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Episode 99: The Pretend Indians! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that fantastic is the best policy.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Astlantes, the podcast where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatekat.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: What is up, Dr.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Tlakatecat?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Do you ever encounter stories in the news and you wonder what is going on?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: What is really going on?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a rhetorical question nowadays, right?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: But every once in a while you find a story that kind of like it it it brings hope, you know, to in the midst of this hellscape that we are currently experiencing, you know, it's like I was reading the story a week ago about a Chicano artist who grew up in the area.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's like an old school about though, like he's probably in the 60s or something.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I had no idea this guy was around.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh name I think is Sam Coronado.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he grew up in uh uh in Ellis uh county, which is just south of uh Dallas, and he went to school in the area, and I believe he got his advanced degree in in art in from UT in Austin, and like he's been doing this thing called the School of C or Escuela de C or something to that effect, where um every year they um open it up for for young people to to go to this workshop and and kind of explore their artistic talents.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure how it's funded, I'm sure they're getting some kind of funding from somewhere, but um this year, I mean, I'm wondering how they they're they're providing the same kind of funding for the students, given everything that's going on with the slashing of the programs left and right.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I was reading the story, I'm like, man, how come I've never heard of this guy?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it'd be cool to just get to know this guy and you know, um see take a look at his art and and you know, and I say this because I've been thinking, man, I need to get back to doing art.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I miss doing art.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh you know this um, you know, one of one of my bachelor's is is uh is a BFA in art, and and I kind of miss it, you know, and and I want to get back into that.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been talking about it long enough, so I'm I'm thinking about doing so just reading the story gave you.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I have an I have one of your original pieces.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: I forgot about that.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so I've been thinking a lot about this.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, man, you know what?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's enough of the talking, you know.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: I got the talking done, as we say over here.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Got the talking done.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's time to, you know, take some action, put it into action.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: So hopefully, you know, the next couple of weeks I'll bring bust out my my artistic materials, my items, my my my brushes, my canvases, and and start doing something with that.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, just to get your mind off of things, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Meditate.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: The the tlack is back.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: The tlack is back.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know my um Dr.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Tlack is back.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: The way that I used to sign, uh, I don't know if I did it in yours, but this is something that I picked up along the way.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: My signature was rata r-a-t-a Ruben Ariano Tlacatekat.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ruben Alexander Ariano Tlacatekat.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Rata.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's why that's how I would sign him.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: So so if anyone has a rata out there, hey, that's me.
• 4:04
  unknown: Rata.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: So did you um did you look this guy up?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Did you no, I haven't, but I I am.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I want to I want to connect with him.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think he's I think he's still down like in Austin.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd have to take a trip.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there's actually two artists down in Austin that I want to reach out to.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's one who was very um, he's still active, but he was his work was featured in a couple of Chicano um uh LP albums from the 70s.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Little Joe uh was one of them.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And um he uh he's still active, he still has a studio, and and I want to connect to him.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: I want I want to I want to see if maybe if by you know chance he still has that that old painting or copies of it, and so I can get one from him and and frame it up and throw it up on the wall over here.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, there's there's a couple of those.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I need to take a trip to down to Austin to uh meet up with these individuals and and connect and and uh maybe start getting back into the art scene a little bit, you know?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Hell yeah, that'd be dope, man.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: What about you?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: You you're considering uh going back to Hollywood anytime soon?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'd um I'd played with the idea of uh beyond just doing like voice work and consulting.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was like, damn, I I felt like you know, I I'll watch like an action movie and be like, damn, I miss doing stunts.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: But then I'll I'll be reminded how much that shit hurts.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: How much my back.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that's actually something I want to talk about.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're gonna do a little talk about stunts and action scenes today, by the way.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so what is the topic, my dear friend?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: So this is episode and I I just realized this.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: This is episode 99.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: 99, right?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're almost at 100 original episodes on the show.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: So that's freaking wild.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh I'm looking forward to some of the stuff we've got coming up.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: But for this one, dear listeners, we're gonna be talking about the pretend Indians.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, uh oh, I I hear controversy.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Controversy.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if you were to walk out into the street right now and ask the average person to close their eyes and picture an American Indian, what images would flash across their mind?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: For most, those images wouldn't be of contemporary indigenous lawyers, scientists, artists, tribal elders, leaders, anyone who is not from a relic of the of the past, but you know, anyone who is navigating the complex realities of the 21st century would be the last person on these people's minds, you know, because we have this idea of the Indian is the past, the past is dead, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: So instead their minds would be automatically uh drifting to a beautifully lit cinematic landscape, a weathered warrior in a majestic feather headdress standing on a desert ridge, or a mystical shaman whispering ancient riddles by a campfire.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I missed those mystical riddles from by the campfire, don't you?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: We live in a culture saturated by these images, but where do they actually come from and whose needs do they really serve?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, we're going to dive into a brilliant, blistering, and profoundly witty critique of American pop culture written in 1980 by the legendary Standing Rock Sioux scholar, historian, and activist Vine Deloria Jr.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria wrote a groundbreaking for word titled American Fantasy for a book called The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the movies, which was edited by Gretchen M.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's Battel.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Battel?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a French name.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Not sure how to say that.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Bataille Yeah, but it's got two L's, so I want to say Bataille, but I think it's Battel.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So Gretchen M.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Battel and Charles L.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: P.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sillet.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoreus' central premise is as shocking as it is liberating.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: He argues that the Indians were uh we see on movie screens, in television shows, and in popular literature have absolutely nothing to do with real Native Americans.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Shocker, right?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they are completely artificial projections, a collection of pretend, so this is where we get the word pretend from figures manufactured by white society to fulfill its own psychological needs, soothe its historical guilt, and escape its own deep identity crisis.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: In a world that prefers comforting myths over complex realities, Deloria challenges us to flip the script.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: He invites us to look at Hollywood not as a window into indigenous history but as a mirror reflecting the fragmented, alienated psyche of the American white man.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's step into this urban fantasy together.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Look beneath the silver screen and explore what happens when a culture replaces living people with a myth, and how native communities brilliantly learned to use that very myth as a shield for survival.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: The cultural landscape of nineteen eighty.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Marked by high-profile media saturated events like the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island, the Trail of Broken Treaties, and the most famous 1973 armed standoff at Wounded Knee.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: These events brought real contemporary Native political grievances directly into American living rooms via the nightly news.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yet as the public watched living Native Americans demand treaty rights and sovereignty, Hollywood, Curly's favorite, and the publishing industry were working overtime to print a quite different version of the Indian.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: The market flooded with what DeLoria calls urban fantasy, which consisted of counterculture films, new age spiritual guides, and historical novels that turned native culture into a canvas for white anxieties, anti-war sentiments, and a desperate search for authentic identity.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, they're just searching, that's all they're doing.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, who can blame them, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was in this precise moment of cultural friction that scholars uh like Gretchen M.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Battel and Charles L.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: P.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sellett compiled The Pretend Indians Image of Native Americans in the movies published by Iowa State University Press.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if this book is still in print.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I happened to find this uh as a uh microfish um uh document when I was still doing research uh as a as a graduate student.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got to be able to do that.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of the the cultural landscape of the 80s, right?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been I've been I've been holding on to this since since then.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I've had this in my in my uh archives for over ten years, waiting for the right moment, and I felt like man, you know what?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um just to interrupt really quick.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: I really enjoyed the sound of the microfish.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like when you when you're searching on the page and it's all like you don't get that anymore.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and and and for those that might not know, like when you go to a place where they have microfish, you can actually save that stuff as a digital file.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I've saved this as a PDF document, right?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: So before when in the old days, you had to copy stuff, you had to send it to the printer, and it would copy, and you'd end up with a stack of copies.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I remember.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, they they've they've progressed, yeah, they've they've advanced somewhat, so you can get it as a PDF document.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so they sought to systematically, and here we're talking about the authors, to uh dissect how cinema had systematically replaced indigenous reality with manufactured stereotypes.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: To frame this landmark collection of essays, they turned to Vine Deloria, a standard rock Sioux theologian, historian, and activist who was already famous for his biting paradigm shifting 1969 book, Custer Died for Your Sins.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, so good.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Been out that long since '69.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: What DeLoria delivered in this in his in the foreword was a masterful, searing, and brilliantly witty critique of American cultural imperialism.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: The evolution of a fantasy.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Though written decades ago, Deloria's insights are so razor sharp, so unsettling, and so deeply witty that they read as if they were written this morning, today, in fact.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: To understand Deloria's central argument, we have to look back at how the image of the Native American fundamentally evolved, or rather devolved in the white imagination.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria traces a historical line.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: He notes that during the first three centuries of contact between indigenous peoples and European settlers, the white image of the native, even when it was deeply confused, prejudiced, or romanticized, always maintained a grounding in reality.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: There was what he calls an empirical reference point.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was forged through the actual tangible and often brutal experiences of people on the frontier who encountered real living native populations.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: The correlation between the symbol and the reality was not difficult to map because real people were interacting, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the line that he's trying to draw here between the pretend Indians that emerged and the documented Indians, even if it was flawed, right, that there is an actual tangible presence there that people were engaging with, right?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: But then came a massive seismic shift.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: With the closing of the frontier, the rise of the Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, and eventually the birth of contemporary cinema, television, and mass market literature, that empirical reference point vanished.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: The living, breathing Native American was systematically replaced by an industry of fiction.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria describes this transition with absolute precision.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Beginning with the Wild West shows and continuing with contemporary movies, television, and literature, the image of Indians has radically shifted from any reference to living people to a field of urban fantasy in which wish fulfillment replaces reality.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty succinct, right?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty pretty succinct, absolutely.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria reminds us that visual images carry an immense, almost terrifying power for communication, far more than the printed word ever could.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: A single vivid movie scene can burn an archetype into the collective, subconscious, overriding historical fact and embedding long-standing biases deeper than the cleverest aphorism or political slogan could ever hope to achieve.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: The tragedy, he points out, is that Hollywood got stuck in a loop.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: The storylines remained completely static, the plots continued to project the exact same familiar caricatures, and this repetitive loop ultimately served neither the viewer nor the producer.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Even worse, this fantasy served to obscure real-world struggles.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria points out that in the post-World War II period, even as the American conscience was continually graded over the coals of historical substance, Native Americans did not gain nearly as much sociopolitical ground as other minority groups.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because in the mill in the minds of the public, real Native people didn't exist.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they had become the great unknown to which can be attached almost any current concern that cannot be expressed in other parabolic and fable format.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: True.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean we s we still don't exist.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: They don't even see us as like legitimate living people.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Anatomy Anatomy?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: Anatomy of a symptom.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: The Billy Jack phenomenon.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Your favorite guy, Billy Jack.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I got I got some stuff to say.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: I know you got some stuff to say.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So to illustrate exactly how this modern fable making works, Deloria takes a brilliant comedic chainsaw to one of the biggest pop culture phenomena of the early 1970s, the movie Billy Jack.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: For those who might not remember or even know, Billy Jack was a wildly popular independent film about a heroic, half-native Greenberet who uses martial arts to protect an alternative freedom school filled with troubled white youths.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria with his trademark wit suggests the film would be much better titled Bully Jack, highlighting the glaring absurdity at the center of the script.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: He describes Bully Jack as a pacifist who demonstrates his commitment to nonviolence by riding around an obscure western Indian reservation and breaking people's necks.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think he actually breaks anybody's necks in the in the movie.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Close enough.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Did you watch did you actually watch the movie Vine?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh Vine.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria walks us through the plot with joyful cynicism.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: He describes how Billy is smitten with a white school mom running a school for psychologically distressed white youngsters, mostly refugees from the San Francisco counterculture scene, who had returned home, as Deloria dryly puts it, pregnant with feelings and other things.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: The school specializes in nonsensical psychodramas where students are encouraged to vent their sentimental emotions and where everyone writes poetry and songs, but is too afraid to sing them in public until Billy inspires him.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, he's always been an inspiration to me.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: But what infuriated and amused DeLoria most was how the film manufactured a cheap mystical version of indigenous religion to justify its narrative.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: The script implies that Billy shares the primordial mysteries of the tribe and exalted wisdom that somehow gives him the cosmic authority to pass instant moral judgment on absolutely everyone he meets.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, he kind of does have a point there.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can argue the point, but he's making a good point.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: This reaches a peak of absolute absurdity in a famous scene where Billy dances in an abandoned ruin while a thoroughly enraged rattlesnake repeatedly bites his leg.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: But because Billy is a blood brother of the snake, a spiritual status Deloria jokes, he probably achieved while a green beret, and because he is deeply sincere, the venom has absolutely no effect on him.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria completely dismantles the urban youths of the 1970s who watched this scene and walked out of the theater believing they had just witnessed an authentic recapulation of a sacred tribal ceremony.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: He look he looks directly at the audience and states a blunt reality.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Even the snake dance, thought by many urban youths to be an accurate recapitulation of a tribal ceremony, has nothing to do with Indians.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: We are no more immune than whites to rattlesnake venom.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you trace the actual theology of that movie scene, Deloria argues, it isn't indigenous spirituality at all.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: It is pure Martin Luther, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, clumsily modified by traditional American mediocrity into the comforting belief that sheer unadulterated sincerity conquers all physical and moral laws.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: He goes on to expose the film's technical advisor, a figure named Rolling Thunder.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: He describes him as an alleged Cherokee, I like how he says alleged Cherokee, who wandered into Western Shoshone territory and somehow emerged years later, branding himself as their quote-unquote medicine man, subsequently becoming the subject of a popular book by Doug Boyd, a writer famous for profiling contemporary gurus, who in that book, Rolling Thunder, reportedly spends his mornings stalking desert snakes and staring them down before they can strike, you know, like like the natives do, right?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like all Indians do.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: So Deloria cuts through the mystique with a single hilarious sentence.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Need it be said that few Indians devote their waking hours to this kind of activity.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen you, I've seen you in action, Curly.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think I I've spent quite a few.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're the exception to the role.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Rolling Thunder is an interesting cat because he was like the the alleged um advisor, right?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: The cultural consultant, technical consultant for Billy Jack.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: And his real name is uh John Pope.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um he died.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: He's he died back in the the late 90s.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: But he's actually pretty um well known in the the world of uh you know the the plastic shaman, the uh of the of the fake medicine man.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: But interestingly, there's a video out there, and I've I've never been able to find it, but allegedly there's this uh uh reporter who interviewed him along with John Trudell and somebody else, and they're just like sitting there giving their um their opinions on uh on native rights.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I've always wanted to look that up and and see if you could tell if like Trudell and anybody else is just kind of like side-eyeing him, like this guy.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Please give us the Billy Jack psychology.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Ultimately, Deloria concludes that Billy Jack has absolutely zero to do with Native Americans of any stripe.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, it is a psychological map par excellence of what anti-establishment young white people thought the world looked like circa 1970.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Take a dash of appropriated religion, a bit of karate, a heavy dose of blatant racism, add a mystical mountain treasure tablet telling everyone to love one another, and mix it with the profound identity crises of individuals raised in American society who are terrified to sing, dance, or recite poetry.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the elements of the uh the white worldview at the turn of the decade, according to Deloria.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria even notes that you can find the exact same complex of elements about halfway through an hour-long speech given by a flying saucer enthusiast, right?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: So he's like poking fun at this thing.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to take an immense amount of preaching to get white Americans to love one another, and the message has to be repeated constantly across every conceivable medium of communication, whether it's a UFO conference, whether you know, aliens that are coming down, the benevolent, you know, always telling us uh to uh do better and to not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, you know, that kind of stuff.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And also, right, he's he's saying, and also you have that archetype, and then you have the Indian, the shaman, the the elderly Klaatu Rata Nikto.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Aho.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the psychopathology of the old chief archetype.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorites.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: This brings us to the profound psychological thesis of Deloria's essay.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Billy Jack is just a symptom of a much deeper, more troubling problem.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria asserts that Americans are fundamentally historically the historical aliens in North America.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Try as they might, they seem entirely incapable of genuinely adjusting to the continent that they inhabit.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because Native Americans are the original rightful possessors of the land, they haunt the collective unconscious of the white man.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, again, what what DeLoria is uh signpoint posting here is that try as they might, white people are the actual aliens in North America, and so that's why they have so much trouble adjusting to um the continent and to and to themselves in this continent, right?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's painting them with that brush.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, if you look at the conflicting images of the Indian that stalk the white man's waking perception, you aren't looking at history, you are looking at a mirror.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: You are looking at a fairly accurate map of the fragmented personality, the identity crises, and the deep alien alienation that plagues the American white man.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can strip away any popular external image of the native to reveal the raw psyche of the white collective.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: To prove this, Deloria introduces us to his absolute favorite archetype, the classic cinematic old chief.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: We all know this character.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: He is a weathered veteran of a thousand Western movies and novels.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: He sits in a classic posture of mysterious primordial earth wisdom.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: He speaks almost exclusively in poetic aphorisms, and he rarely utters a single word that isn't deeply wise, solemn, and sentimental in some way.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: They always have something important to say.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Crucially, the old chief is always in favor of love, peace, and mutual understanding.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: He never advocates to his people take up arms or resort to violence against those who have systematically wronged, displaced, and cheated them.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: In every single scene where the passionate younger warriors counsel for war, the old chief steps forward to sadly relate the utter futility of opposing progress.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Directors like John Ford use this figure sparingly.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Think of the old man in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, but you can find him fully developed as a distinct personality type in films like Little Big Man.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: But why does white culture desperately need to manufacture this character?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria argues that behind the image of the benevolent, fading old chief resides a fierce, subconscious conviction within the white psyche that expropriating the North American continent was not actually a bad or criminal act.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: White society wants to believe that some kind of cosmic natural law decreed that the modern agriculturalist and industrialist would inevitably replace the primitive hunter-gatherer.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when the old chief stands on a ridge in the Hollywood film, beautifully describing his tribe marching inevitably into the sunset, he grieves, no, he gives that colonial belief uh a comforting validity, right?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: This idea of fading into the sunset, you know, the old ways are waning and the new ways are emerging.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: So Deloria is exposing the historical lie of these scenes by pointing out what the old chief is never allowed to say.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: Very few of the sayings in Touch the Earth and other anthologies, or in the movies during the old chief scene, feature the old chief saying, You dirty sons of bitches, you lying bastards.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: You gave your promise, and then and and then when we were weak and disarmed, you betrayed us.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: If I had my axe here, I would take a few of you treacherous bastards with me when I go.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: No, rather the old chief explains that one tribe follows another and the white man himself will vanish.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: But here's here's one thing about Deloria's Peace that I think is kind of a contradiction, because he criticizes Billy Jack by calling him Bully Jack for being willing to be like, nah, bro, and just for beating the absolute shit out of white racists through the entirety of that movie.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then he's like, but then he turns his analytical lens and and criticizes uh the old chief, right?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: For uh for not being able for never being uh depicted as uh as doing that.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like a a small contradiction in his uh in his criticism.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: In the discussion.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria adds a characteristically biting aside to that comment.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: We all know that ain't true, but it does sound cosmically comforting, uh oh.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: You see, if the old chief who represents the ultimate ancient wisdom of the continent tells the white audience that this entire tragic history is just part of a cosmic process that is much bigger than any of us, it's bigger than all of us, then the white audience is completely released from all moral, historical, and political responsibility.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that is exactly what they desperately need an older authority figure to tell them.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: The traditional Jehovah of the Christian Bible isn't much help here because that God demands that humans actually be good and act justly.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think I I I might have a little disagreement there.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, which which one are you talking about the old uh Testament or the New Testament?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: George?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: Which flavor of which flavor of the month are you referring to?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if a cosmic natural process has already determined the unavoidable demise of the people standing in the way of progress, then modern Americans can wash their hands of ethical questions entirely.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: They can revert directly to the true ultimate American moral stances of if I don't do it, someone else will.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Or don't blame me, I'm only doing my job.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Once those genocidal histories can be cosmically justified as natural evolution, anything becomes permissible and anything becomes moral.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we're seeing that today already.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: The eagerly awaited white informant.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is a good one right here.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: The archetype of the old chief has a mandatory second component that almost always follows it in tandem, creating a complete psychological narrative.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria explains that the fictional chief is always eagerly anxiously awaiting the arrival of a very specific person, a white writer, anthropologist, hey Curly, or seeker.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it is Carlos Castaneda, Stan Steiner, Thomas Males, or TC McLuhan, the story remains identical.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: The chief is always standing on the precipice of passing away to the happy hunting grounds, terrified that his wisdom will be lost to future generations.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, remarkably, in these narratives, the chief has lived his entire life surrounded by his own children, his grandchildren, and his tribal community.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yet he has never found a single member of his own tribe who is deemed worthy of receiving his message and passing it along.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: But the very first white person who sticks their head inside a TV door instantly triggers a psychological compulsion in the chief to reveal ancient secrets that nearly a hundred generations of native people have kept fiercely hidden in their hearts and enshrined in their memories.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's so stale.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: This faithful white informant narrative is a core item of belief for Western people because Western society believes it has successfully corralled the entire physical world within its scientific and rational doctrines.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: It operates under the arrogant assumption that all secrets, not just the secrets of nature, but the spiritual secrets of all human history, should be given up to them effortlessly effortlessly.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: They firmly believe they should be recognized as the sole impartial priests of all human knowledge.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is fucking entitlement, man.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and this is something that that Deloria was consistent in critiquing the white establishment throughout his entire career.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in you know, God is Red.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um what's the other book that was uh complimentary to the God is Red uh book, where he's also like digging into uh Red Earth, red earth, white lights?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that one right there.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: So his message, his idea, his philosophy was consistent throughout most of his work.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: When this bizarre informant dynamic hits the movie screen, it transforms into an easily identifiable trope.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because a character sitting in a tent revealing ancient truths doesn't move a Hollywood action plot along very quickly, the white informant is transformed into the Indian's most cherished friend, right?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: This the oh, we know each other from back in the day.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the time we went hunting and all this good stuff, right?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we've all seen this movie, right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: This movie scene, the cavalry commanders or local settlers scream, Don't go in there, Jimmy.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Those Indians are mad, they have sworn to kill all white men they see.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: But our brave white hero rides into the canyon anyway, utterly content in his absolute certainty that if he can just get an audience with the Cochise, with Geranimo, with Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or whoever, the great war chief will instantly remember their deep personal friendship.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: The chief will listen to our hero and refuse to continue the war against the white settlers, remembering perhaps a brief conversation a decade ago when our white hero profoundly warned the chief that war is bad for the people.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria points out the subtle, insidious propaganda hidden within the cinematic moment.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: The moment the good chief recognizes and embraces the white confident, it immediately antagonizes the chief's leading political rival within the tribe.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: This rival is always portrayed as a scurvy, treacherous, and deeply untrustworthy individual whom no one, white or native, would ever trust.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: Inevitably, a dramatic knife fight ensues between our white hero and this political rival.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: Don't you just hate that, Curly?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: When you go to a meeting and the knife fight has to ensue, it's mandatory.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have it.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: They automatically they're like, this man lies, and then they pull out a big old fucking bowie knife, and I'm like, ah.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Crucially, this indigenous rival and is almost never killed in the initial scene.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because he serves as empirical evidence for the audience of the innate, unyielding savagery of the native population.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: A savagery that the old chief's singular benevolence temporarily undermines.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Since this is bitter rival, represents the members of the tribe who oppose a chief's accommodation of white settlement, he represents the actual tribal tradition and the real-world tribal membership.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: By framing him as a villain, the film tells the audience that the actual native population is completely unworthy of continuing into the future.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: He becomes the cinematic stand-in for contemporary living tribal members, the very people who might blow the whistle on the white expert or confident if that expert ever actually dare to step in front of a real native audience.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do actual contemporary Native Americans navigate this dense jungle of white delusion?
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is where DeLoria reveals a brilliant, hilariously pragmatic truth.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: He admits that Native people intuited this subconscious white drive for authenticity decades ago, and instead of wasting time and energy fighting it, they adopted specific, highly coordinated performance techniques in order to survive.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: When native communities are confronted by zealous, wealthy, but completely uninformed white people who show up claiming they want to solve quote unquote the Indian problem, Native people do not send out their most qualified accountants, lawyers, or political scientists.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, he says, they deliberately send out the most stereotypically Indian looking people they can possibly muster to deal with them.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: Realizing that modern white society worships money and imagery above all else, they actively seek out representatives who look exactly like they could have modeled for the antique buffalo nickel.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: DeLoria explains the psychological brilliance of this tactic.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: No white man, no matter how callous, can resist this classic figure since it has been burned into his subconscious during those formative years when that profile would get him an ice cream cone or a box of popcorn.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: You just don't argue with the face on the coin.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's why we place only the most cherished and pristine American heroes on the coins.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting, DeLoria.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: So DeLoria continues, he he illustrates how this played out perfectly during the early days of the Office of Economic Opportunity or the OEO in the 1960s and 70s.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: When federal government agencies and massive private philanthropic foundations were looking for native organizations to fund, the tribes would intentionally pick out their handsomest, most cinematic representatives to send to Washington.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: They knew that white executives would hand over institutional funds far more readily if they felt they were giving money to a young man who looked exactly like Tonto or a young woman who beautifully resembled Pocahontas.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: The technique worked with flawless precision.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was a brilliant appeal to the white romantic imagination, completely bypassing the actual administrative relevancy or complexity of the project under consideration.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria jokingly laments that this perfect strategy only started to fall apart as the funding pathway became a well-known beaten trail, and the younger Native representatives tragically began to take themselves too seriously, ultimately screwing up what had been a flawless, beautiful arrangement.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: The tactical performance extended into every arena of American institutional life.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Take electoral politics, for instance.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you needed to extract resources or support from the Democratic Party, the strategy was simple.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Find a handsome young native man with a sharp, nice haircut who could successfully project the aura of an quote unquote Indian Bobby Kennedy.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you would instantly have white Democrats lusting over your endorsement.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: If you needed to gain admittance to a conservative Republican meeting, a major corporate caucus, or even the opening ceremonies of the cotton bowl, oh Dallas is in the house, the playbook shifted.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: You would bring forward a beautiful poised, quote unquote, Indian princess, clad in buckskin, who could perform the Lord's Prayer or the 23rd Psalm in elegant sign language.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria notes with a laugh that it didn't even have to be read be real sign language.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: She just had to wave her arms in some vague, graceful, sequential manner that looked like it might be sign language to a room full of white politicians and the doors would swing wide open.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And who hasn't done that before, right?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like you ever see that episode of Parks and Wreck where they have like the native dude comes in and they have him, he's giving, he's giving like an opening blessing or something at some city event.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've seen that, yeah.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_02: And he says it all in his language, but the subtitles are just like, you people have no idea what I'm saying.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: And they're just sitting there looking at him like, wow, so profound.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: So profound.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is uh that's uh the pretending in an action right there, huh?
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you were dealing with national church meetings and religious institutions, the strategy adapted once more.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: You either deployed a fierce passion.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: Young militant to trigger white liberal guilt, or a deeply traditional fundamentalist elder native minister, preferably a Baptist or a Methodist, to trigger pastoral sympathy.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: You would instantly walk away with whatever funding or institutional backing you wanted.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: The list of these strategic adaptations, Deloria notes, is absolutely endless, limited only by the almost inexhaustible depths of white fantasy.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we must ask an ethical question.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is this proper?
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: Should native people be actively scamming white folks who are genuinely deeply sincere?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria answers this with a brilliant blend of philosophical depth and raw practicality.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: He notes that while the answer might be complex in an abstract ethical sense, it is incredibly simple in the practical context of everyday survival.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: The reality is that while these white individuals are undoubtedly sincere, they are only ever sincere about what they themselves are interested in.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: They are not sincere about real Native Americans about whom they know almost nothing and care even less.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, if a native person steps forward and attempts to tell them the cold, unvarnished historical truth, those same sincere white people get exceedingly angry.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we've seen that before, haven't we?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: They will actively reject the real person standing in front of them and keep searching until they find a compliant stereotype who fits the precise contours of their urban fantasy.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, if a tribal leader has to for perform within the fantasy to get a school built, secure medical funding, or protect treaty rights, that performance simply comes with the territory of the job.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: You see this a lot in um archaeological sites too, where they where native people are serving as tour guides, and they'll just tell the tourists, you know, they're they're not going to tell them the truth, like, oh yeah, you know, where did they all go?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: They're not gonna be like, oh, they were murdered by fucking Catholics and Spaniards.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: They'll like gloss it over and be like, well, nobody really knows, but you know, they they think that this happened and and they'll kind of, you know, just sort of assuage their guilt and just play into whatever it is that they want to hear ultimately because they're relying on tips from from these tourists.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then these are the very same people who pretend to be experts uh when they're talking to people online.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the tour guy that I was on told me so, so it has to be true.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're completely wrong.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: What are you talking about?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: You have no idea.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, sit down.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria anchors this behavior in deep historical trauma.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: He reminds us that the very first European expeditions to enter the Southwest were utterly convinced that the mythical seven cities of gold existed somewhere in northern Arizona, even New Mexico, right?
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: Local native people repeatedly told them the plain truth that no such golden cities existed.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the conquistadors flatly refused to believe them.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they tortured countless indigenous people in a brutal attempt to force them to reveal the location of the gold.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: The next waves of European expeditions arrived in the southeast entirely convinced that a literal fountain of youth was hidden in the Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi area.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: They too tortured native people in the mistaken, paranoid belief that the tribes were maliciously trying to keep them from learning the secret of immortality.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's the one that just it just never ceases to amaze me to the degree that these people believe such nonsense and the the tragedy that ensued because of it, right?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria draws a straight line from these historical atrocities to modern cultural tourism.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: As long as the white suspects that he does not know the whole story, or that we are trying to keep our secrets, whether gold, history, religion, or lands from him, he will find one torture or another to plague us with until we tell him something.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: Fact.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a defense mechanism, right?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you're saying.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: The modern irony of the alien.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this brings us to a profound, almost comical irony in how the American government handles the concept of identity today.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Think about the language our institutions use.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: We see the government establish portals, policies, and legal definitions regarding so-called aliens, a word used to strictly define outsiders, foreign nationals, and literal beings from outer space, right?
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: From outer freaking space people.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: The state spends an immense amount of bureaucratic energy cataloging who belongs and who is an alien.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: But if we look at this through the lens of Vandaloria, the ultimate historical irony becomes glaringly obvious.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: The very establishment branding others as aliens is doing so from a capital built on displaced indigenous land.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: By projecting the status of alien onto immigrants or cosmic outsiders, the dominant culture attempts to subconsciously flip the script, framing itself as a natural native authority of the continent.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Deloria completely shatters this bureaucratic illusion.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: He reminds us that no amount of official paperwork or clever semantic projection can change the foundational physics of history.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: Strip away the legal definitions, strip away the Hollywood myths, and the psychological reality remains exposed, as Deloria writes.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_02: Underneath all the conflicting images of the Indian, one fundamental truth emerges.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_02: The white man knows that he is an alien, and he knows that North America is Indian and he will never let go of the Indian image because he thinks that by some clever manipulation he can achieve an authenticity that cannot ever be his.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: Still searching for the function of youth.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_02: I saw an article the other day about how uh men in the United States are no longer just concerned with their physical longevity, but they want to be like eternally hot.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like I swear.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's like settle down, grandpa.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jeez.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: In the bizarre twist, within the American media landscape, only Native Americans are allowed to get old.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank goodness.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Modern coffee table books and documentary films are absolutely filled to the brim with striking, deeply wrinkled portraits of elderly Native people.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yet you will hardly find a single artistic book celebrating the deep, unairbrushed wrinkles of elderly white people.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: And who wants to anyway, right?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: It is a strange, ironic reality for a people who were long labeled a quote unquote vanishing race to have their elderly faces on display everywhere as artistic commodities.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: And therein lies the ultimate meaning of the white man's fantasy.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: The endless obsession with the Hollywood Indian, the New Age shamans, and the aphoristic old chiefs has never been an interest in indigenous history or culture.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: It is an unresolved weeping wound in the American soul.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: It is a desperate frantic search for an authenticity that modern Western culture, through its history of displacement and commercialization, has stripped away from itself.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this, dear listeners, was the original intent behind the coining of the term pretend Indian all those many years ago in 1980.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was never about otherizing fellow native indigenous peoples and comparing blood quantum.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't about dismissing whole sections of people as pretending Indians or pretendians for simply not having the colonizer stamp of approval, or as Jack D.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: Forbes used to say, quote unquote, government approved Indians.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, dear listeners, the term was strictly meant to criticize and hold the mirror up to Wasp society.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: Wasp Anglo, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Wasp Society.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's what that means in case you didn't know.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: To force it to confront its not so romantic past.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thus considering the drift to fascism that this nation has taken in, it is incumbent on all native people to lift each other up and embrace our cultural differences with the understanding that no one is illegal on stolen land, especially indigenous populations whose ancestors predate the invasion and colonization of, you know, however you call it Turtle Island, Abyayala, Anawak, Taptai, Astlan, and whatever sacred name that your people use for the land.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: We are indigenous Amanam, all is good.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, sir.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's that's a great piece.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's interesting to to know, like, well, you know, this whole pretend Indian slash pretendian thing, actually the the roots of it was far more uh meaningful, I would say.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: Legitimate.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_02: Legitimate.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's the word I was looking for, as opposed to the way it's just thrown around today to by uh you know people who police identities.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, exactly.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_02: The Indigops.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_02: The Indigicops, exactly.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: But I do I do you know want to zero in a little bit more on that one thing that I see as a uh uh a contradiction in Deloria's piece is his whole dismissing the the Billy Jack character for being violent.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I gotta say, I I love Billy Jack too, so I was a bit of a Billy Jack.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that well, you have to understand when this was written though, too, right?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um Billy Jack came out in 1971.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_02: Was it 71?
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: 71, and the character Billy Jack was introduced in 1967, I believe, in a movie called The Born Losers.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, that's right.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, I forgot about that.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, the the character Yeah, I used to own a video store.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a film buff.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I got to interact because we carried all the Billy Jack movies, I got to interact with a lot of natives from Albuquerque.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: Albuquerque has, I think, the largest urban indigenous population of uh representing different uh groups of indigenous people.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like a diaspora of indigenous representation.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, the talking about movies would come up in there, and I would say that the overwhelming majority of natives that I spoke to uh were fans of the Billy Jack movies, especially the first one.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the other two were Yeah, they they weren't great.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_02: Billy Jack goes to Washington, I think, was one of them.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, especially from the older cats, the guys that saw Billy Jack like in the freaking drive-in movie when they were they were kids, yeah, you know, they liked it, they appreciated it.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, uh yeah, it's it's played Tom Laughlin was a white actor.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's why he made Billy Jack half a half native, right?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_02: Because he saw that as well, this is how I'll be able to star in the movie because he was an aspiring actor.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_02: He really wanted to be an actor and star in movies.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: And his girlfriend at the time, see, this is where all my film buff history comes out.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_02: Bring it in.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_02: Bring it in.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_02: She grew up around the Rosebud Reservation.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she was not native, she's a a white woman, he wound up marrying her.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: Rosebud.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_02: And he was visiting her, or they were hanging out uh in her hometown, and he saw, and this is how the story goes, that he just saw how shitty native people were being treated there.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: I thought you were gonna think he meant an old chief and told them the secrets of the tribe.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give you all my secrets, son.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so he just saw how shitty the yeah the racism was, and it inspired him to create this character, Billy Jack.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: And he was really trying to get this movie made for a while, and at the time, in the 1960s, late 1960s, biker movies were super popular.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: So he's like, Well, I got this character named Billy Jack.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right, because he's in the bike in the first movie, right?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh he's like, I got this character named Billy Jack.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_02: I want to make a movie about him, but I could take advantage of the biker movie craze.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'll make this biker movie called The Born Losers, and Billy Jack will be like the hero of this movie.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then hopefully the and his plan worked, like the character became really popular, and he was able to secure financing and distribution for an actual Billy Jack movie.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: And to his credit, like he, you know, even though he was wrong, he sought out a cultural consultant and got taken advantage of by this guy, Rolling Thunder.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: Rolling Thunder.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um I want to say, I think I think I have that that that book that was written about him somewhere buried with my stack of books.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that'd be like I didn't even think about that.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because that guy's got an interesting story.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: But Billy Jack also hired, oh my gosh, Bong Sun Ho, I think was the guy's name.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_02: And he is he was the fight choreographer for the movie, and he was like considered the grandfather or the father of introducing Hopkito to the United States, right?
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_02: So he he went out of his way to try to be as authentic as he could, and he made he wanted a star in the movie, so he made the character Billy Jack half white because then he figured he could play him.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_02: But when you watch the movie, it seems to me that Billy Jack embodies a lot of the characteristics that Vine is actually criticizing in the old chief.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the old chief is the nonviolent one, the one who tells everybody that this is just the way it's gonna go.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_02: And when you watch Billy Jack, you know, one of the most famous scenes is there's a group of young people, because it's a very counter-cultural movie, and they're trying to buy some ice cream, and the local white people don't want to sell these kids ice cream because there's like some native kids are part of this group.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_02: So they're being like obnoxious racist assholes to these kids because they have natives with them.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_02: And Billy Jack sees this and he confronts the people, he like beats the shit out of the racists.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_02: So his answer is like not only is violence the answer, but so he comes in and just beats the shit out of him, and then they surround him outside, and people from New Mexico in particular, northern New Mexico especially, love this scene because it was shot in the the plaza of uh Las Vegas, New Mexico, and he's standing there and he's surrounded by all these white racists, and uh he tells them, you know what, I'm gonna take this right foot and I'm gonna womp you on the side of your face, and there's not a goddamn, you know, there's not a thing you're gonna be able to do about it.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then he just proceeds to beat the absolute shit out of all the racists in Las Vegas Plaza.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_02: And as a former stunt performer, I can say that it's actually a really well choreographed fight.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like it looks like the stamp of approval.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it looks like he's laying some fucking thumps on these uh stunt people that he's fighting, and the editing is really good, and he's using Hopkido.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is like the first time really that the American public got to see Hopketo in in like a major motion picture.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, you know, the natives that that that I would speak to at Burning Paradise, especially the older guys, they would just kind of like laugh off the goofier parts, like the getting bit by a snake and and all that shit because they knew it was nonsense, right?
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_02: But to them, that was not as important as having a native character or at least a partially native character on screen defending native people and beating the shit out of racist white people.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: Portrayed by a white guy, right?
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: And like I think, but but I think that for Deloria, I think that's that's what really sticks in this cra, right?
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: That it's this white guy basically.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: Performing the fantasy that the white man believes of himself, right?
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: That that he is like you were just saying a while ago, like we are the native people, yeah, because we were born here.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: So to him And I get that argument.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, despite despite the um the accolades that people gave it at the time within the native community, I mean I think Deloria's point is that this is still not an actual native person doing this.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, and I and I get that point.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: But just looking at it from the perspective of, well, this is a movie made in 1971.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's a pretty entertaining movie.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and you get to see like a native character, not not a native actor, but a native character uh doing this.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I have my problems with that too.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like I love the movie La Bamba, but goddamn, do I wish they had actually got some fucking Chicanos to play Bob and Richard?
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Selena, right?
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right, yeah, or Selena Mexican American.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like you can't get us to play these.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's it's a little more understandable in the 1970s, but yes, it would have been.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_02: I would like to see a remake of Billy Jack set in the modern day.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: With actual native people written and directed by one called Curly Jack.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Curly Jack, yep, exactly.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_01: You got the talking done, brother.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_01: But time for some action.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_02: It also brings to mind to me uh the character of John Rambo, right?
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh Rambo.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_02: That first book, uh First Blood.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then they make it into a movie, and that movie's badass.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't he also like a Green Beret or something?
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Some kind of special force.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Former Green Beret, half native.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, he's also half native.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's uh half Navajo.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_02: I totally forgot about that.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh half Navajo, half Italian.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_02: So the way they get around that is you cast an Italian actor.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_02: An Italian actor to play.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because you know, Italians and and native people, they're interchangeable, right?
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Columbus, Columbus and and you know, Montesuma, they're in they're interchangeable.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_02: The same people.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: But in First Blood, which is a great freaking movie, and it talks about the disdain of veterans of Vietnam and how they're basically abandoned, and it talks about PTSD and and all of these things.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_02: The first movie, the other movie's.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the first one.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_02: But the first one is a badass, low-budget, drive-in exploitation film that had very specific themes.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I always thought, God damn, that movie would have been made so much better if a native actor had played Rambo in it.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_02: Who do you think would have should have played as?
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know who I I've always in my mind who I see when I think of Rambo is uh the guy that played Sonny in um Predator.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, right, yeah.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like, goddamn, that guy would have been a wicked Rambo.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's of the era, right?
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Rambo, Predator, they're kind of like in the same way.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it would have been so cool to see like a native dude.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then it would have added just a little bit more substance to why that cop is being such a piece of shit to him.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because at first you can't really like like why is it being yeah, why is it being like that?
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is it because he's Italian?
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is there some kind of anti-Italian um sentiment here?
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was meant to be to to portray like anti-vet like the abandonment of veterans of Vietnam.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: That too.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_01: I always found that weird because I mean that's a myth.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_01: I know I know that that you there's a lot of um Yeah, the baby killer spitting on Vietnam.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Veterans, yeah, there's a lot of veterans who who will tell you anecdotes, right, of things that happened to them or that they heard happened to someone else.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and and I'm not denying those things, but in the aggregate, it's it's a mythology that that they experienced what what they claim to have experienced.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because the studies have been done on this, and they've all shown that that it's been this idea has been mythologized and overblown, especially by people on the right for political purposes.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then the whole demonization of Jane Fonda tied into that and all these bullshit stories made up about her.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, it's it's very myth-driven.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_02: But man, we need a put a remake of Rambo with uh natives.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, Rambo meets Billy Jack.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was just thinking that.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was just hey you can be uh curly jack and I can be Billy Just uh what would be a good way of saying it's like a thinking on Rambo.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Clambo?
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: I can be Tlambo.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Rambot.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Rambotl.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Rambot.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_02: But one thing that Deloria uh what he talks about when he's talking about the old chief is being like this um I don't know, this uh marker of uh this trope, I guess, that reappears.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's definitely annoying, but you know what I even I hate even more than the trope of the old chief?
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you see this now a lot is the trope of the old wise white man.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it's always the old wise white man.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_02: Where do you see this?
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, any fucking ty what's his name?
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Taylor Sheridan movie or TV show, or it's always almost always played by the same actor, too.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's always like Tommy Lee Jones.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I think you know, and it's always these old cowboy white guys who are like whenever they talk, it's always this profound word of wisdom, and they're like, Well, well, I'm tell you what, and then they like spit off some fucking nonsense.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think the exception to that rule would be um the the cowboy and and um the dude.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: What's the name of that movie?
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh The Big Lebowski?
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: With that cowboy dude's talking to the dude at the at the bar.
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's what's that actor's name?
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm blanking on his name now.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't remember either of their names.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_02: But both of them actually do pop up every once in a while playing playing an old wise white man.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like, well, and they just they just call it like it is.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_02: And they like feed into this uh masturbatory white western male, like like there's that fucking guy, Taylor Sher Tyler Sheridan?
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Taylor Sheridan?
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_02: I have no idea.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_02: He writes every goddamn show on TV right now, apparently.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So disconnected from all this junk that I haven't understood.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's a TV show called uh what the hell is that?
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_02: It it got cancelled or it ended.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_02: And but every TV show on the air right now seems like it's a spin-off.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yellowstone, that's what it was called.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't watched a single show, a single episode, none of that.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't interest me.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's boring.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, we're doing Westerns again?
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the thing is, right, they pop up, you know, the clips will pop up on my feed, so I'll stop and I'll be like, all right, what is this shit?
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the problem.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: You still have feeds.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: So social media feeds.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's we're getting to the core.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're psychoanalyzing you today, Curly.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't realize that the purpose of this episode was to get into the mind of Curly and I thought that was the purpose of the interview.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And get get get get to the core of the distress that's taking place.
• 1:16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so he they they show these clips, and I'll watch one, and I saw somebody describe it perfectly as like these shows are like for old white boomer males.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty much people who like fantasize about winning every fight and fantasize about being like the ultimate badasses because the cowboys in these shows are shown as like these unstoppable forces of nature who have like all this deep wisdom and respect for the land, and I'm like, okay, buddy.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's why I just stay away, man.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, uh I got no time for this, got better things to do, bruh.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's ridiculous.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I was and and uh full disclosure, I've been in two movies written by Tyler Sheridan.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_02: So Oh, you have?
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: He wrote uh the two Sicario movies.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, there's there's that full disclosure.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_02: But the guy just writes all of his movies and TV shows seem to always feature like a native character being brutalized or killed.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's like a white k white savior character who steps in and uh helps like rectify the situation.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um a lot of criticisms have been written about this dude and his writing.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they're well warranted, well deserved.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, the old wise white man.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Jeff Bridges is the one that's Jeff Bridges.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: The dude, right.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm trying to think of the the old wise cowboy the guy with the giant mustache.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm trying to think of his name.
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_01: What's his name?
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_02: But all this to say, um I like Billy Jack.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I get all of his criticisms.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_02: All of his criticisms are warranted.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_02: All of the way he says everything is very well put and succinct and apt.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm also a fan of 1970s drive and exploitation movies, and I thought this one was pretty good.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, sir.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing I really like about it, I'll just say Sam Elliott.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_02: One more Sam Elliot.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one one thing.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's the he's the quin quintessential old white man chief, I guess.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you want to put it.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the old white chief.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_01: The old white chief.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Elliott.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you're if you're listening, you're the old white chief.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're the old white chief, bro.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_02: Take it down a notch.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: But uh with Billy Jack, and I'll this will be my last thing I say about Billy Jack, is in that movie, in that first movie, he never is a clown.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like he never represents native people as like these buffoons or uh or anything.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's not a clown, but but it it's over the top in in some respects.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I mean it's also an exploitation movie.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's an exploitation, uh it's kind of part of part and parcel of the genre, right?
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and for our listeners, you know, if I'm wrong, let me know.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_02: If you agree with me, let me know.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't seen the movie, if you want to see a story about a native character just beating the absolute shit out of white racists in the 1970s, check out Billy Jack.
• 1:20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Billy Jack is your guy.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't uh look up um the term Pretend Indian, because I know I had written it down somewhere in my notes and it's buried in in uh on some of my older stuff that I haven't opened in years.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: So um, but I was doing some quick digging right before we started to record and and uh to see the first uh instance of like the term pretend Indian as it's used today in terms of pretendian, right?
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because it used to be two separate words, pretend Indian, as the way that it was published in the book originally, but then over time, you know, as things go, uh as language evolves, uh the the term got merged, it got uh what's it called?
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_01: Portmanteaued into into pretendian.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so some of the stuff that I was looking at uh says that the you know there's no way to really you know ascertain who or where it first originates, but like by the mid-2000s, it was something that was already being defined in the urban dictionary as of April of 2007.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so it was uh officially defined in in that space in that dictionary um to call out people who were deemed as pretending to be indigenous or Indian.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and let's let's let's also be specific here.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_01: When people use the word pretend Indian, they're not saying they're pretending to be um indigenous people from Mexico, from South America, or from somewhere else.
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually primarily the the US and by extension Canada as well.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's the English-speaking world that they're usually referring to uh when people use the word pretend Indian.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um but by 2012, uh the the controversy that surrounded Elizabeth Warren, do you remember that?
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where she was Oh yeah, you know she had said in the past that she was she was Cherokee and of Delaware ancestry and all this stuff, and then people started digging into her past and they realized that she had like a 130-second relative or ancestry, and so like they were questioning can you really claim to be indigenous if you're that far removed from from your indigenity, right?
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you had the indigicops coming out and and targeting her, and so she had to kind of retract that, and so it was around that time that the term pretend Indian gained popular usage in uh on the interwebs mainly on social media sites, uh, and by 2016 there was an individual who uh by the name of Joseph Boyden who apparently uh he was an author or is an author who claimed to be of indigenous heritage, and then some guy named Jorge Barrera uh questioned uh his uh background, and I guess um he's the one that kind of exposed him as being a pretend Indian for uh you know monetary purposes to sell his books as an indigenous author or something to that respect.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so from there, that's when the the term started to gain uh steam.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so ever since 2016, the term pretendian has been in regular usage, especially among a certain sector of uh armchair activists who pretend to be indigenous identity cops.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I mean there's some people who are legitimate targets of being called pretendians because they're literally not indigenous people whatsoever, have no affiliation or ancestry that ties them to indigenous uh roots or societies or communities, and and they're privileging from that in some way, whether monetarily, financially, or even just politically or socially, right?
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the advantages and the benefits come in in different forms.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_01: But by and large, a lot of the people who have been the targets of being called a pretend Indian are those who are indigenous people but just do not happen to have some kind of recognition from the government.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Official affiliation of some sort.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_01: To a recognized tribe that the federal government has recognized as being authentic, quote unquote authentic, right?
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where the controversy lies, right?
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And in this idea of calling people pretend Indians.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it gets worse, right?
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because you go from being a pretend Indian to being called an an alien, and the the configuration there is like, oh, are you from here?
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Are you not from here?
• 1:24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Are you from outer space?
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_02: So and and I really like the way he uh the uh Vine put it where he was saying, like, they uh they've been unable to adapt to this area.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's like they are an invasive species, basically.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that's my words, that not not Vine's, um but like this uh invasive pathogen almost that stepped in and is forcing instead of them adapting, they're forcing the everything to adapt around them.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think he made some really good points in that.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, like whether you agree with with what I've said or with what uh what Dr.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Tlakatekat said or with what Vine has to say about these things, we encourage you, dear listeners, to take the time, step back and explore these ideas for yourself.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh don't just blindly accept what what people are feeding ya.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_02: Don't don't succumb to the the whims of the indigicops or the tomfoolery of the pretend Indians.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, sharpen your knives, sharpen your tools, and look at everything with a critical eye because ultimately it's all about getting to the truth.
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what I like to say about the truth, Dr.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_02: Tlakatekup.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_01: The truth is like pretending to be Indian?
• 1:26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the truth is like medicine.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't always taste good, but it is always uh good for you.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_02: You're here.
• 1:26:42
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• 1:26:50
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• 1:26:54
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• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Just go to tales from Ostlantis.com, go premium, and support independent indigenous Chicano Media.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.