Iron Eyes

            On Monday morning during song practice there was a guy panhandling from cars with a paper plate. He was wearing one black shoe and one white shoe.

I finished working out the chords for “Vu de l’extérieur” (From the Outside) by Serge Gainsbourg, and ran through it in French and English.

I tried to take a siesta between 9:41 and 11:00 because I would have class that afternoon and then that evening I would have to pose for OCADU. I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall asleep at work. I dozed a bit but I couldn't sleep and so I got up at 10:26.

There was no class ahead of ours in the lecture hall but there were some students from another class hanging out at the back. Some of my class were sitting in the fall and I guess they thought there was a lecture going on but I went inside. I read chapter three of The Portrait of Dorian Gray while I was waiting for class to start.

A guy leaned his bike against the Dollarama entrance and put on a sweatshirt but then walked halfway across the parking lot while adjusting the shirt underneath it which looked like a kind of awkward upper body dance. Then he walked back to his backpack and pulled out a jacket, which he also put on while walking halfway across the parking lot.

            Safia told us that Professor Kevin White had urgent personal matters in the United States related; it seems to him moving to Canada. That explains why our reading material for this week seemed so last minute.

            Our lecture topic was stereotypes.

            “Squaw” is a degrading term. The Algonquian expression “squaw” has never been a word by itself but always a part of longer words. The Ojibwa word for “woman” is “ikwe”. In Cree it’s “iskwew”. In Haida it’s Jaadaa.

            Stereotypes have consequences and are harmful to children. The victims of stereotyping internalize and begin to believe it.

            There was a suicide of a young black child in the southern United States because of teasing about a disability.

            Stereotypes are as old as humanity.

            Some stereotypes: that black people are physical and unintelligent.

            Thomas Flanigan, who worked as an advisor to Stephen Harper, wrote a book called First Nations? Second Thoughts that supports various racial stereotypes.

            Eugenics arguing that white people are a balance between smart Asians and physical black people.

            She asked us why we might “other” someone. I said for territorial reasons. She agreed and said it serves coloniality.

            The “savage” is a colonial trope.

             Racialized people as sidekicks, stoics, criminals or saints but never ordinary people.

            Robert Picton’s victims were mostly Indigenous.

            Indigenous people are only named in the news when the news is bad.

            Ben Johnson was called “Canadian” when he was winning but “Jamaican” when he was caught cheating. I don’t know if that’s true. He was always spoken of as “Jamaican-Canadian” before and after the doping scandal.

            Buffalo Bill’s wild west shows re-enacted battles rather than massacres.

            She showed us a slide of the text of a newspaper story from 100 years ago about white men canoeing with Indians when three is an accident. The white men are named but the Indians are not. I pointed out that the Indians are also not referred to as “men” and so their humanity is diminished.

            She showed us slides of comic book covers, including one of Superman wearing a chief’s headdress while his invulnerable body deflects Indian arrows.

            She showed us an image of fans doing the tomahawk chop.

            The tension is about land while the racism is just a tool.

            Things are gradually changing.

            Safia said that her old Indigenous Studies professor is now part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

            At Christmas when the racism comes out, knock it down.

            Go to comments sections if you really want to see racism.

            APTN is more prone to good research and they are controlling their own voice.

            We watched a clip from the movie Reel Injuns.

            Pine Ridge Reservation is the poorest in North America. It’s the site of the Wounded Knee genocide in 1890 when 300 were killed by US soldiers, two-thirds of them women and children. The chief is a direct descendant of Crazy Horse. A memorial is being built there that will be the largest statue in the world even though Crazy Horse refused to have his image captured and all photos purported to be of him are fake. It will actually be the second largest statue since the largest is the Statue of Unity in India.

            There was a clip of a Native comedian: "Where does this road go?” “Road stay. You go!”

            The Silent Enemy is a silent film shot in 1930. It was about the Ojibwe of Ontario before the settlers came and used real indigenous actors. One of the actors was Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. He was a mixture of Cherokee, black and white. According to this documentary he concealed the fact that he was part black and when that background was revealed he was shunned. According to my research it was also the fact that he wasn’t really part Cherokee that caused him to lose popularity in addition to being black. He ended up committing suicide.

            In the 1930s, after The Silent Enemy, when talking pictures came in, Indians became transformed into savages. Every Indian became either a Plains Indian with a feathered headdress or they all wore single feathered headbands like some tribes of the northeast woodlands.

            There was a funny clip from the film A Distant Trumpet in which the hero is talking to a Navajo who is speaking his native tongue for authenticity. The documentary shows subtitles of what he really said, “You’re a snake crawling in your own shit".

            Iron Eyes Cody was one of the most successful portrayers of native characters on screen, having done more than a hundred westerns. He was really of Sicilian descent but behaved like an Indian off screen. He played the Native American shedding the tear in the famous Keep America Beautiful ad. He married Bertha Parker Pallan, who was of Abenaki and Seneca descent. They adopted two Native American boys. His children stand by their father as having been a true Native despite his real ancestry.

            Our tutorial had a lot more students than the four we had last week. One student explained that she’d been working for Elections Canada that day.

            Safia said there are copyright issues with the readings she scanned for us.

            We split into two groups. Our group consisted of six of us and three of us were Native. I learned two of the Ojibwe dancers named Nicole and Robin.

            We discussed whether the depictions of contemporary Natives have changed over the last several decades. I thought they had changed in the movies over the years but the Ojibwe women didn’t think so.

            Another question was, “Are the depictions of Native characters uniform across North American media. I thought they are more positive in Canada like Pat John on The Beachcombers but they thought they are all the same.

            Safia said some people are more outspoken than others and she pointed at me. She said she wanted to hear from some other people this time and pointed at a helpless white guy who seemed embarrassed by the attention.

            When we related what we’d discussed the one Ojibwe woman who spoke just said we all agreed there had been no change.

            Safia said that stereotypes are not as blatant now as they were but they are still there.

            Safia talked about cognitive dissonance, saying that it was when one has core beliefs and refuses proof. That's not what cognitive dissonance means at all. It's when someone holds more than one conflicting opinion.

            Nicole and Robin go to schools and put on traditional dances. Robin said that when she performs she gives a talk first and especially at French schools they basically tell her to shut up and dance.

            Nicole expressed the opinion that Indigenous Americans did not come across on the Bering Strait. I was relieved when she said that a lot of Ojibwe people get made when she says that. As long as she doesn't think they were always there or were created supernaturally I think there are other possibilities. There's certainly no evidence that Native Americans evolved independently over here so they must have gotten here either by way of the Bering Strait or by boat.

            Robin said people have been lining up for their little bit of money from the treaty. I asked, “What treaty?” She pointed at the floor and said, “This treaty!” Again, I asked what treaty is this treaty. She said, "Treaty 13. The Toronto purchase.” I said I thought everybody got $20,000. Nicole said they didn't get $20,000. It's more like $500 a month. What I’ve read is that 1700 Mississauga got $20,000 and the rest was put in trust for future generations. Nicole would have been thirteen when the settlement was arrived at so maybe the $500 a month is part of that trust.

            I rode home and had lunch. I tried to sleep for half an hour before leaving for work but couldn’t.

            I worked for Shavon Lewis at OCADU. Also painting in the class was Kima Lenaghan, whom I’d worked for the previous week. I think they are both teaching assistants. I started with one-minute poses for the first set and then did two and a half sets of five-minute poses leading up to the long break. I worked on my journal during most of my short breaks but tried to snooze for the fifteen minutes of the long one. I didn’t really sleep but I got enough rest to help me stay awake for the rest of the class.

            On my way home another cyclist rang her bell behind me and then asked in an annoyed voice if she could pass, as if I was somehow preventing it. I asked, “Why not?” and she passed.

            It seemed to be an angry night. I passed the scene of an accident where two guys were standing in front of a dented vehicle and the shorter man was threatening the other with a club-like implement and demanding to know, “Why you hit me?”

            It was almost 22:00 when I got home. For dinner I had two cold drumsticks and a bowl of potato chips with salsa while watching an episode of Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen that seemed pretty silly in the context of my earlier Indigenous Studies class.

            A man named Albright hires Josh to marry his daughter, who was kidnapped at an early age and was raised by Apaches. She is about to be courted and married in some fake Apache tradition and Albright wants Josh to be one of the courters. The former Doris Albright is now called White Antelope. Why would Apaches name someone after an animal that is not native to the Americas at all and that they probably wouldn't have heard of? At first White Antelope rejects Josh but he charms her and competes for her hand. He beats the other suitor in combat and kills him. White Antelope chooses Josh. He takes her back to her father. She wants to go with him but he leaves her.

            White Antelope was played by Lori Nelson, who was a child star as a dancer in New Mexico and when her parents moved to California she was voted Little Miss America and worked as a model until getting into films in her early teens. She starred in “Hot Rod Girl” and some other pictures and was in the first season of the TV series “How To Marry a Millionaire”.