Ross H. Dabney, Professor of English

The Native American -- at the same time terrifying and weak, fierce and manageable, has always been mythologized, especially in popular art, especially in film. The old myth of the brutal savage festooned with the blond scalps of little white children, only good when dead, has in the last half century given way to the new myth -- the gentle old shaman in Thunderheart, whose wisdom and understanding, rooted in unalienated nature, make him visionary and prophet in a greedy and destructive white world. Clearly there's some historical truth behind both myths; we all now tend to think there's more in the second one, perhaps partly because the second one is more useful to us at this time.

Films about Native Americans offer a promising occasion for us to sort out and try to be honest about the categories of art, politics, and historical truth. Of course the sense that there is historical truth and the attempt to judge art in terms of it is a relatively modern embarrassment -- something that has grown upon us especially since the Victorians, and has perhaps only recently begun to decline. Our remote ancestors were content to reach into a treasury of stories which happened to people who were in a sense their contemporaries; they were sensitive to bad art but would not have winced, as we do, at the mere anachronism of Charlton Heston's Moses. Should we not try to resemble our ancestors? Is it not better, from the point of view of drama or film, not to know or care about the historical truth? And won't this be easier and easier as we know less and less history, and treat it more and more as a mere confirmation of our political and cultural prejudices?

Clearly people have always mythologised history; artists need to do this, as do political advocates of all kinds; it is hard to separate mythmaking that serves art from mythmaking that serves politics. When we look at a film that presents a myth whose politics we despise -- say, The Birth of a Nation or Jud Süss -- it seems more relevant to us in terms of aesthetic judgment that the film is not telling the truth about history, and we are more apt to consider that historical inaccuracy is related to bad art, than we do when we look at an egregiously mythical film whose politics we approve -- say, Dances with Wolves. How is the historical truth presented in a film related to its quality as art?

This question is illuminated by looking at two films together -- Dances With Wolves and Black Robe. Dances with Wolves pretends to show us a process of demythologizing -- its protagonist discovers that the red men are not the demons he had feared. The myth is in fact transferred to the whites, who turn out to have the qualities they ascribed to the natives -- brutality, violence, ignorance, insensitivity, cruelty, pleasure intormenting the helpless, hostility to all that stands outside their narrow purview, stupid and aggressive illiteracy (white soldiers wipe theirbacksides with Lt. Dunbar's journal, which records the truth their civilization is determined to ignore). By the time Dunbar (who has now found his identity as Dances With Wolves) is rescued by his red friends, we are ready to accept the principle that a good U.S. soldier is a dead one. For various reasons we find this reversal satisfying; we get the same primitive satisfaction our grandfathers presumably got from Zane Grey, along with a warm glow of political correctness; if we recognize that we are experiencing a traditional myth turned upside down, we feel an intellectual's self-approval at the recognition along with the vague sense that some kind of clever irony is involved.

In Black Robe instead of having a reversed myth imposed upon us we see people making up myths; they are making up myths about Father Laforgue and his kind, who are ugly and stupid, weak and childish, and yet uncanny and powerful, whose god is a clock at Quebec, who are demons and not men, who seem -- some of them -- without the sexual needs all humans have, who can use black marks on paper magically to transfer words and concepts from mind to mind, but lose their way in the forest as no man out of infancy could do. The priest, Father Laforgue, presumably has a mythological explanation of what he is doing, but we have very little idea of how he sees the natives; this has been criticized, along with Laforgue's general woodenness, but perhaps this criticism represents a misunderstanding of what the film is up to. The mystery in the film is not the red men -- we see their choices and understand what they do -- it is rather the priest; in a sense it is our own civilization. As in Dances with Wolves, the mythmaking faculty is focused on us rather than on them, but it is done in the open, by people whose mistakes we recognize; it is not a question, as in Dances with Wolves, of our own myth being switched from them to us. Rather we see something we think we understand being explained by people who find it mystifying. It is a useful exercise; watching people make up false explanations (in good faith) about European behavior neither confirms old prejudices or helps us to shift them mechanically to new objects -- it makes us think about history and about our own civilization.

Both films present a white man in the middle who is required by circumstances to choose between white and Native American culture -- in both films, he chooses the Native American way. Clearly this is a useful dramatic device, but it is historically anomalous: there hasn't historically been much choice on either side but the choice there was offered the red man -- do it our way; learn to trade or farm like a white man, give up your own political authority and accept ours, or be an outlaw and resist until you're beaten, starved, worn out, killed. In Black Robe we have the rare experience of watching red men appreciate their choices -- the white man wants us to accept his authority, to give him some of the lands we live in, to have one wife and to stop killing our enemies; if we accept we get various useful objects -- guns, knives, pots -- and maybe he can do something about the diseases he brought us; he also says we will go to his paradise. Maybe so; who knows. But we lose ourselves. Maybe we can trade for the white man's weapons and go on being ourselves.

In Dances with Wolves the white protagonist goes native not only because of circumstances he can't resist but also because he is convinced by evidence (that convinces the audience too) that the red man's way is better. In Black Robe the young Frenchman in the middle, Daniel, sees advantages in both cultures -- on the one hand he might like to go to France and train for the priesthood, and on the other he clearly sees advantages in the native way of life -- not only in its attitude toward sex, but even in its religious ideas. Like Dunbar he is swept away by circumstances; both situations are convincing as one watches them, but the choice in Black Robe much more so, because it seems less staged and argued. What Daniel does when he sticks to his red woman and leaves the priest is not presented as a choice of cultures, but rather as a man doing what he must at the time.

Both films face the temptation to use the good-injun-bad-injun structure. How does this thing work? It is basically a device to handle our ambivalence about the red man and about various qualities he has been made to represent, and to say contradictory things about him. If the red man is noble and base, honorable and treacherous, cruel and sensitive, better and worse than the white man; if we want to argue the native's ecological superiority to the white man who rapes the land, while admitting that the native butchers and tortures human beings unashamedly for pleasure, good-injun-bad-injun is a useful if mechanical and even dishonest way to sort this out. The variety of tribes helps -- noble Mohicans, base and cruel Hurons, etc. Of course the myth has now been reversed, from good red men like Uncas and Tonto who scout for the whites to the good red men of Thunderheart who maintain implacable hostility to the white civilization because, unlike the Reservation politicians (bad injuns) who play ball with the F.B.I., they have not sold out to white corruption and rapacity. Dances with Wolves plays the good-injun-bad-injun game quite crudely -- bad Pawnee, good Sioux. We think that something like this is going to happen in Black Robe -- the people we have got to know seem to be in violent contrast to the new tribe who are going to torture them to death. The chief red man, whom we have learned to venerate (he is played by August Schellenberg), disabuses us: "They are the same as us." One reason why this works is that, since we can't see things from Father Laforgue's point of view (he is too wooden) and we have been encouraged to look at the whites from the outside, we have begun to see things from Schellenberg's character's point of view. We have also begun to move imaginatively from the automatic acceptance of convenient and traditional myth to a more thoughtful historical awareness -- maybe the various tribes of the long house culture really did behave pretty much in the same way. I think we can identify Black Robe's refusal to do the good-injun-bad-injun thing as a decisive measure of its seriousness -- a concern for truth that makes it more important as art.

An essential difference between the popular settlers-and-indians drama of the Zane Grey era and of today is that then the focus was on the drive of the settlers to establish themselves, and now it tends to be on the doomed drive of the indigenous culture to survive. Both of these things are of course historical, but there is plenty of room in both for mythic interpretation and moralization. In Dances with Wolves, the native way is doomed not only because the whites are more numerous and better equipped, but also because the white man is evil -- greedy, destructive, rapacious. This evil is not arbitrary; it comes from the combination of power and ignorance, an ignorance projected and made possible by power. The white man does not know or understand the buffalo or the wolf, but he an kill them much more easily than the red man could. He can't figure out that, in the absence of sheep, it makes more sense to dance with a wolf than to shoot him. Because he has so much power he does not have to understand the land he lives in or the creatures that inhabit it. If the white man were better he wouldn't want to displace the natives from their lands, but also he wouldn't be able to -- the riches, numbers, organization that are tokens of his power are also tokens of his moral and spiritual inferiority. History has revealed this to us now; the Faustian bargain has produced the hole in the ozone layer, bumper-to-bumper traffic on eight-lane superhighways, the hydrogen bomb, the Astrodome. The perspective we get from these things is in the escapism as well as the cultural self-hatred of Dances with Wolves. Our satisfaction in this film as well as some of its vulnerability to criticism lies in the judgments it makes; we cannot unmake the bargain, which is what the film suggests we ought to try to do.

Black Robe doesn't seem to judge the two civilizations. But it shows that they cannot ultimately live together -- that the red man cannot afford to become a Christian and stop killing and raiding in tribal warfare if he wants to go on being himself. We learn at the end that the people Father Laforgue has come to save will go down before their tribal enemies, presumably because the Father has succeeded and they have become Christians. We have a kind of D. H. Lawrence suggestion that their souls, robbed of the strength they used to get from torturing their neighbors to death, will quail before the souls of these neighbors. Once the Hurons have given up the culture of torture and endurance there will be no place for them; they will lose their ability to compete and to survive in this hard land.

The hardness, immensity, and occasional seeming hostility to human life of this continent is more effectively represented in Black Robe than in any other film I have seen. Both Black Robe and Dances with Wolves show us that the red man accepts this land and lives in it in a way the white man cannot or does not choose to do. In Dances with Wolves we see a small part of the slaughter of the buffalo from the red man's perspective, which is, of course, now ours. Unfortunately, Black Robe cannot show us the Canadian equivalent of the slaughter of the buffalo -- the cutting down of millions of white pines four to six feet in diameter, six hundred to a thousand years old, a hundred and fifty feet tall. The wilderness of Black Robe is full of small trees. But even with the small trees, the land in Black Robe is frightening as we are almost never allowed to see it in in the cinema landscape of the Wild West. The sense that Lawrence and other Europeans experiencing the New World write about -- that America is a landscape hostile to Europeans: too big, too harsh, too hot, too cold, We don't get this in the usual red man film -- certainly not in Dances with Wolves we do get it in Black Robe. The pitilessness of the Native American corresponds to the pitilessness of the land he lives in.

This is a suggestion of something true, a suggestion achieved by facing and not avoiding historic truths. I have argued with people who condemn Black Robe because it shows red men being cruel to each other -- this, they say, is to feed the old white imperialistic myth and justify the rape of the continent and the destruction of the cultures that inhabited it. We must ignore the historical evidence that we have and supplant it with stories that appropriately represent the political truth we have found -- at the very least we must adapt the traditional good-injun-bad-injun construction, using the suggestion that bad injuns have been somehow corrupted by the whites. But this will not do -- we cannot dispense with the truth; we can make up myths to dramatize fears, hopes, and triumphs, but we cannot use them to forget or deny what we know happened. The Greek word for truth, Alethea, means literally not forgetting.

What has happened has happened, and that is why we are where we are; this is something that is interpreted by both history and art. The natives of this continent were on the whole hard and cruel people. They lived hard, in a hard land. We, of the European culture, have found it possible to conquer the land and mitigate the ferocity of the climate; in the process we are destroying the land and, possibly, the climate. We are doing so with the best of motives -- like Father Laforgue's.