Walking in Two Worlds

Valerie Rochelle Littlestar Red-Horse Mohl.

Unmistakably Indian . . . that name, that thick, black mane cascading past her waist. Yet undeniably middle-class. College cheerleader married to football hero, raising their kids in the suburban mainstream.

Like many of the 85,000 urban Indians in Southern California, her family straddles two cultures, weaving strands from both into a pattern of their own creation.

You see it in their Tarzana home, where a table made from a Native American ceremonial drum flanks a French armoire and big-screen TV, and tribal masks and kachina dolls line walls papered in delicate rose brocade.

In the way she and husband Curt Mohl raise their three children, hauling them to basketball practice and birthday parties . . . and to powwows and Indian reservations.

And in the way her heritage has directed her dreams, turning her away from acting to filmmaking so that she she could bring the stories of her people to the screen.

“People like us walk in two worlds,” Red-Horse says. “And that comes with certain responsibilities. What I want to do is show the richness of our culture,” to teach Native American children the value of roots and give them the gift of wings.

Her children are “less” Indian than she . . . one-quarter, if you do the math; their native blood is diluted by their maternal English grandmother, by the Germans on their father’s side.

But Native American identity has never been about percentages and drops of blood. It is about culture and history.

That is what Red-Horse tries to convey to her three children--Courtney, 14, Derek, 10, and now, Chelsea, 1.

It is hard, eldest daughter Courtney admits, to walk in two worlds; awkward to wear heritage on her sleeve, the way her mother does.

“Everything my mother does involves Native Americans” whether it’s decorating their house or running her business, Courtney says. “My life is not that way.”

Courtney is smart, athletic and pretty, with her mother’s high cheekbones and long, dark hair. She was voted “funniest” in her eighth-grade class.

She knows she may be the only Native American her private school classmates will ever meet.

“It’s kind of weird,” she says. “At first you feel like they’re expecting you to be dressed in leather or riding a horse. . . . You talk about Native Americans in [history] class and everybody turns to look at you.

“It’s a kind of pressure, like I’m representing a whole culture, so I have to be careful what I say and do.”

And sometimes it is a burden. Like when a popular boy showed up at school wearing a baseball cap with an ugly caricature of a Native American.

She didn’t want to overreact, to alienate her friends. But she’s not the type to suffer silently. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but it’s hard not to take it personally. If it was a Jewish person on there with a big nose, that would offend people and we would understand why. But people still feel free to stereotype Native Americans . . . I mean, do I look like that? Why is that OK?”

She couched her protest as a joke, and the hat never showed up at school again.

It is a feeling her mother knew well. Red-Horse grew up in Fresno, the only child of a woman whose family hailed from England and a man who was raised on Cherokee land in Oklahoma.

Her father, Joseph Red Horse--half Cherokee, half Sioux--was 70 when she was born. She was one of 14 children he had with several women. He left the family when Red-Horse was 3, and she saw him only sporadically.

But her mother remained “in love with the Indian mystique,” regaling her with stories from her father’s past. “In a lot of mixed-blood families, the parents just erase the Indian side. But my mother was proud of the fact that I was Indian, and she encouraged me to be proud.”

Still, it was hard knowing where she fit, in a town where everyone else seemed to be either black, white or Latino.

“I remember back in the ‘70s, we had these race riots at school. And the black kids commandeered the school bus and wouldn’t let the Mexican kids on. I went over to board the bus and the black kid looked at me. ‘What are you?’ he said. And I told him ‘Cherokee.’ And they had this big discussion.” Ultimately, they let her ride . . . though none of the black kids spoke to her on the way home. “I was always the oddball. Nobody knew what to do with me.”

It is that sense of isolation that fuels Red-Horse’s efforts to keep young Native Americans connected to their culture.

After only moderate success in 20 years as an actress--being told she was too ethnic for mainstream parts, but not ethnic enough for native roles--she launched her own company two years ago to make films that accurately portray the Native American experience.

The catalyst was her husband, Curt; the turning point, rejection by a casting director who said she “sounded too educated” to be believable in a Native American role.

“I came home and railed at Curt for two hours, screaming, crying. He said, ‘If you have this much of a problem, you need to write your own stuff.’ So we started our own production company.”

Last year, the company released its first feature film, “Naturally Native,” financed with $700,000 from the Mashantucket Pequot Indians, who run one of the nation’s most profitable tribal gambling operation, the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.

Native Americans filled almost every role and production job on the film, which deals with the lives of three Native American sisters who are taken from their reservation and raised by a white foster mother. The film follows the efforts of the sisters to launch a cosmetics firm using natural Native American ingredients and recipes. But its underlying theme is the challenge urban Indians face as they struggle to understand and embrace their culture.

The movie premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and is expected to open in a few theater chains in Los Angeles and other cities this fall.

In film circles, Red-Horse is considered “at the forefront of a whole new era for Native Americans in Hollywood,” says Dawn Jackson, a designer for the Disney Co. who serves on the Los Angeles County Native American Indian Commission. “She’s one of a handful of Native Americans--and the only woman--in Hollywood who’s made this kind of mark, who has the kind of access, the credibility to bring us to the next level.

To that end, Red-Horse organized and funds the nonprofit Hollywood Access Program for Natives, which has provided film production internships for a dozen students from Native American reservations in the last three years.

Some of the students live with the Mohl family during their time in Los Angeles. For many, it is the first time they’ve been off the reservation, and the transition is not always easy. But the learning experience goes both ways.

“My kids learn there are people who live and breathe being Native American every day, who understand the richness of their culture,” Red-Horse said. “And the reservation kids get to see possibilities for a life without limits.”

It can be an education for the crews who work with them as well. Filming on a recent Red-Horse project was delayed when intern Ernie Stevens--a new arrival from the Oneida Nation reservation in Wisconsin--got lost on the freeways and arrived on the set late.

He was given a tongue-lashing about work ethic from the project coordinator, who later complained to Red-Horse that he offered no explanation and that he wouldn’t even look her in the eye.

“I had to explain to her that in our culture it can be considered disrespectful to meet your elders’ eyes. And I had to explain to Ernie that it’s OK to ask for help, that he should have told her why he was late. She felt angry, he felt ashamed . . . all because of a cultural difference.”

Growing up in an urban setting may deprive Native American kids of chances to connect with their heritage, but it also gives them a leg up in dealing with the mainstream culture.

In her life, Red-Horse has taken full advantage of that benefit. She graduated at the top of her high school class and, she says, turned down scholarship offers from Harvard, Stanford and USC to attend UCLA.

There, she “fell in love with the whole college experience . . . being a cheerleader, joining a sorority, that whole ‘rah-rah, Go Bruins’ thing.” And she met Curt Mohl, a strapping offensive lineman on the Bruins’ football team, and the man who would complete her life. “He was 6 feet, 6 inches, 250 pounds of solid muscle. . . . I said to myself the first time I saw him, ‘I’m going to marry that man.’ ”

Mohl was smitten as well, but he was wary of introducing her to his folks, a conservative brood from “white bread” Sunnyvale in the Bay Area. And her first encounter did little to ease his mind.

“My dad was down here on a visit, and we met up for dinner. I introduce her, and he reels off this joke: ‘So, I hear they call you 99 cents.’ The punch line: ‘Always under a buck.’ ” Mohl cringed, but Val Red-Horse didn’t. She’d heard worse. The next family meeting went slightly better.

“We were in Sunnyvale, at my folks’ house for dinner. My mom’s German, so dinner’s always meat and potatoes, heavy stuff. We sit down at the table and start passing the meat around. And Val won’t eat it; she doesn’t eat meat.

“Turns out,” Curt says, “the Indian thing didn’t bother my family. They were more concerned about me marrying a vegetarian.”

Twenty years later, Val is still a vegetarian. And Curt is still meat and potatoes. And together, they are like a complete meal.

In addition to the film production firm, they own a successful advertising specialty business, which they run from an office in their home. They share a strong Christian faith, which keeps the whole family active in community service and steadies them “through the highest highs and the lowest lows,” Curt says.

In the main, their life is not so different from any other family’s; the influence of Native American culture as subtle as it is ubiquitous.

The kids take classes in Fancy Shawl dancing, rather than ballet. The family hosts exchange students not from Sweden or Japan, but Oklahoma and Arizona. They travel not to theme parks on vacation, but to Indian reservations. And just as Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, and Christians skip Passover, the Red-Horse-Mohl clan has wiped Columbus Day off its calendar.

The family went abroad for the first time last fall, on a film promotion tour that included Germany. And Valerie felt as at home in Curt’s ancestral homeland as he has always felt in hers.

“For years, I’ve dragged him to powwows and Indian reservations all over this country,” she says. “He’s learned our tribal dances, our stories, our culture. And he’s developed a passion for the Indian situation, because he’s got a passion for justice, for making things fair and right.

“Now it’s time we get the kids connected to their German culture, to honor that side of their life. Ultimately, to know who they are, we need to take them full circle.”

Sandy Banks can be reached by e-mail at Sandy.Banks@latimes.com.