MOVIE REVIEWS : An Angry ‘War Against the Indians’

“The War Against the Indians” (Laemmle’s Sunset 5, weekend mornings through Nov. 29) is a 2 1/2-hour documentary about the plight of American Indians that reaches back over 500 years. It’s an ambitious feat--so ambitious, in fact, that, despite the film’s length, one wishes it were longer. It’s a miniseries idea if ever there was one.

Still, documentarian Harry Rasky has crammed a voluminous amount of material into his film, stretching from pre-Columbian days right up until the present. The Columbus connection, of course, is entirely uncoincidental. “The War Against the Indians” is a prime piece of Columbus-bashing, and it’s much more documented, and poisonous, than any of the current Columbus films.

Rasky brings in the stories of native peoples from throughout North America and the West Indies. He crowds the soundtrack with spoken narrative from historical sources--the words of the Navajo, Hopi, Sioux, Cheyenne, and many others. We’re shown a steady stream of astonishing artworks: paintings, maps, carvings, totem poles. The American Indians are often interviewed in the landscape of their ancestors, and their mixture of rage and supernal calm is almost palpable.

Rasky doesn’t pretend to “objectivity.” His film is a polemic against Western colonizers who decimated the native populations; the wars and cruelties between the Indians are unstressed. Rasky’s view of the native people may be too paradisiacal, but the justness of his anger is unimpeachable. This story of epic horror has been chronicled in literature, but not too often on film, and the documentary mode may be the most effective way to transmit the horror.

We hear from one Indian speaker about how every 10 years since 1600 native people have lost half their number. The white-run “residential schools” that Indian children were herded into are depicted as de facto jails where physical and sexual abuse was rampant. The vast storehouse of myths about American Indians is turned upside down: the myths that have become part of the American historical record by way of Hollywood.

“The War Against the Indians” (Times rated: Family) could do with less footage of pristine canyons and ceremonial naturescapes; the Indians’ primal connection to nature doesn’t need to be padded out with close-ups of Bambi and bumblebees. The soundtrack, with its mix of native music and melodramatic filler, is sometimes distracting; we don’t need all this artificial heightening when the material itself is so emotionally wrenching on its own. And one wishes Rasky had explored contemporary native culture more; the Indians interviewed in this film appear to stand apart not only from the past but the present.

The film doesn’t satisfy our desire to know how these people, freighted with such anger, manage the sheer dailiness of their lives. Rasky’s epic ambitions don’t include the mundane circumstances that gives texture, and beauty, to the lives we see on the screen. The Indians, because of their history of suffering, are portrayed as epic-scaled, and this approach has its own myth-making qualities.

Still, it’s hard to feel unsympathetic to this kind of corrective. “The War Against the Indians” is both countermyth and angry revisionism. Its epic rage fills out its epic frame.