Barbenheimer and Indigenous Erasure, Again
A non-chalant reference to genocide and the absense of mention of nuclear testing on Native American's lands, waters, and territory, proves again, Hollywood hates NDN's.
Reservation Dogs by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi has ushered in a new era in film and television for Indigenous people in Hollywood - one of respect and narrative sovereignty, allowing Indigenous Peoples to tell their own stories their way. Reservation Dogs was the comedic triumph we have been waiting for since
gave us the groundbreaking comedy, Smoke Signals.I can get down with the idea that some progress has been made and that the times they are a changing (slowly and very reluctantly), and it’s about fucking time. Hollywood was built on the backs of Dead Indians, and the damage done by harmful Indigenous representations through decades of racist and surface-level depictions of Indigenous Peoples is hard to measure. But does this supposed bit of progress mean that Hollywood doesn’t hate Indigenous Peoples anymore? No, it doesn’t.
(remind me to tell you all the story of my dance with an off-broadway production of last of the mohicans - the musical, back in 2000 in Toronto. i made the final call back and walked off the final audition when they busted out the loincloths.)
I don’t know what the numbers are, but I’d wager a bet that one in ten, maybe one in twenty, Hollywood movies flippantly refer to Native Americans in a way that raises an eyebrow. I think the woke, academic-typed Indigenous folk calls these things microaggressions now, but keep your eyes and ears open for them, and you’ll hear them all the time. They're hard to ignore once you listen to them, understand them, and weigh their impact.
Sometimes these references fly under the radar and remain inconspicuous in their offence; other times, Native Twitter grabs hold of the throats of the offenders and exposes the wrongdoer to 100,000 public lashings on Twitter. Someone is having a powwow (a meeting), someone is off the reservation (acting crazy), or someone is your spirit animal. Relatively ambiguous and non-offending, right? Sure. But where do we draw the line?
In the past handful of years, Indigenous peoples have protested and called to boycott films by Adam Sandler, Johnny Depp, James Cameron, and others for their more blatant fouls. I personally don’t have any hope that Hollywood turns the corner on Native America. Indigenous Peoples in the US are essentially invisible. Hence the importance of representations in mediums such as film and television - when we get a shot to be in front of a camera, the words, the visual aesthetic, and the story being told carry the burden of 130 years of dehumanization from moving pictures in Hollywood.
I don’t want to redirect the energy from the current discourse around Barbie being a feminist triumph in cinema - a female director breaking box office records for women in film while working under the banner of a male-dominated studio system in Hollywood deserves all the attention and accolades Greta Gerwig receives.
In this very same breath, I acknowledge the impact misogyny and patriarchy have in the lives of women and Queer folks from all walks of life, not just in Hollywood. I’m on a journey to understand and eliminate my misogyny and the ways in which patriarchy has privileged me; I’m sympathetic to the fight. I’m paying attention.
Barbie has been lauded for its innovation in set design, costuming and groundbreaking cinematography, a triumph for Greta Gerwig. Many believe the Barbie movie has delivered on the challenge of adapting the iconic toy brand into a cinematic, playful, and clever world. There is an early mention of Oscar noms for those in front of and behind the camera, but who knows how all of this actually works, and I’m not going to waste the word count on trying to figure that out here.
This past week, a line from the film caught Indigenous people's attention, and once again, Indigenous People are being slapped in the face by a big-budget Hollywood studio movie.
The Indigenous smallpox reference comes when Barbie does the math and figures out that, like, patriarchy is, like, totally bad. Here’s the line from the film:
“Oh My God, this is like in the 1500s with the Indigenous People and smallpox. They had no defenses against it.”
- Gloria in ‘Barbie’
Okay, Ryan. It’s just a line in a movie, calm the fuck down.
Let me then, for a second, give the writers of the film, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s say it wasn’t meant as a flippant joke. Let’s try to read it straight; many people claim it was a simple juxtaposition meant as allyship - pointing toward the injustices Native Americans have gone through historically and contemporarily.
Okay.
Let’s run that to the end.
A juxtaposition in the name of allyship.
Patriarchy is to women as smallpox is to Native Americans.
Got it.
Barbie was just trying to help.
Will the toy company behind the Barbie brand, Mattel, launch a Smallpox Barbie in the coming days, weeks, or months? Proceeds can go to Native American student scholarships or a trust that will help Indigenous Peoples repurchase their land (because, let’s face it, we aren’t just getting it back out of the goodness of people's hearts). Smallpox Barbies accessories can be a blanket, a little jar of bear grease ointment to apply to the scarring and open wounds on their body, and maybe a burnt-up old copy of a broken Treaty!
Using juxtaposition in the writing of the scene in question is uncalled for; it’s a cheap shot. It feels like a cheap shot, even if it wasn’t meant as one.
Casually dropping a genocide reference in a movie like Barbie is uncalled for.
Here are a few lines of dialogue that could have been considered in place of the smallpox reference:
“Oh My God, this is like in the 1500s with the White People in England and smallpox. They lived in an unsustainable Elizabethean-ruled society where the poor were shitting in the streets and disease was rampant, so they made plans to flee their homelands and spread their vile and deadly diseases in lands across the ocean in the name of a fake God and a Crown that did not give a fuck about them. They had no defences against it.”
- Gloria in ‘Barbie’
“Oh My God, patriarchy is totally like deep-dish Chicago-style pizza. I love it AND it’s bad for me.”
- Gloria in ‘Barbie’
“Oh My God, fuck the patriarchy. It’s REALLY fucking bad.”
- Gloria in ‘Barbie’
And let’s think about how big studio films are made.
Movies are big business. They’re shot. Edited. Tested. Reshot. Reedited. Tested again. The release of big-budget films is a measured, conservative, and complex science - the White Men that run the corporations that own these studios and invest in these films want and need their fucking money back.
The calculations are done on every second of the film.
Barbie was released after the exhaustive process of ensuring this project allowed the studio to earn hundreds of millions in its release.
Did anyone in the screen testing flag the Native American reference?
Did anyone think it was offensive or, at least, unnecessary and in poor taste?
Does Hollywood believe Indigenous Peoples to be a people that deserve their humanity, and thusly, the genocide of our peoples is off the table for the sake of a laugh?
The Trinity Test and the Downwinders
Christopher Nolan has written and directed what critics are calling his most cinematic masterpiece, Oppenheimer.
This is high praise for the person behind films like Dunkirk, The Dark Knight (yes, THE Joker movie), and Inception. These films were noted for their awe-inspiring cinematography, matched with the execution of masterful writing and directing. In short, Oppenheimer has hype.
Cillian Murphy. Atomic bombs. The subtext of a tortured and troubled US psyche as told through the eyes of one man, Oppenheimer.
Oh. And Russia and Ukraine are at war.
And. Well. Nukes.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is a perfectly conflicted character; this is the secret sauce that good movies are made of. He was a theoretical physicist recruited in the early 1940s to direct the Manhattan Project, the top secret US project to detonate nukes in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
On July 16th, 1945, the Trinity test of the Manhattan Project was the first nuclear weapon detonation in America.
They say the explosion went 7.5 miles into the atmosphere. Just a few hours after detonation, it rained. No one told area residents not to drink from their cisterns.
The government lied through the media and said that the reported detonation was just an explosion of leftover munitions from weapons testing conducted by the US Army.
A few weeks later, atomic bombs were dropped in Japan.
What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nothing short of devastating. The bombs dropped there killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people; most were civilians.
The US military-industrial complex started building itself in the early 1950s as a result of the First and Second World Wars. The US vowed to themselves and the world that they would not be defeated; they would win at war at all costs, monetarily and otherwise.
The cost of war is paid by the youth and civilians that have died as a result of war. But the untold story, the one no one wants to talk about, is the price paid by Indigenous Peoples in America.
In the 1950s, approximately 900 nuclear tests took place on the Shoshone territory – 100 in the atmosphere and more than 800 underground.
Shoshone territory is approximately 40,000 square miles (25.6 million acres), from just west of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the Snake River in Idaho, including a 350-mile (563km) wide strip in the Great Basin. There are approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Shoshone lineal descendants.
According to a 2009 study in the Nevada Law Journal, between 1951 and 1992, the tests conducted on Shoshone land caused 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout. When the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, 13 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout hit the city.
The Shoshone peoples are not the only Native American Nation that has suffered. Not that it’s a contest, but the Navajo Nation claims to have suffered the most from the atomic era in America.
The lands and territories of the Navajo Nation were mined to supply the US government with uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons. Their lands were used at atomic playgrounds for the US military, then, after privatization in the 1970’s, for private companies that operated without oversite or proper safety standards until the last uranium mine closed in 1990.
For nearly 30 years, the Navajo Nation has been calling for Congress to provide just compensation for victims of radiation exposure.
The down winders, as they are called, suffer rare cancers, auto-immune disorders, and other catastrophic health implications that have decimated their communities, their elders, and thus, their languages, cultures, and their ability to live their lives in the ways their ancestors did. The people have consumed contaminated wildlife, drank contaminated milk, and lived off contaminated land for decades.
Who will tell this story?
In places where nuclear exposure has happened to citizens in Kazakhstan, Japan, even Chernobyl, there are public health registries to monitor those exposed.
This does not exist in the US.
In my mind, as a writer, researcher, and documentarian, I’m stuck with the question of whether Oppenheimer wrestled with the moral question of testing in Native American territories.
If Oppenheimer feared nuclear fallout, what did he know that Native America didn’t?
HOW DO WE MEASURE HATE?
This essay started with me saying that Hollywood hates Indigenous Peoples. Quite a claim, I know. My saying this will incite eye rolls of epic proportions from the critics of the woke and snowflake culture war fighters.
Does a flippant Native American reference in the Barbie movie or the omission of a key part of US history that intersects with Indigenous Peoples, equate to the hatred of Indigenous Peoples?
I don’t know. How do we measure hate?
I can point to racist depictions of Native Americans in films.
I could have pointed to derogatory language directed at Indigenous Peoples in film and television.
We could talk about the lack of representation on screen, off-screen, behind cameras, in board rooms, at executive decision-making tables, fuck, I could even point at the industry service level and behind the craft tables full of snacks and bubbly water and notice Indigenous Peoples just don’t work in the industry.
While some of us creatives are fighting for better Indigenous representations in front of and behind the camera, it’s hard to feel like we’re making progress in the film and television industry that has historically shown Indigenous Peoples such disdain.
A flippant reference here.
An erasure there.
Disregard for Indigenous life everywhere.
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