Next week the rest of the nation will see why. That’s when the Turner Broadcasting System kicks off an unprecedented, companywide assault on a single subject: the saga of the Western Hemisphere’s first inhabitants. On Oct. 10 TBS unveils “The Native Americans,” a three-night, six-hour historical documentary. On Oct. 16 TNT will present “Lakota Woman,” a two-hour film drama produced by Jane Fonda. On Oct. 3l CNN begins airing 20 daily news reports on contemporary issues confronting “The Invisible People.” And yes, there’s a soundtrack CD (produced by Bobble Robertson, who is part Mohawk) as well as a coffee-table book (Turner Publishing’s “The Native Americans,” which has sold nearly half a million copies since its premature arrival last year).
The question is inescapable: has “Captain Outrageous” suddenly gone P.C.? “I’m always interested in exploring subjects that haven’t really been covered,” says Turner. “Nobody’s ever taken a really in-depth look at our indigenous people. I’ve also always pulled for the underdog. And ever since Columbus landed, Native Americans have been the underdog.” Good for Ted, even if he still calls his baseball team the “Braves.” And good for Native Americans, who finally have the chance to tell their own story in their own voices: both the documentary and the drama rely heavily on American Indian directors, writers, actors and advisers. That just leaves the viewers. Is all–or even any – of this good television?
Right from the opening words of TBS’s six-hour history lesson (“Our memory is deep and proud, and the eagle holds it”) you know you’re getting a unique take. The Native American filmmakers who largely de-signed this documentary are out to overcome nearly 100 years of Hollywood Injunizing. Using all available tools–haunting photos and paintings, the sayings of Indian sachems, vivid re-enactments–they depict a culture that, before the white man’s arrival, existed in Edenesque harmony with the natural world.
Incongruously, Indians called this idyllic era “the dog days” (for their heavy dependence on canines), and the documentary uses it to forever bury all those primitive-savage stereotypes. Among just the California tribes, more than 200 distinct languages were spoken. Hunters profusely apologized to the spirits of the animals they were about to slaughter. Material wealth was accumulated solely to redistribute, “When you gave it all away,” explains one of the show’s Native guides, “that’s when your name was something.” Yes, there’s more than a little idealizing here: intertribal warfare (including cannibalism) barely gets flicked at. Yet that’s at least more forgivable than the Hollywood demonizing that went before. This is, after all, the story’s other side.
Certainly the horrific impact of European contact is inarguable–and no piece of television has brought it home more harrowingly. Indians gave the new arrivals tomatoes, corn, clams, turkeys, antiseptics and anesthetics. In return they got syphilis, smallpox, tuberculosis, alcohol and the gun. The documentary’s most chilling segment focuses on the government’s campaign to “take the Indian out of the child.” Indian youngsters were shipped to prisonlike boarding schools, where their heads were shorn and their minds stuffed with white culture. Those who continued to speak their tribal languages were beaten.
As an exercise in history, “The Native Americans” may not escape scholarly challenge. For openers, its claim that the Iroquois Confederacy provided the model for the U.S. Constitution will come as a revelation to those who thought the Magna Char-ta had something to do with it. As television. the documentary risks afflicting viewers with repetitive eyestrain injury. Even the most evocative shots of sunset-silhouetted tepees and smoking pipes begin to irritate the kajillionth time around. But the narration glows with lyrical Indian images and cadences: this is history as a tone poem. In one of the most memorable blends of picture and sound, the screen shows a lone brave racing across an empty plain as a voice reverently eulogizes the “buffalo runners”: hunters of extraordinary courage who ran before the great buffalo herds to lure them over deadly cliffs.
The documentary’s most intriguing figures, however, are very much alive. They’re all those contemporary Native Americans, from housewives to Harvard Ph.D.s, who are trying to reclaim their culture by connecting with their heritage, We watch them re-creating ancestral canoe trips, building traditional Indian communities, teaching their children Native languages and besieging the government for a culturally meaningful education. Recalls a Cheyenne historian of his first-grade reading lessons: “The only relevant thing about those ‘Dick and Jane’ books was Spot.” That’s about the only light note in these entire six hours, and yet you come away feeling strangely uplifted. This documentary is the most compelling study of America’s least-known people we’re ever likely to get.
Jane Fonda’s “Lakota Woman,” on the other hand, wants so badly to inspire us that it lists perilously close to preachiness. Based on a best-selling autobiography, the film tells the true story of Mary Crow Dog, one of the 2,000 Native Americans who, enraged by injustices, seized the hamlet of Wounded Knee, S.D. in 1973. The bloody, 71-day occupation of the infamous massacre site became a defining moment for the nascent American Indian Movement. But the film is really about the spiritual odyssey of Mary (played by a young half-Cree named Irene Bedard) from reservation nobody to drunken drifter to proud Indian activist. “Lakota Woman” has the virtue of its defect. If the acting and writing sometimes seem annoyingly strident, many of those who created the film-both on camera and off are real Native Americans who joined in the stand at Wounded Knee. Simply by their presence, they transform what might have been just another message flick into a work of credibility and power.
In the end, though, this is Ted Turner’s excellent adventure, and he deserves a cheer. Coincidentally, Turner shocked the press with another outrageous performance last week. The TBS chairman publicly (and at times unprintably) lambasted one of his biggest shareholders, Time Warner, for roadblocking his efforts to buy a major network. Uncook for sure, but suddenly the prospect of Turner running a CBS or NBC doesn’t seem so scary. After all, when’s the last time a broadcasting mogul enlisted every one of his divisions in an educational crusade? The man who pioneered the satellite-linked superstation and the all-news cable channel may sometimes speak with loose tongue, but that’s just one more facet of his fearlessness. Turner is, in a way, the television tribe’s lone “runner.”
