"Reel Navajo": The Linguistic Creation of Indigenous Screen Memories

Abstract

As Philip Deloria reminds us, popular cultures are key sites for the “production of expectations,” and as a major form of popular culture, film has figured prominently in the circulation and reproduction of expectations about Native American peoples since the early twentieth century.1 Deloria suggests that such expectations assume a status quo that is often built around failure— a failure to engage technology, thwart Manifest Destiny, exist with non-Natives in a contemporaneous modernity, and—as many of the articles in this issue illustrate—maintain their heritage languages or speak in otherwise “correct” ways. Visual representations such as film and video, tools of what James Faris called “the gaze of Western humanism,” have been integral to a multitude of colonial projects such as salvage ethnography and the promotion of government policies, and they continue to fuel expectations and misrepresent histories in a range of genres and styles including children’s movies.2 They also have been most often produced in colonial languages. Due to assumptions of reality and objectivity—as well as the expectation of spectacle, illusion, and entertainment—that are often embedded in films, they have been especially powerful in reflecting and recreating dominant histories and ideologies about Native peoples.3 They are also powerful tools in countering such expectations. Throughout the past twenty years, there has been a significant increase in the number of films in a variety of styles and genres written, produced, and