their relation to the real as non-problematic. . . . Through the discourses of sobriety knowledge/power exerts itself. 24 One aspect of the cultural dichotomy reinforced by filmic representations of non-Western cultures has been the striking difference between the ways that whiteness and Otherness (in this case, Indianness) are constructed by the text. For example, in The American Stranger, the politics of white America was visually constructed around the talk of white men. In terms of mise-en-scene, white men were always dressed in suits and ties and their talk situated in interior (office) spaces constricted by walls and windows. In contrast, Indian country and its people and cultures were visually constructed through a trope of vast openness and a foregrounding of the natural world. Even the interviews with tribal leaders (some of whom were dressed in white business clothes, but more casual without the ties) were shot outdoors rather than in offices--on the fences of cattle ranches, in oil fields and on porch rails. For much of the film, we watch silent Indians in action; it is only during the last twenty minutes or so that tribal leaders were allowed to speak. In these

623 interviews, McCormick shed his coat and tie and favor of a casual ethnic shirt, emphasizing his own on-site role as ethnographer and cultural mediator. The text fabricated a bifurcated whiteness that was contradictory but not incommensurable. Through the construction of the us in the voice of the documentary, which interpellated a more socially and politically liberal white audience who could identify with one of the three main white social actors in the text (McCormick, Metcalf or Byrne), the text spoke to a whiteness that was complicitous with the liberal political and humanistic aims of the documentary. However, through its biting narrative and indignant characterization of the white man so evil and greedy that hes committed mass murder. . . [and] persecuted, brutalized and debauched the Indians as well as the forest, The American Stranger constructed the evil twin of the contemporary white liberal. This bogey man was discursively distinguished from us in McCormicks commentary: Hes been trying to shove the Indian out of the way. The Indian has something he wants, and, history says, he usually gets it. Into this undesirable category of the white man also fell the institutional evils of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Congress, and corporate powers. The other side of the coin--the benevolent, well-intentioned white we--was not explicitly sketched out by McCormick, though its construction was implicit in the portrayals of three caring, passionate, pro-Indian white men (Metcalf, Byrne and physical therapist Luckman) in addition to McCormick himself. Through its discourses about whiteness, the populist stance taken by the documentary (reflecting a lingering New Deal social and political philosophy) created a dichotomy which threw suspicion on--and in many cases, vilified--big business and government bureaucracy, while celebrating the compassion

624 and dedication of individual white workers who devoted their energies to pro-Indian and other liberal causes. These are the models of whiteness that the documentary applauded, while acknowledging (and implicitly accepting guilt for) the historical injustices perpetrated by ancestral whites and vehemently criticizing those members of the white race who continued to use their privilege to perpetrate contemporary injustices. One of the most striking aspects of The American Stranger that has been noted was the documentarys unprecedented representation of Native Americans from a sympathetic political perspective (antagonistic to that of the white government), and especially the opportunity it provided for tribal leaders to speak for themselves, on camera, directly to the predominantly white viewing audience. Since this period in the late 1950s, the implications of allowing the subjects to speak within a text have become a topic of great concern within ethnographic text-building, especially in the context of the postwar processes of decolonization which uncomfortably made anthropologists aware of their own complicity in the colonial project, and in response to the radical cultural theories of the 1960s and 1970s. To what degree, many have asked, does such a strategy subvert the authority of the omniscient narrator? The question of authority in ethnographic representation has been a political and moral dilemma of ethnographic film as well as a primary issue in the postmodern critique of anthropology represented by such seminal essays as James Cliffords On Ethnographic Authority. 25 These new paradigms have led to larger epistemological questions of representation of Others. As Nichols puts it, Who has the responsibility and legitimacy (or power and authority) to represent, not only in the sense of rendering

625 likenesses but also in the sense of stand for and prepare an argument about, others?. . . The unasked question is, In what way does this representation matter to those it represents? 26 Ethnographic filmmakers like David MacDougall are often credited with incorporating, starting in the 1960s and early 1970s, dialogic or interactive strategies which allow their subjects a voice. As MacDougall himself explains, about this time ethnographic filmmakers began feeling uneasy about the unchallenged dominance of the authors voice in ethnographic representations, and began to open their work more fully to their indigenous subjects. However, he acknowledges a leading critique that in this paradigm the indigenous voices are merely appropriated for what ultimately becomes the authors project, that there may exist a gap between the voice of the social actor in the film and the voice of the film itself. 27 Clifford has discussed this issue by examining the various possible ways of incorporating the voices of the natives into an ethnographic text: This possibility suggests an alternate textual strategy, a utopia of plural authorship that accords to collaborators not merely the status of independent enunciators but that of writers. As a form of authority it must still be considered utopian for two reasons. First, . . . multiple-author works appear to require, as an instigating force, the research interest of an ethnographer who in the end assumes an executive, editorial position. The authoritative stance of giving voice to the other is not fully transcended. Second, the very idea of plural authorship challenges a deep Western identification of any texts order with the intention of a single author. . . . The textual embodiment of authority is a recurring problem for contemporary experiments in ethnography. 28 In the case of The American Stranger, the collaborative efforts which took place were historically located in a period several decades prior to the widespread acceptance of this new self-reflexive paradigm in academic anthropological ethnography. Apparently

626 not trained in any sort of anthropology, McCormick just followed his own muses in determining the need to immerse himself in intensive intercultural research upon which to base his journalistic story. Given the journalistic as well as the ethnographic conventions of his time, then, what is amazing is not the question of why he did not cede more authority to his Indian collaborators--but actually, why he felt compelled to let them speak for themselves at all. The question MacDougall theoretically asks about ethnographic films--Whose story is it?--is also a very pertinent question to ask of The American Stranger. The answer is that the story is clearly McCormicks, though there are segments of the documentary in which he cedes the storytelling floor momentarily and that these moments produce opportunities for rupture in his authoritative control of the master narrative. As MacDougall claims, By using the words of their informants, anthropologists (and ethnographic filmmakers) bring into their work the narrative forms and cultural assumptions embedded in speech. Whenever quotation occurs, an indigenous narrative model is possible. 29 Filmic quotations are usually found either in interviews or in freestanding sound bites in which the indigenous subjects speak. There is a difference even within the interview style between those interviews in which the McCormick as author takes a controlling role (e.g. the interview with Meade Swingley) and those where he is present but passive, and pretty much lets the subjects talk (e.g. the interview with Walter Wetzel and Iliff McKay). The filming of the Blackfeet Tribal Council meeting is yet a different situation, though one with even more problematics since it was a situation with the potential to be quite liberatory given that there was no interviewer and it was hypothetically a free forum for the expression

627 of Native ideas. However, in this case the rehearsed and staged nature of the meeting (evident from production papers which have transcripts for a number of takes of the scene, as well as from the awkward self-consciousness of acting on the part of some of the council members) inhibited the liberatory potential of the opportunity. What textual independence do these incorporated voices actually have? asks MacDougall, since they may be seen to be subordinated to the text produced by the films author. MacDougall has suggested that much of the power and collaboration afforded to indigenous subjects of films may be invisible in the final text itself but may have shaped the structure of the text in indelible ways. Sometimes, MacDougall has claimed, films may be possessed by their subjects when the orientation of the film gradually shifts towards a particular narrative voice. At other times, the shaping of the finished film owes much to the extratextual social process which is larger than the film itself. I believe this is an important factor in the case of The American Stranger, which was critically shaped in tone, if not as much in textual representation, by the influential perspectives and involvement of radical white religious and community activists such as Sister Providencia (whose presence is absence from the visual text though her rhetoric permeates the spoken commentary) as well as tribal leaders such as Walter McDonald of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (also an invisible textual presence). In such cases, we might then ask, Who did not speak? Who was excluded, or was not heard? First, we have the situation of the three Indian elders, two of whom spoke in the Blackfeet language but were not heard (or at least linguistically understood) by most members of the viewing audience. In a positive light, this strategy

628 can be interpreted as having given respectful voice to the Blackfeet traditionalists, and may be seen as a fairly radical technique. On the other hand, we might consider being able to speak without being understood a silencing of sorts. It is a strategy with ambiguous intent, which can be read as either radical or as one more imperialist request (as part of a long tradition) for members of this generation of Native Americans to play Indian to satisfy the curiosity and longing for spectacle by the non-Indian American public. Other more blatant omissions of voices in the controversy over termination were those of the government, obviously--ranging from the Department of the Interior officials in Washington to the localized Bureau of Indian Affairs administrators and civil servants working on the reservations (many of whom were themselves Indian). These voices were excluded by McCormicks choice, as were the voices of the mediating advocacy groups such as the Association on American Indian Affairs and the National Congress of American Indians. Perhaps in an effort to show a unified and single-voiced Indian perspective, some of the most important voices which were unheard were those which would complexify the Indian position--those Native Americans who held contradictory perspectives within the Native community about termination. Also, as I have noted elsewhere, the voices which spoke the documentarys arguments were exclusively male, and spoke not only from their racial and ethnic perspectives but also from gendered positions that excluded the perspectives of both Indian and non-Indian women. The failure to incorporate the strong and powerful voices of many women who were major players in the political struggle against termination--including NCAI Executive Director Helen Peterson

629 (Coeur DAlene), AAIA Executive Director LaVerne Madigan, and Sister Providencia Tolan--is an oversight with no recorded explanation to shed historical light upon it. Finally, the voices of pro-termination white interests, such as legislators and corporate capitalists, were not provided a forum. The choices of inclusion and exclusion themselves were significant in shaping the final voice of the documentary text. By many journalistic standards of the time, these exclusions--particularly those of the government perspectives, since gender exclusion was certainly not a 1950s issue--marked this documentary as one taking an editorial position of biased advocacy rather than one striving to meet the highest journalistic standards of objectivity and fairness to represent all sides equally. Despite the omissions and perceived shortcomings of the documentary in terms of presenting all possible voices and/or fairly representing the interests of all relevant parties to the issues (a feat which would be impossible to achieve in its ideal state), and despite the power of the authoritative narrators voice to recuperate a master narrative, we can still read the film as a work made more ideologically complex by the inclusion of indigenous voices and worldviews. As MacDougall explains, Whenever culture forces within a subject act upon the structure of a film in the ways I have described--through the patterning of an event, a personal narrative, appropriation to a local function, or in some other way--the film can be read as a compound work, representing a crossing of cultural perspectives. 30

THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION This brings us to consider the question of the effectivity of any representation of the non-mainstream Other in the mainstream media. Can progressive or even

630 radical images of the usually-stereotyped-or-chronically-absent Other (African Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, to name just a few) ever be recoded to produce a more authentic understanding of the cultural experience and reality of being an Other in American society? Is the presence of any representation better than none? To what degree is the metaphorical voice of the cultural Other a necessity for the production of a culturally authentic representation? Similarly, to what degree is the actual control over the production by a member of the represented group necessary to validate and authenticate the representations produced? Is an uncompromised native-controlled production even possible within the production/distribution system that characterizes American film and television, given that economic autonomy is almost nonexistent? These are questions which are not merely of academic speculation, but which are currently being hotly debated in the pragmatic discourses of the film and television industries and in some sectors of society at large. There is a tendency to oversimplify our conceptualization of the media process when considering the possibility for increasing access by Americas cultural Others to the apparatuses and modes of production of mainstream media. When considering the possibility for activist intervention into, and negotiation about, the production of representations in a media text, we must take into account all stages of the effective life of a media form, including pre-production planning, the process of production itself (generally considered the shooting stage), the processes of post-production (especially editing), the channels and outlets for distribution (broadcast or theatrical release, video rental), as well as the processes of reception (in which any negotiations

631 over meaning are necessarily extratextual) . Negotiations over the text regarding representation and issues of control can occur at any or all of these levels. Traditionally, we have seen cases of many journalists or ethnographers or filmmakers speaking for and representing the cultural Other, without granting approval or veto power. In such a case, the only recourse is intervention at the level of distribution or reception. A recent example is the 1996 international and intercultural protest by Australian Aboriginal elders over the representation of their culture by a New Age American writer (Marlo Morgan) in a fictionalized autobiographical account (Mutant Message From Down Under) of her supposed experiences on an Aboriginal walkabout ceremony. In response to her newfound celebrity and plans for a Hollywood film version, a group of indigenous elders traveled around the world to meet with United Artist executives to protest the proposed film, and also used Internet networks for indigenous peoples globally to mobilize support for their cultural cause. They proclaimed: It is through the eruption of Marlo Morgan exploiting our Culture and our Blackfella Religion and our Sense of Belonging that our Elders and People Australia-wide have become deeply concerned with this issue. Marlo Morgan is becoming a rich woman overnight and telling lies about our Beliefs and Culture. Many Aboriginal people have read her book and have heard tapes of her speaking at lecture tours. She is being very racist saying Aboriginal people have made a decision to die out. Her lecturing makes fun of us the Aboriginal People and our Beliefs. It is not a laughing matter. The statement by Aboriginal leaders continued: All this has to be corrected by the Indigenous People of this Land. There have been meetings over the last year throughout the Central and Western Desert, South Australia, the Kimberleys, and the South West

632 coordinated by Dumbartung. All are agreed in a united voice of concern that we must speak in America concerning Marlo Morgan's book. . . . It is also asked by me and my community of Nyungah people living on our Sacred Homegrounds on the Dreaming Track of the Sacred Belief of the Waugal Rainbow Serpent in the Swan Valley Western Australia, to the 11 Spiritual Elders and to Indigenous People where you are and who you are, can you support? We are asking for world indigenous support by telegram, letters, faxes, making statements, by contacting the Publishers of that book, Harper Collins to withdraw it, and the film people who have bought the rights, United Artists to stop, and American T.V. radio, newspapers and Oprah Winfrey who put Marlo Morgan on air. 31 Robert Eggington, an Aboriginal activist spearheading the trip, commented in an accompanying release: "Marlo Morgan has taken away the right for Aboriginal people to tell their own story as she saturates the American market with a complete fabrication." 32 A slightly more progressive option in allowing native control over some aspects of production would be allowing representatives of the non-dominant group to be consulted during the pre-production or development stage, but having no control over the ultimate textual structure or representation. Similarly, white producers might allow Native Americans--or other Others--to have a voice on camera, as in The American Stranger and, more recently, in television news reporting in general--but their voice and the perspective it represents is subsumed within the larger piece that is edited and controlled by a white producer or production hierarchy. This is the level of

633 representational access that The American Stranger provided to Native Americans, but it was considered a breakthrough at that time from having no voice and no access to having limited access to and influence over their own representation. Another notch forward in the continuum might involve granting members of the represented group some mechanism for approval or veto power at the post-production stage, a practice which has been incorporated into the ethnographic process by some anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers, but has rarely been a practice within the media industry. Similarly, bringing Native American employees on board the project in either creative (writers or actors, for example) or technical support roles (camera operator, grip, etc.) or as co-producers in which shared decisions are made does increase the possibility of native control and/or influence over the terms of representation, although the structures of power in such production situations can create inequalities and lead to cultural negotiations which are often settled by economic imperatives rather than creative or cultural ones. This situation is the most likely scenario in the most progressive conditions of Native American representation today in the mainstream media, such as television series like Northern Exposure or television historical productions about Native American history such as those produced by Ted Turner during the early 1990's. In the most progressive of such cases, Native American producers can create self-representations but because they are working within the system their media pieces must be controlled and constrained by pressures of the industry system. The alternative to such compromised and negotiated productions would be for native groups to produce totally independent, alternative productions outside of the

634 hegemonic, mainstream media system. Several large bodies of political literature, theory and practice converge in the issue of Native Americans and media access. Very few overviews exist which account for the historical cultural and political meanings and uses of what might be considered Native American media. 33 The question leads us to consider the many ways that we can metaphorically consider the sources of difference between Native America (including its hundreds of culturally and geographically distinct tribal groups) and dominant, white, mass-mediated America. Do we conceptualize the marginalization of Native America in the media as a local or regional versus a national issue--or, politically, as a matter of Native Americas distance at the peripheries from some sort of white American core ideology and industry? The latter might lead to a distinction between mainstream and alternative media which is parallel in some ways to the distinction between Hollywood studio versus independent film production, although this analogy is problematic in many ways. However, both imply the existence of some core, integrated culture industry against which independent media producers are defining themselves. In addition to the existence of a thriving Native press, which is mostly localized with some degree of national networking (and a national association of Native American journalists), we can consider native-produced and controlled media through the separate discourses and practices of independent Native American filmmakers (of both documentary, feature and experimental films), community-based tribal broadcasting (radio and television) industries, as well as a few national Native American media organizations for networking support, broadcasting, and/or distribution of films, videos or press releases about Native American issues to the non-Indian American public.

635 If intended for the widest audience, then of course the problem with alternative media is that of distribution, since mainstream distribution is limited to attempting to acquiring space on public broadcasting stations or trying to achieve wide theatrical release for an independent feature film. A Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium does exist, which works to encourage Native American production and to distribute such productions as widely as possible through either broadcasting or rental venues. There are also Native American press associations and radio networks which produce press releases and syndicated programs for more mainstream distribution as well as programming for more localized consumption in Indian country. Locally-produced television programs and films are also produced through the auspices of many tribal communications offices. Many alternative circuits for national distribution exist, though their scope is limited: ranging from distributors specializing in the rental and sale of culturally-oriented nonfiction and experimental films and videos (such as Women Make Movies) to mostly academic and political audiences to the film festival circuit (a number of Native American film festivals, as well as documentary and experimental film festivals, exist). On a more delimited geographical scale, public access cable television channels and community media systems modeled upon the successful Native American press provide opportunities for exhibition of media in community-oriented settings. 34 Community media and especially community radio have become extremely significant vehicles for grassroots political organizing and for control of self-representations to a local audience, 35 especially among indigenous peoples globally and in developing nations.

636 In terms of geographically localized communities whose local indigenous cultural needs have been overlooked, ignored or marginalized by the mainstream media, the growth of tribal and community media offers an alternative for serving the needs of the distinct and vastly dispersed groups of indigenous peoples within the Americas, as well as the rest of the world. Also, as a politicized national collectivity of indigenous Americans, at different times in recent years a number of social movements have emerged from the political body that is Native America which have worked to radically change the political, social and/or economic conditions of some segments of the Native American population. Although Native American filmmaking as an art is beyond the scope of this project, the craft is thriving, as is media activism through media production--and artists such as Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva are demonstrating ways that alternative cultural truths can be encoded into very cultural-specific forms of media. 36 The growth of an interdisciplinary scholarship in social movement theory as well as pragmatic guides to media organizing provide us with an alternative model for thinking about the use of media by socially disenfranchised groups in their struggles for power and sovereignty. It is where these two bodies of interdisciplinary theory and praxis converge--the strategic use of media for indigenous artistic and cultural expression and for deeply localized cultural/political movements--that we find the most revealing clues about the power of the media, either national/mainstream or local/alternative, to become integrally meaningful socially, culturally and politically for indigenous people. Questions of voice and of representation in mainstream media (either fiction or nonfiction) are ultimately two different but interconnected issues, and they are

637 intimately relevant to the issues debated in the self-reflection of post-Eighties anthropologists about the role of ethnography as a system of representation and the questioning of who has the authority over ethnographic representation. They are also related to the sensitive historiographical question surrounding who has the authority to speak Native American history, as Gail Landsman and Sara Ciborski have recently explained in their study of conflicts over the representation of Indians in curriculum development in New York State: The controversy offers an opportunity to explore important questions about the politics of historical representation and the social construction of knowledge. What are the assumptions about historical writing and the nature of historical truth that underlie both the Indians construction of their own culture history and the scholars dissenting history? 37 In all academic disciplines which create representations of either the temporal or geographically spatial cultural Other, the post-everything turn (post-colonial, post-structuralist, post-modern) towards self-critique of the past decades has foregrounded the implications of the ideological assumptions which have saturated such traditionally-accepted representational practices as writing culture, writing history and even writing journalism. Such theory has been a bit slower making its way into media practices, especially those associated with the mainstream media industries which are notoriously non-self-critical about their ideological presuppositions as long as they are making comfortable profits.

638 In his writing about the media representation of gays and lesbians, Larry Gross argues that, although control over production of images is the ultimate goal, other forms of media exposure are still important: Representation in the mediated reality of our mass culture is in itself power; certainly it is the case that non-representation maintains the powerless status of groups that do not possess significant material or political power bases. . . . When groups or perspectives do attain visibility, the manner of that representation will itself reflect the biases and interests of those elites who define the public agenda. . . . Gross continues: The most effective form of resistance to the hegemonic force of the dominant media is to speak for oneself. At one level this means attempting to be included in the category of recognized positions and groupings acknowledged by the mass media. Achieving this degree of legitimation is not a negligible accomplishment, and is not to be despised or rejected as an important minority goal. . . . The ultimate expression of independence for a minority audience struggling to free itself from the dominant culture's hegemony is to become the creators and not merely the consumers of media images. 38 The question of the political effectivity of media representations at the level of reception or consumption of media images, then, becomes one of the most relevant in terms of considering how media representations might be used to shape public opinion and the publics perception of the diverse cultures that constitute global society. However, this question of effectivity in altering or reshaping public perceptions is one that can only be answered through reception studies which

639 address the uses and meanings people make from media and the ways media representations affect their perceptions of--indeed, constructions of--social reality. There has been much debate in the mass communications scholarship on media effects over the degree to which viewers or audience members perspectives are potentially determined (or overdetermined) by media, and especially the degree to which mass media is only one contributory agent among many other mediating factors in determining audience understandings of situations (e.g. effect of representations of sex, crime or violence on audience values and behaviors. An assumption of political effectivity at the level of reception is taken for granted by media activists who work on behalf of social movements. The goals of such media activism, according to Ryan, are first, to turn television news into contested terrain ( to point out that the establishment view is not the only or natural way to look at a problem, and, at best, to present an alternative), and second, to use the media as a vehicle for mobilizing support for their social cause. 39 In her how-to manual for media activism, Ryan admits the inherent difficulty of using the mainstream media to challenge the status quo when those same media are generally structured to reinforce the status quo, and generally operate in economic and political structures which are intricately interlinked with the structures of hegemonic power in American society, reinforcing the political views of the powerful by promoting insiders framing of events and by employing notions of newsworthiness that reinforce the status quo, marginalizing challengers and their perspectives. However, although acknowledging that the mainstream media have generally silenced, marginalized, or absorbed alternative and opposition voices, Ryan continues to promote the use of mainstream

640 as well as alternative and oppositional channels of media, since mainstream media can reach a segment of the national population which will never be accessed through alternative media. Since alternative media are perceived to reach the already-converted, Ryan queries, the challenge becomes: how to mobilize mainstream support through media? Through the case study of The American Stranger, a 1958 mainstream documentary produced within the constrained environment of televisions structures of journalism and broadcast nationally to an audience which was for the most part previously unaware of the cultural politics of Native America, we have seen one detailed and early example of the use of television as a channel for the mobilization of political and social support at a national level. Like Ryan, I have understood the process of journalistic documentary production as the exercise of power over the interpretation of reality, and interpret the inclusion of Native American voices, however limited, to be a first step in what will be a long historical process in the struggle for power over control of the social practices of cultural representation. The clash between numerous versions of truth, and the subsequent struggle to determine facticity about the federal relationship with Native American tribes, highlights the ideological nature of all struggles over truth in the public sphere constructed by the mainstream media. Facts are tactical weapons in an ideological struggle, Ryan argues 40 --and the ongoing debate in Montana and across the nation during the late 1950s over which facts were the true-est provides scholars of culture, society, history and the media with a rich example of the complex ways that such discourses may be generated around, through and about the media. Ultimately, the

641 legacy of The American Stranger is to help us to understand the many cultural and political meanings that may be made--and actions that may be taken--by active media consumers in their public spheres of influence.

642 NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE

1. Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981) 193-196. 2. Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival: World War II to Red Power (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986) 6-7. The photo is in the National Archives. 3. See Hauptman, 116-117. 4. Clint Wilson and Flix Gutirrez, Minorities and Media: Diversity and the End of Mass Communication (London: Sage, 1985) 32-34, 38-40. 5. Wilson and Gutirrez 41, 135-40. 6. See, for example, the work of Michael Real, Herman Gray and Ed Guerrero on African American representations in film and television. The cultural studies approach to representations of race and ethnicity in the media has an extremely rapidly-growing body of literature. 7. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 107. 8. Nichols, 3-4. 9. Nichols, 10-11. 10. Eliot Weinberger, The Camera People, in Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994) 3-4. 11. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 189. 12. Eric Barnouw, Documentary (London: Oxford UP, 1974) 221-227. 13. Ana M. Lpez, (Not) Looking for Origins: Postmodernism, Documentary, and America, in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993) 153. 14. Weinberger, 8. 15. Weinberger, 9. 16. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 34. 17. Spurr, 15.

643 18. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic, in Visualizing Theory, 363-364. Lutz and Collins distinguish seven kinds of gaze: the photographers gaze; the institutional/magazine gaze (evident in cropping, picture choice, captioning, etc.); the readers gaze; the non-Western subjects gaze; the explicit looking done by Westerners who are framed with locals in the photos; the gaze returned or refracted by the mirrors or camera in local hands; our own, academic gaze. See also their Reading National Geographic (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993). 19. Lutz and Collins, 364-365. See also Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 1975) 803-816; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1981); Frederic Jameson, Pleasure: A Political Issue, in Formations of Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1983) 1-14. 20. Spurr, 13. 21. Spurr, 13. Homi Bhabha, The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse, Screen 24 (6) 18-36. 22. George F. Will, The Viewers and the Viewed, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (19 November 1995) B-3. Will refers to a not-yet-published essay in The National Interest quarterly by Clifford Orwin entitled Compassion and the Globalization of the Spectacle of Suffering. See also Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times, Daedalus (Winter 1996) 1-23. 23. Bill Nichols, The Ethnographers Tale, in Visualizing Theory, 69-70. 24. Nichols, The Ethnographers Tale, 63. 25. James Clifford, On Ethnographic Authority, in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) 21-54. 26. Nichols, The Ethnographers Tale, 61. 27. David MacDougall, Whose Story Is It? in Visualizing Theory, 27-36. 28. Clifford, 51, 53. 29. MacDougall, 31. 30. MacDougall, 35. 31. Letter from Robert Bropho, Nyungah Elder and Spokesperson, of Swan Valley

644 Western Australia, posted 24 Jan 1996 on NATIVE-L Mailing List (native-l@gnosys.svle.ma.us) by mktrecon@iinet.net.au. 32. A follow-up posting dated 31 Jan 1996 from mktrecon@iinet.net.au on NATIVE-L Mailing List (native-l@gnosys.svle.ma.us) excerpted an article from the West Australia Newspaper that same day, written by Vanessa Gould, entitled Elders Receive Apology. The Gould article reports that Hollywood action star Steven Seagal has brokered an apology to eight Aboriginal elders from Marlo Morgan, the American author who claimed first-hand experience of a group of unknown Aborigines she called the wild ones. The New Age author of a best-selling book, Mutant Message From Down Under, claimed she was initiated by the tribe during a four-month walkabout in the central desert. In an emotional hour-long telephone call to Morgan in New York from Seagal's Hollywood studio on Monday, Morgan admitted for the first time to the eight elders that her work was fiction and a fabrication. . . .The group did not want her money or any compensation, just to stop the story. Morgan made $1.8 million from the first book's publishing rights, is likely to make $3 million from a second volume, and stood to make up to $90 million from lecturing and film rights. The book has been published in 11 languages. She had written a disclaimer in the second 1994 edition of her book, published by Harper Collins, which said the book was fiction, but based on her experiences in Australia. However she maintained this was only to protect the identity of the tribe. Dr. John Stanton, curator of the Bendt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, said the book contained misleading and damaging information about Aboriginal people which had pandered to the gullibility of Americans desperate for New Age ideas. . . . He was not sure whether the damage the book had done to the overseas image of Aboriginal culture, which was complex, diverse and vibrant, could be ever undone. 33. See Richard LaCourse, A Quickening Pace: Native American Media 1828 to 1994, Akwe:kon Journal/NMAI 11/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1994) 53-60. 34. For more on the Native American press, see Douglas Scoville, As Cultures Clash, Presstime (Jn. 1994) 22-25; James and Sharon Murphy, Let My People Know (U Oklahoma P, 1981); and Richard LaCourse, An Indian Perspective--Native American Journalism: An Overview, Journalism History 6/2 (Summer 1979) 34-35. 35. See the numerous articles in Tony Dowmunt, ed. Channels of Resistance: Global Television and Local Empowerment (London: BFI, 1993). Also, see Lorna Roth, Mohawk Airwaves and Cultural Challenges: Some Reflections on the Politics of Recognition and Cultural Appropriation After the Summer of 1990, Canadian Journal of Communication 18 (1993) 315-331; Ray Cook and Joseph Orozco, Native Community Radio: Its Function and Future, Akwe:kon Journal/NMAI 11/3-4 (Fall/Winter 1994) 61-67; and Marian Bredin, Ethnography and Communication: Approaches to Aboriginal Media, Canadian Journal of Communication 18 (1993)

645 297-313. 36. See Kathleen Sands and Allison Sekaquaptewa Lewis, Seeing With a Native Eye: a Hopi Film on Hopi, American Indian Quarterly 13/3 (Summer 1989) 387-96. Michele Stewarts doctoral work at the University of Minnesota on Native American activism through filmmaking is also a promising development in this area. See also Geoffrey White, Village Videos and Custom Chiefs: The Politics of Tradition, Cultural Survival Quarterly 15(2) 56-60, and Marcia Langton, Aboriginal Art and Film: the politics of representation, Race and Class 35/4 (1994) 89-106. 37. Gail Landsman and Sara Ciborski, Representation and Politics: Contesting Histories of the Iroquois, Cultural Anthropology 7/4 (1992) 425-447. Also see R. David Edmunds, Native Americans, New Voices: American Indian History, 1895-1995," American Historical Review 100/3 (June 1995) 717-740, and Daniel Richter, Whose Indian History? The William and Mary Quarterly, 50/2 (April 1993) 379-93. 38. Larry Gross, Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media, in Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter et al (London: Routledge, 1991) 130-149. 39. Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Activism (Boston: South End Press, 1991). 40. Ryan, 10, 79.