Interview with Michael Smith (52), Lakota, (organizer of the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco) and Alex Rice (Indian actress). Translated by Annette Rukwied

Stuttgarter Zeitung, November 22nd, 2004

First Nations Michael Smith and Alex Rice on the Situation of Native peoples in Canada and the U.S.

Alex Rice (30), Mohawk, is one of today` s most important actresses in Canada.
In the course of Stuttgart` s first Native American Indian Film Festival, Rupert Koppold and Michael Weißenborn talked with them about the problems and hopes of their peoples.

Q: Native Americans are economically successful and have improved their educational situation. Is there something like an “Indian Renaissance”?

Alex Rice: The Mohawk are souvereign people, and they have a growing number of educated people among them. In Kahanawake, Quebec, where I am from, we gain information on politics drawing on our own media. We defend our rights and our identity, and we want the Canadian government to pay credit to the contracts sealed with us. We neither long to be Canadians nor Americans.

Michael Smith: Native Communities in the U.S have lived to see an overall renaissance. The National Congress of American Indians – the oldest civil rights movement in the U.S. – is growing and has gained more influence due to the relative wealth of some tribes. Some of the most well-off tribes live in California, where they are able to influence political process. However, it is everywhere in the U.S. that Native populations are growing; they are better at taking issues like health care and police force into their own hands. In other parts of the country, though, there` s still a great deal of poverty, such as at my own Lakota reservation in Montana where the unemployment rate is about 70 %. We cannot run a casino there because that North Eastern part of the state is far too remote. So, the general assumption that all tribes are wealthy is a wrong one.

Q: You have occupied the island of Alcatraz in 1969. In 1973, there was the occupation of Wounded Knee. Are spectacular actions like that still asked for today?

Michael Smith: Yes, the attention of the media is still needed today. When I joined the people at Alcatraz, I was a high school student. I belonged to those young people that were drawn to this kind of actions. Wounded Knee was a symbolical act as well. It touched the flame of many American Indians, and it was the base for their inner growth, even though the plan to make Alcatraz a cultural center was to fail eventually.

Alex Rice: In 1990, my community at Kahnawake and security people were facing one another for 78 days in an armed encounter. This happened when we wanted to stop the extension of a golf course on our land, which is also an old burial ground. The Canadian government sent police and armed troops. We still are in possession of the land, despite the fact that we are not yet entitled to it on legal terms. This is an action that brought together First Nations all over Canada.

Q: Are Mohawks and Lakotas familiar with one other` s culture?

Alex Rice: As an actress, I have gotten to know other traditions. Our languages and songs are different, but our basic values as Native People are similar. We have a kind of fundamental understanding of each other.

Q: In how far is the situation of Canadian First Nations different from the situation in the U.S ?

Alex Rice: Canadian Indians have better access to health care and cultural programs. In the U.S., the fight for funding of schools and film programs is a much tougher one. But racism is the same problem in both countries. In Québec, for example, the French Canadians want to create a nation withi the Canadian nation. But much of the land they claim for their independent state is really ours.

Michael Smith: In the U.S., more than 65 % of the Native Americans live in urban areas. They have hardly any access to those welfare programs found at the reservations. A lot of Indians are second or third generation urban residents. Their kids have married into other ethnic groups. They don` t profit from support we are supposed to get because they aren`t registered as members of a Native tribe.

Q: Who decides who is an American Indian?

Michael Smith: Every tribe has its own rules. For the government, then, you have to be one quarter American Indian.

Q: Does it hurt to see the same old Westerns broadcast on television?

Michael Smith: Yes, it hurts when by the late 1980s cable T.V. took over and a new generation of viewers were shown those same old movies that had been cast out be the 1970s. These stereotypes – the burning of wagons, the obstacles posed to a god-given takeover of the West-all of that harmed a new generation.

Q: Does the Art of cinema help you to keep in touch with your own traditions?

Alex Rice: Making movies enables me to fuse the ancient culture of my people with my everyday life. For my roles, I bring with me a feeling of my traditions and of who my peoples are. As First Nations, we live in the past and in the present. We can live in our world, but we are aware for our roots. Most people don` t know anything about us. In Hollywood movies, we only exist as Indian trouble-makers. We are invisible. Thus, in our own living-rooms, people act as if we have become extinct. Hollywood is really not interested in getting to know us.

Photos
1. Michael Smith (Photo: Gunter Lange)
2. Dan Golding (Photo: Dr. Sonja Schierle)

[south-west German radio station].

In Stuttgart nearly half of the people going to the cinema purchased a season ticket. Some people had travelled from very distant regions of Germany and some even arrived from Denmark and the Netherlands.

Thanks must be given for the success of the festival to the many people who put in so much enthusiasm and inspiration. They are as much a part of it and by committing themselves helped towards realising a very meaningful and effective idea. The Stuttgart film festival team, the partners from Zurich and Gunter Lange as artistic director of the festival as a whole greatly appreciate this help and would like to offer the sponsors their warm thanks.

Our Native American guests were also very enthusiastic about the organization and interest shown by the audiences and felt very warmly welcomed in both Stuttgart and Zurich and will return to the “New World” taking fond memories with them. The Canadian actress Alex Rice commented that it was one of the best organized film festivasl in which she had ever participated.

During the course of the film festival many informative discussions were held and many personal contacts were made that all point towards the future. Indianer & Inuit, the first North American Native Film Festival in Europe has paved the way for further cooperative projects; the public interest that was displayed suggests that the festival should be established as a very special intercultural event in Stuttgart and Zurich.

Planning for the next film festival scheduled to be held in the spring of 2007 is already under way. The film festival team would be very pleased if all the sponsors and cooperation partners were to continue to show their support.

Comments from the press on Indianer & Inuit:

Südkurier Konstanz, Weekend Supplement, 13.11.2004
Europe’s first “Indianer & Inuit Filmfestival” portrayed both legend and truth. Ever since Kevin Costner’s modern classic, “Dances With Wolves”, the image of the noble savage dominates. Thanks to “Winnetou” and the German author, Karl May, this image has been apparent in Europe for a longer period of time. From the point of view of American Indians, who prefer to call themselves “Native Americans”, both images are incorrect.

They prefer films such as “Smoke Signals” in which they are portrayed as very normal people who face the social squalor they meet in the reservations with humour and irony… Typical for today’s placement in society and the image of the Native American is their role in advertising: here they are portrayed as either totally stupid or as representing the environmental conscience… Gunter Lange’s mission is not aimed at the Native Americans but at the Europeans. Months of preparation were required to organize the first Indianer & Inuit film festival on the old continent. No other could be more predestined for this task as he: Lange was one of the first white people – and the very first European to work for the American Indian Film Institute and Festival in San Francisco…

Stuttgarter Zeitung, culture section, 17.11.2004
In many of the films shown at the festival it is noticeable how courage is displayed on the inside and on the outside an impression is made… Rolled over by the image machinery of the white man and pressed into a grotesque clown and bad man role: No-one can blame the Native Americans for feeling like this. The cinema was actually used as propaganda for white America with the Cowboy and Indian film genre falsifying history. This experience with cinema is by no means a closed book. It influences how Native American film-makers think about their medium and their audiences…

Esslinger Zeitung, Ez-Online, 17.11. 2004
“ Ja, des war schee, aber heut` gibt´s koine Indianer meh,” Grachmusikoff
“ That was great, but now there are no more Indians left” – the words sung by Swabian rock band, Grachmusikoff. But they are still there, the Native Americans. And some of them even make films about themselves and their lives… And now, the visitors of the first Indianer and Inuit film festival on German ground will have to take leave of the typical Cowboy and Indian film image of the Indian on the war path…

Leonberger Zeitung, culture section, 18.11. 2004
The Native American world is Europe’s counter-draft to our material society. It is not surprising that a “real” Indian cannot identify himself with this type of portrayal or in the stereotypes described by the US American film industry… Festival director and expert in Native American film is Gunter Lange, who lives in Konstanz, Germany. A few years ago, he worked for the American Indian Film Institute and Festival in San Francisco and now he is using his lively contacts…

Südkurier Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, 22.11. 2004
A successful premiere…And the community of Native Americans will definitely hear about its success when the guests that arrived from the USA and Canada return home to their tribal brothers and sisters… “At home these films are only shown at Native American film festivals, which is why it’s so wonderful that so many people here in Stuttgart have been so interested,” said Mohawk actress Alex Rice at the farewell event, clearly moved. Michael Smith, director and founder of the AIFF, was also overwhelmed, “I would never have thought that Konstanz-man Gunter Lange’s dream of presenting our films in Germany and Switzerland when he was with us in 2001 on an internship would so quickly become reality…”

Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger, 25.11. 2004
Aside from campfire romanticism, tepees, feathered headdresses and war paint, in his film “Skins”, the director Chris Eyre brutally describes daily life in an Indian reservation, where life expectancy is half of the American average. In cooperation with the North American Native Museum and many other cooperation partners in Germany and Switzerland, the “Film Podium” presents a selection of films from the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco.
The festival’s emphasis is on documentary films that mainly devote themselves to the US government’s exploitation of mineral resources and the related destruction of Native American culture.

Zürcher Wochenzeitung, 25.11.2004, page 23
“ You must try to look as if you’ve just come back from hunting buffalo” – “But hey, our ancestors didn’t hunt buffalo, they were fishermen!” objected Thomas, whereupon Victor said so what, no-one’s interested in fishermen.

The scene from the film, “Smoke Signals” (USA, 1998) reveals a lot about the Indian cliché – which has even become part of the Native American way of thinking – or as the film puts it,: “The only thing more embarrassing than Indians on TV is Indians who watch Indians on TV…” Since then more and more Native Americans and Inuit have placed themselves behind the camera to record their own reality in the form of movies and documentaries – far away from the Hollywood cliché.

Photos
1. From „Where the Spirit Lives“
2. James L. Kinistino (Photo: Dr. Sonja Schierle)
3. Tamara Podemski (Photo: Dr. Sonja Schierle)
4. Gunter Lange, Alex Rice, Anette Ruckwied (Photo: Dr. Sonja Schierle)