Tag: Kirby Brown

Presenter: Anna Peckinpah

Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies

Oral Presentation

Major: English

In the United States alone, currently more than 183 million people play videogames. When it comes to producing cultural ideology that leads to consequential discourse and stereotypes in video games, one of the most problematic depictions of minority characters occurs with the depiction of First Nation people. Due to the closely tied correlations of cinematic film tropes to videogames, westerns and other films featuring indigenous identity inaccurately illustrate Native women and negatively impact how games depict aboriginality. Often, the harmful game portrayals follow the cinematic precedents of either the explicitly racist caricature of the ignoble savage “squaw” and/or the hyper- sexualized and fetishized “Indian princess”. With non-natives depicting Native female identity with the ideological approach of the ignoble versus noble, videogames continue the legacy of so many films and television series that bastardize the accuracy and nuanced uniqueness of each First Nation woman’s identity and history by conglomerating common tropes of westernized perceptions of “Indianness”. The only way to counteract the harm caused by such misrepresentation requires Native videogame makers to reassert their sovereignty and control over telling their history and experiences without catering to colonial desires or tropes. A careful examination will emerge on how certain cinematic narrative techniques and tropes in games affect the progression from explicitly racist and violently sexist portrayals of Native women in videogames, to a sympathetic but still sexually objectifying and inaccurate rendering of indigeneity that still relies on distorted versions of history to alleviate colonial guilt. A final critical move illustrates how Native-produced games challenge such conventions via the creation of nuanced, humanized, and thoroughly researched and authentically historic depictions of First Nation female identity and uniqueness.

Presenter: Samantha Elwood

Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies

Oral Presentation

Majors: English and Spanish

Even though The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar occur hundreds of years apart, both try to heal culpability felt by white settler-colonial audiences surrounding the United States’ foundational history of colonialism. The Last of the Mohicans directed by Michael Mann and based off of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, follows Nathaniel Poe, a frontier man, and his adoptive Native American family, Chingachgook and Uncas, as they walk the line between indifference and concern during the events of the French and Indian war in the mid-18th century. James Cameron’s film Avatar explores the newly discovered world of Pandora and its indigenous people, the Na’vi, through the eyes of Jake Sully, the narrator of the film and the narrative anchor for both species. Both films explore the usually contentious relations between white and Native American society in a more positive and mutual way. The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar attempt to console the colonial anxieties through their depictions of Native Americans as sympathetic, but by mediating these characters through white male protagonists, they naturalize the history of white dominance of Native Americans because whiteness becomes vital to the futurity of the Native American culture.

Presenter: Joel Ekdahl

Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies

Oral Presentation

Major: English

Queer Indigenous critics Lisa Tatonetti and Gabriel Estrada criticize Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing for upholding the rural-urban binary, and for defining the Spokane reservation as “a landscape emptied of gay people” (Tatonetti 173). They argue that this binary panders to a white-washed form of multicultural theory whose focus on the fragmented, alienated, urban subject erases the particular circumstances of indigenous decolonization. This divide, they argue, forecloses the recovery “of dynamic Two-Spirit traditions and communities” and thus fails to establish a critique that is both queer and indigenous (Estrada). However, by reading Alexie’s Spokane Reservation as an absolute cultural domain, Tatonetti and Estrada’s criticism occludes Alexie’s engagement with the continuing process of colonization. Alexie utilizes the unique relationship between Seymour Polatkin, Aristole Joseph, and Mouse to explore the diverse issues of reservation poverty, alcoholism, white voyeurism, and internalized Native heteronormativity. Alexie, instead of focusing on Two-spirit revitalization, resists the temptation to essentialize indigenous queer theory by locating critique at the level of personal desire. Focalizing my analysis around Seymour Polatkin, I will argue that his poetry bridges his personal desire to obtain positive recognition while also critiquing colonialism through the stories of his reservation.