Post by blackcrowheart on Mar 8, 2006 16:00:02 GMT -5
"Trudell" looks at noted Indian poet-activist
NEW YORK NY
Daniel Garrett 3/7/2006
www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=76\
27
<http://www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=7\
627>
Every culture has its rebels, every culture has its wise people, and for
Native Americans the two are one in John Trudell. Political history and
personal tragedy seem to have applied the pressure that produced this
rough diamond: he is hard, rare, sharp, and immensely valuable,
something attested to by his comrades, friends, and family—among
them, Gary Farmer, Wilma Mankiller, Jackson Browne, Robert Redford and
Val Kilmer—featured in the documentary, Trudell, directed and
produced by Heather Rae, a Cherokee who worked on the project for more
than ten years. The film's credits list Russell Friedenberg as
writer, and editor Gregory Bayne and cinematographer Gilbert Salas as
sharing some of their duties with Rae. The documentary was screened at
the Sundance film festival in January 2005, and opened a little over a
year later in Manhattan and San Francisco in February 2006. There are
films that seek to give us more of the same—the same old stories,
the same old ideas, the same old feelings—and Trudell is not at all
one of those films. The focus on nature, spirituality, community, and
politics is sometimes soothing and sometimes scathing in its truth.
Spirituality has been for Native Americans, as for African-Americans, a
path to personal dignity, social morality, and public meaning; and in
the film John Trudell talks about the importance of valuing the earth,
of reconciling ourselves to the requirements of the land, and of being
cognizant of what we leave to future generations. Robert Redford
describes conversations with Trudell as exciting, and Wilma Mankiller
talks about how essential Trudell has been to articulating Native
American concerns.
"Why don't we have the respect and dignity of all men?" is a
recurring question of his. Cruelty and brutality are spoken of by
Trudell because they are what have been demonstrated most consistently
by official American society to the indigenous people of North America.
The documentary is admirable, dramatic, informative; it is a view of an
alternative reality, one in which the shards of Indian history are
brought together to form a mosaic. Trudell's face and form can be
read therein—but so can the repressed history of America.
"Assembling an impressive collage of newsreels, live performances
and interviews with admirers, Trudell delivers a fascinating account of
its subject's most turbulent crusades," wrote Jeannette
Catsoulis in The New York Times (February 24, 2006). She also noted,
"No one in the film has a bad word to say about Mr. Trudell, despite
his 17,000-page F.B.I. dossier."
Trudell's daughters pay tribute to him in the film, talk about the
heritage he shared with them, and the unconditional love. Trudell, a
mixed blood Sioux born in 1946, says his Nebraska childhood was poor but
he never felt deprived; and after his mother died, he realized he
"didn't like God" (and in the film, he recites a poem in
which he complains about Christians to God). Told he has potential he
leaves school; already feeling as if he was somebody, he didn't want
to become somebody (else). He volunteered for the military, the Navy,
and was given a tour of duty (1963-1967) in Vietnam; and he says he made
the right choice of military branch as the Vietnamese had no navy. With
other American natives, he took over the abandoned Alcatraz Island, the
former United States prison complex. To see film interviews from that
time is to become reacquainted with a period of radical social change
and possibility; ideas and practices were embraced with force. Trudell
says the Alcatraz Island takeover was a legal, not a moral, issue; and
he cites various treaties the government had made with natives, then
betrayed. With the takeover of Alcatraz, for the first time, young
natives were standing up, says Wilma Mankiller, a United Nations advisor
and the former chief of the Cherokee Nation. Trudell, seen then holding
a child, and talking about Native American hopes, at that time is at his
most hopeful and charming. The interviews with the participants can
bring tears to the eyes, but their puritanical inclination may have
prevented a success they could have built on: they were offered a lease
to half of Alcatraz Island, with funding and the proviso that they act
as caretakers of the island. They said no to that; and soon a government
assault team arrived, and on June 11, 1971, the natives were removed.
They had been there for about twenty-one months, beginning in 1969.
In the film, one official government document is quoted as saying that
John Trudell is extremely eloquent and that made him extremely
dangerous: that is why government files on him totaled more than 17,000
pages. Trudell says many things—about the alienation of people from
the land, how many do not have the spirit to live; and that people must
control the land to be able to change the systems that take place on the
land. "The great lie is that it is civilization—it is the most
bloodthirsty, brutal system," he says. (Trudell also states a belief
in genetic memory, a comment that requires discussion and evaluation, as
far as I am concerned.) Trudell reminds us that people have
traditionally lived in tribes; and affirms that accepting sky as father
and earth as mother gives (humbling, useful) perspective.
"All I did was talk, and they cracked down hard just for that,"
Trudell says. Robert Redford says he, Redford, was amazed that a
government would try to dismantle a culture by first destroying a
people's spirit. To hear a figure such as Redford—someone most
of us take for the mainstream—say something like that adds great
weight to the film and to one's sense of the integrity and value of
Trudell. Trudell's courage and honesty enables that of others.
However, such testaments have made more than one critical commentator
suspicious. "Trudell is an entrancing character and quite
camera-friendly. But the film is so one-sided as to put the
disinterested viewer on guard, which I don't think is Rae's
intention," wrote Walter Addiego in the San Francisco Chronicle
(February 3, 2006).
"The backstory portion of the film, though, chock-full of archival
footage and contemporary interviews with Trudell and his American Indian
Movement cohorts, is riveting," asserted Mark Holcomb in an
otherwise snarky Village Voice review (viewable online as of February
21, 2006).
John Trudell says that the American Indian Movement's focus was
community, the way of the tribe, and legal issues. Trudell was a
national spokesman for the movement from the early 1970s to 1979. He and
others say that just as the government's counter intelligence
program (Cointelpro) infiltrated the civil rights movement as part of an
attempt to subvert it from within and without, it did the same to the
American Indian Movement. Such efforts preceded the siege of Wounded
Knee in South Dakota, where many native lands were being poisoned by
various mining concerns. (Apparently much of the country's mineral
deposits are on native lands.) We see film of the government's
military response: armored tanks, helicopters, and men with machine
guns. In one conflict, government agents die, with three native men
arrested and charged; and there is official propaganda that promotes a
paranoid climate against the natives, describing them as being a
terrorist threat. Smartly, the American Indian Movement did local
outreach in Cedar Rapids, meeting with many people to introduce
themselves and explain their concerns. When two of the men are tried,
they plead self-defense and are acquitted, but Leonard Pelletier, who is
tried in another location, is not allowed to make the same plea: and he
is convicted. ("Case was covered more extensively in another
previous documentary, Michael Apted's Michael AptedIncident at
Oglala (1992), which also featured interviews with Trudell," said
Variety's Joe Leydon, February 24, 2005, after screening Trudell at
the Sundance festival January 29, 2005).
The most poignant part of the film concerns John Trudell's marriage
to his wife Tina, and their children. "Me and Tina were a good
team," Trudell says. He talks about her intelligence, how they
complemented each other (he notes, humorously, that her study of
psychology prepared her to deal with him). She traveled with him, and
they worked together, but she wanted to return to her home, Duck Valley
(Nevada), and work there: "Tina was from there, they knew her,
trusted her, she was educated, and knew how things worked," he says.
Trudell burned an American flag in front of the F.B.I.'s Washington
headquarters; and twelve hours later his wife, their children, and
Tina's mother were dead in a suspicious Nevada house fire. The
government's Bureau of Indian Affairs did a lackluster
investigation, and a private arson investigator did not support the
Bureau's analysis of the fire's cause. Trudell, who says that to
say his wife was killed because of his actions discounts her own value
and the threat she posed, declares that he died with the killing of his
family, that he had to die in order to get through that time; and, in
his grief, he went to Canada and began to write. Kris Kristofferson says
that Trudell's family's death made him fearless.
Trudell declares that he requested asylum from Canada not to embarrass
the United States but because he needed refuge as part of the real war
he was part of, the centuries-old war waged against natives.
Someone, a foolish reporter, asks Trudell about celebrating Columbus
Day; and he says asking Natives to celebrate Columbus is like asking
Americans to celebrate Osama Bin Laden. The arrival of Europeans on
native lands centuries ago was devastating, like a virus, he asserts. He
sees European nations as the parents of America, as also to blame; and
thinks that citizens in developed countries—who enjoy the fruits of
their countries wealth—have a responsibility for the policies of
those countries, a very succinct charge, and a practical conclusion.
The film "rhymes" Trudell's presence with a coyote moving
across a field, suggesting they share a similar nature. The young
Trudell seemed to me to be intense and open, the older Trudell sadder,
less hopeful, but reflective. He's one of our philosophers, someone
says, we used to have more of them.
Trudell was lucky enough to find a talented musician who wanted to work
with him, a Kiowa native who had worked with well-known folk and rock
figures, Jesse Ed Davis. Together they did several music albums,
including A.K.A. Graffiti Man and Heart Jump Bouquet. (It seems that
Trudell on his album cover spelled graffiti with one f, but doubled the
t.) Trudell, whose work is centered on the ideas and observations in his
lyrics, has said that he writes songs for all people. He, also, has
produced music with guitarist Mark Sharp, Fables and Other Realities,
and with his children, Child's Voice. Angelina Jolie, actor and
activist, produced one of his albums, Bone Days; and she is one of the
executive producers of the film Trudell. (Trudell has also appeared as
an actor in several films, such as Powwow Highway, Thunderheart, Smoke
Signals, and A Thousand Roads.)
"Trudell remains interesting, but appreciably less compelling, while
charting the activist's evolution into a poet and musician following
the mysterious deaths of his wife, children and mother-in-law in a 1979
house fire that many claim was deliberately set by political enemies.
Footage of Trudell in concert as a spoken-word artist accompanied by
musicians indicate his work, however impassioned, is very much an
acquired taste. Here and elsewhere, however, Trudell comes across as a
charismatic figure whose gravely thoughtful demeanor is leavened with
self-effacing humor," wrote Joe Leydon, Variety (February 24, 2005).
Yet, the film, which has been shown at about twenty film festivals, is
the kind of work that may be seen one day as a building block of a new
civilization (or the renaissance of an old one). Usually montages are
dull, but in this film's combining of traditional native dancing
with nature and communal and political scenes, it achieves formal beauty
and cultural memory. The political history the film tells, and the life
it records, are important.
"Men cannot destroy the earth, only man's ability to live with
the earth," Trudell concludes.
Daniel Garrett, a graduate of the New School for Social Research, is a
writer who lives in New York. He wrote a piece called "The Barbarian
Invasions" for Offscreen.com in which he discussed Haircuts Hurt, a
ten-minute short film written and directed by Randy Redroad (Cherokee),
and Cowboys and Indians, written by Andrew Rai Berzins and directed by
Norma Bailey. His work has also appeared in The African,
AllAboutJazz.com, American Book Review, The Audubon Activist, Changing
Men, The Humanist, PopMatters.com, The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
and World Literature Today.
NEW YORK NY
Daniel Garrett 3/7/2006
www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=76\
27
<http://www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=7\
627>
Every culture has its rebels, every culture has its wise people, and for
Native Americans the two are one in John Trudell. Political history and
personal tragedy seem to have applied the pressure that produced this
rough diamond: he is hard, rare, sharp, and immensely valuable,
something attested to by his comrades, friends, and family—among
them, Gary Farmer, Wilma Mankiller, Jackson Browne, Robert Redford and
Val Kilmer—featured in the documentary, Trudell, directed and
produced by Heather Rae, a Cherokee who worked on the project for more
than ten years. The film's credits list Russell Friedenberg as
writer, and editor Gregory Bayne and cinematographer Gilbert Salas as
sharing some of their duties with Rae. The documentary was screened at
the Sundance film festival in January 2005, and opened a little over a
year later in Manhattan and San Francisco in February 2006. There are
films that seek to give us more of the same—the same old stories,
the same old ideas, the same old feelings—and Trudell is not at all
one of those films. The focus on nature, spirituality, community, and
politics is sometimes soothing and sometimes scathing in its truth.
Spirituality has been for Native Americans, as for African-Americans, a
path to personal dignity, social morality, and public meaning; and in
the film John Trudell talks about the importance of valuing the earth,
of reconciling ourselves to the requirements of the land, and of being
cognizant of what we leave to future generations. Robert Redford
describes conversations with Trudell as exciting, and Wilma Mankiller
talks about how essential Trudell has been to articulating Native
American concerns.
"Why don't we have the respect and dignity of all men?" is a
recurring question of his. Cruelty and brutality are spoken of by
Trudell because they are what have been demonstrated most consistently
by official American society to the indigenous people of North America.
The documentary is admirable, dramatic, informative; it is a view of an
alternative reality, one in which the shards of Indian history are
brought together to form a mosaic. Trudell's face and form can be
read therein—but so can the repressed history of America.
"Assembling an impressive collage of newsreels, live performances
and interviews with admirers, Trudell delivers a fascinating account of
its subject's most turbulent crusades," wrote Jeannette
Catsoulis in The New York Times (February 24, 2006). She also noted,
"No one in the film has a bad word to say about Mr. Trudell, despite
his 17,000-page F.B.I. dossier."
Trudell's daughters pay tribute to him in the film, talk about the
heritage he shared with them, and the unconditional love. Trudell, a
mixed blood Sioux born in 1946, says his Nebraska childhood was poor but
he never felt deprived; and after his mother died, he realized he
"didn't like God" (and in the film, he recites a poem in
which he complains about Christians to God). Told he has potential he
leaves school; already feeling as if he was somebody, he didn't want
to become somebody (else). He volunteered for the military, the Navy,
and was given a tour of duty (1963-1967) in Vietnam; and he says he made
the right choice of military branch as the Vietnamese had no navy. With
other American natives, he took over the abandoned Alcatraz Island, the
former United States prison complex. To see film interviews from that
time is to become reacquainted with a period of radical social change
and possibility; ideas and practices were embraced with force. Trudell
says the Alcatraz Island takeover was a legal, not a moral, issue; and
he cites various treaties the government had made with natives, then
betrayed. With the takeover of Alcatraz, for the first time, young
natives were standing up, says Wilma Mankiller, a United Nations advisor
and the former chief of the Cherokee Nation. Trudell, seen then holding
a child, and talking about Native American hopes, at that time is at his
most hopeful and charming. The interviews with the participants can
bring tears to the eyes, but their puritanical inclination may have
prevented a success they could have built on: they were offered a lease
to half of Alcatraz Island, with funding and the proviso that they act
as caretakers of the island. They said no to that; and soon a government
assault team arrived, and on June 11, 1971, the natives were removed.
They had been there for about twenty-one months, beginning in 1969.
In the film, one official government document is quoted as saying that
John Trudell is extremely eloquent and that made him extremely
dangerous: that is why government files on him totaled more than 17,000
pages. Trudell says many things—about the alienation of people from
the land, how many do not have the spirit to live; and that people must
control the land to be able to change the systems that take place on the
land. "The great lie is that it is civilization—it is the most
bloodthirsty, brutal system," he says. (Trudell also states a belief
in genetic memory, a comment that requires discussion and evaluation, as
far as I am concerned.) Trudell reminds us that people have
traditionally lived in tribes; and affirms that accepting sky as father
and earth as mother gives (humbling, useful) perspective.
"All I did was talk, and they cracked down hard just for that,"
Trudell says. Robert Redford says he, Redford, was amazed that a
government would try to dismantle a culture by first destroying a
people's spirit. To hear a figure such as Redford—someone most
of us take for the mainstream—say something like that adds great
weight to the film and to one's sense of the integrity and value of
Trudell. Trudell's courage and honesty enables that of others.
However, such testaments have made more than one critical commentator
suspicious. "Trudell is an entrancing character and quite
camera-friendly. But the film is so one-sided as to put the
disinterested viewer on guard, which I don't think is Rae's
intention," wrote Walter Addiego in the San Francisco Chronicle
(February 3, 2006).
"The backstory portion of the film, though, chock-full of archival
footage and contemporary interviews with Trudell and his American Indian
Movement cohorts, is riveting," asserted Mark Holcomb in an
otherwise snarky Village Voice review (viewable online as of February
21, 2006).
John Trudell says that the American Indian Movement's focus was
community, the way of the tribe, and legal issues. Trudell was a
national spokesman for the movement from the early 1970s to 1979. He and
others say that just as the government's counter intelligence
program (Cointelpro) infiltrated the civil rights movement as part of an
attempt to subvert it from within and without, it did the same to the
American Indian Movement. Such efforts preceded the siege of Wounded
Knee in South Dakota, where many native lands were being poisoned by
various mining concerns. (Apparently much of the country's mineral
deposits are on native lands.) We see film of the government's
military response: armored tanks, helicopters, and men with machine
guns. In one conflict, government agents die, with three native men
arrested and charged; and there is official propaganda that promotes a
paranoid climate against the natives, describing them as being a
terrorist threat. Smartly, the American Indian Movement did local
outreach in Cedar Rapids, meeting with many people to introduce
themselves and explain their concerns. When two of the men are tried,
they plead self-defense and are acquitted, but Leonard Pelletier, who is
tried in another location, is not allowed to make the same plea: and he
is convicted. ("Case was covered more extensively in another
previous documentary, Michael Apted's Michael AptedIncident at
Oglala (1992), which also featured interviews with Trudell," said
Variety's Joe Leydon, February 24, 2005, after screening Trudell at
the Sundance festival January 29, 2005).
The most poignant part of the film concerns John Trudell's marriage
to his wife Tina, and their children. "Me and Tina were a good
team," Trudell says. He talks about her intelligence, how they
complemented each other (he notes, humorously, that her study of
psychology prepared her to deal with him). She traveled with him, and
they worked together, but she wanted to return to her home, Duck Valley
(Nevada), and work there: "Tina was from there, they knew her,
trusted her, she was educated, and knew how things worked," he says.
Trudell burned an American flag in front of the F.B.I.'s Washington
headquarters; and twelve hours later his wife, their children, and
Tina's mother were dead in a suspicious Nevada house fire. The
government's Bureau of Indian Affairs did a lackluster
investigation, and a private arson investigator did not support the
Bureau's analysis of the fire's cause. Trudell, who says that to
say his wife was killed because of his actions discounts her own value
and the threat she posed, declares that he died with the killing of his
family, that he had to die in order to get through that time; and, in
his grief, he went to Canada and began to write. Kris Kristofferson says
that Trudell's family's death made him fearless.
Trudell declares that he requested asylum from Canada not to embarrass
the United States but because he needed refuge as part of the real war
he was part of, the centuries-old war waged against natives.
Someone, a foolish reporter, asks Trudell about celebrating Columbus
Day; and he says asking Natives to celebrate Columbus is like asking
Americans to celebrate Osama Bin Laden. The arrival of Europeans on
native lands centuries ago was devastating, like a virus, he asserts. He
sees European nations as the parents of America, as also to blame; and
thinks that citizens in developed countries—who enjoy the fruits of
their countries wealth—have a responsibility for the policies of
those countries, a very succinct charge, and a practical conclusion.
The film "rhymes" Trudell's presence with a coyote moving
across a field, suggesting they share a similar nature. The young
Trudell seemed to me to be intense and open, the older Trudell sadder,
less hopeful, but reflective. He's one of our philosophers, someone
says, we used to have more of them.
Trudell was lucky enough to find a talented musician who wanted to work
with him, a Kiowa native who had worked with well-known folk and rock
figures, Jesse Ed Davis. Together they did several music albums,
including A.K.A. Graffiti Man and Heart Jump Bouquet. (It seems that
Trudell on his album cover spelled graffiti with one f, but doubled the
t.) Trudell, whose work is centered on the ideas and observations in his
lyrics, has said that he writes songs for all people. He, also, has
produced music with guitarist Mark Sharp, Fables and Other Realities,
and with his children, Child's Voice. Angelina Jolie, actor and
activist, produced one of his albums, Bone Days; and she is one of the
executive producers of the film Trudell. (Trudell has also appeared as
an actor in several films, such as Powwow Highway, Thunderheart, Smoke
Signals, and A Thousand Roads.)
"Trudell remains interesting, but appreciably less compelling, while
charting the activist's evolution into a poet and musician following
the mysterious deaths of his wife, children and mother-in-law in a 1979
house fire that many claim was deliberately set by political enemies.
Footage of Trudell in concert as a spoken-word artist accompanied by
musicians indicate his work, however impassioned, is very much an
acquired taste. Here and elsewhere, however, Trudell comes across as a
charismatic figure whose gravely thoughtful demeanor is leavened with
self-effacing humor," wrote Joe Leydon, Variety (February 24, 2005).
Yet, the film, which has been shown at about twenty film festivals, is
the kind of work that may be seen one day as a building block of a new
civilization (or the renaissance of an old one). Usually montages are
dull, but in this film's combining of traditional native dancing
with nature and communal and political scenes, it achieves formal beauty
and cultural memory. The political history the film tells, and the life
it records, are important.
"Men cannot destroy the earth, only man's ability to live with
the earth," Trudell concludes.
Daniel Garrett, a graduate of the New School for Social Research, is a
writer who lives in New York. He wrote a piece called "The Barbarian
Invasions" for Offscreen.com in which he discussed Haircuts Hurt, a
ten-minute short film written and directed by Randy Redroad (Cherokee),
and Cowboys and Indians, written by Andrew Rai Berzins and directed by
Norma Bailey. His work has also appeared in The African,
AllAboutJazz.com, American Book Review, The Audubon Activist, Changing
Men, The Humanist, PopMatters.com, The Review of Contemporary Fiction,
and World Literature Today.