Oh Cinema: Films for the Trump Years, Part 18: Songs My Brothers Taught Me

A great deal of this series to date has focused on the Black experience in America, specifically the ongoing legacies of racism and slavery. Given how foundational the genocide of African-American slavery is to the development of this country, one of its two fundamental Original Sins, this is not unreasonable. However, it is equally important for me to make the time to reflect on the legacy of our second Original Sin, the genocide of Native Americans that began with the first arrivals of Columbus and other white explorers, even before the introduction of slavery, and that continues, unchecked, to this day. Persistent poverty and lack of federal funding and support, along with continued efforts to desecrate Native lands with abominations like the Keystone Pipeline, are the most current iterations of this mistreatment, which in turn have directly worsened the effects of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Navajo Nation in particular seeing some of the worst infection and mortality rates in the world.

In large part, my delay in being able to tackle this topic stems from a profound lack of access to proper Native American representation in media; as woefully underrepresented as Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American persons are within the upper ranks of both government and cultural industries, Native American representation is even worse: the list of registered Native Americans who have served in Congress is woefully short, and it was only last year that the first two Native American women were sworn into office. Thought she didn't win her race, in that same election cycle Paulette Jordan in Idaho became the first ever Native American woman to be nominated by a major party for a governorship.

This invisibility and erasure of Native Americans within American culture and politics extends to film as well, where the most well-known and lauded films with prominent depictions of Native American life tend to be White-oriented affairs like Dances With Wolves or Little Big Man, to say nothing of the looooong history of bigotry within the Western genres. As a result, it is extremely hard to find films made by Native American artists and starring Native American performers, since they never get widespread releases with big studio publicity and are usually not widely available on services like Netflix where most people watch their movies.

Thankfully, I was finally able to procure access to one of the more highly-regarded Native-America-centered films of recent years, the 2015 directorial debut of Chloé Zhao. Though Zhao herself is Chinese, the film features an all-Native cast and is largely focused on a grounds' eye view of daily life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Taking place over the course of, perhaps, a few weeks within one of the reservation's towns, the film is essentially a slice-of-life exploration of how the lives of our two main characters, the young siblings Jashuan and John Winters, slowly begin to shift as a result of the death of their father in a fire. Over the course of the funeral and its related scenes, we learn that their father had had a long history of womanizing, regularly divorcing and re-marrying; he apparently had a total of 25 children by 9 different woman, most of whom Jashuan and John seem to have either only previously met in passing, or had never met at all. Slowly, the connections between these half-siblings, with wide age and experience gaps between them all, begin to open up new possibilities for Jashuan and John, both of whom seem to be just wandering through life at the beginning.

The tragedy that sparks this is entirely random and cruel, mocking any effort to make sense of it. There is no closure, no body to be found. No proof is provided whether or not the fire was an accident or something more sinister. It simply happened, a father is gone, and the dispersed pieces of him left in the form of his many children have to decide for themselves what to make of it all. There will be no moment of clarity, of promise that everything will get better for these people. Just the resolve to keep living.

It is to the film's credit that these metatextual ways in which the events of the film reflect on the general struggles of Native American communities are never directly referenced. They are simply there for the observant viewer. The land of the reservation itself appears dusty, dry, and very flat, stretching out in all directions. The desolate views are a constant reminder that few of the Tribes that still exist live anywhere near there actual, historical lands; all modern reservations are the remnants of generations upon generations of efforts to deliberately uproot Native communities and force them from one place to another. Not only that, it was also very much intentional that Tribes be removed, forcefully if need be, from any place with valuable resources or good farming land; they were to be shunted off to the barest, bleakest places imaginable, so that any land that offered a perceived bounty could be offered up to white settlers.

Christianity and alcoholism play hugely important roles in the narrative as well. Jashuan and John's mother talks often of how she is trying to get over drinking by committing herself to the local church, to the point where her oldest child, a full brother to Jashuan and John who is currently serving out a prison sentence, snidely remarks that she better make sure she "doesn't use God as another man to abandon her kids for."

Alcoholism, like many other diseases, is another legacy of colonialism that still plagues Native communities to this day, where deliberate efforts in the past to spread addiction within Tribes so as to weaken them mirror the same ways other drugs have been used against Black Americans in more recent decades, often in combination with our prison-industrial complex that seeks to use the "justice" system as another tool of oppression. At the beginning of the film, we learn that John already has a bit of a reputation with the police for hustling alcohol between towns, since it's one of the easiest ways for him to make a quick buck. Christianity, too, is something grafted on to tribal existences, as it was forced on Tribe after Tribe through forced conversions and even the kidnapping and indoctrination of Native children, right up into the 20^th century.

And yet, they are still here, and they still live their lives, speak their languages, and endure. That alone is a miracle, but it also needs to be more actively seen and heard and felt amongst the rest of us if we are to finally break the systematic chains that continue to hobble and harm Native American communities. No true realization of justice will be complete until ALL of America's sins are accounted for.

I assumed at the beginning of the film that the focus would be on Jashuan and her relationship with John and her mother. It quickly becomes clear that this is not the case. Both she and John are in places of deep uncertainty regarding their futures that the death of father only accentuates, and both have lessons to learn from the extended family they reestablish a connection with in the wake of the funeral. Some offer advice gleaned from their more advanced years, some offer money or concrete jobs, but all have something to teach these two about living on the reservation, and about the enduring beauty of their land, their tribe, and above all else their family, that they hadn't truly seen before.

This is a film of quiet moments and seren beauty, tinged with the sadness of lives and existences that have been made as hard as possible by the callousness of the ghosts of the past. And yet their is a power and a nobility in surviving and making the most of it that cannot be forgotten. Watch more films like these, talk about them, and let's all commit to being truly inclusive in our calls for a better future.

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the TrumpYears:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13^th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Moonlight/Winter's Bone

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development