The Wolves at Bay

They are the first Americans, but in films they have often been the last. In traditional movie westerns, they served as all-purpose villains, swooping down with bloodcurdling war cries upon hapless white settlers, scalping men, kidnapping women and children, stealing horses.

“The only good Injun is a dead Injun,” was a familiar line. The irony was that often the Injuns were played by non-Injuns.

Then came the late ‘60s, when America became sensitized to cultural imperialism and racial stereotyping. Soon films such as “Soldier Blue” (1970), “Little Big Man” (1970) and “Billy Jack” (1971) indicted white society for its prejudice and brutality against Native Americans.

Twenty years later, the Oscar-winning “Dances With Wolves” (1990) proved a landmark in theme and casting. Though the movie starred a white hero (played by Kevin Costner, who also directed), it was deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Lakota Sioux and made a point to seek Native American actors for the many Native American roles. While this may seem standard procedure today, Graham Greene, who won an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Kicking Bird in the film, says, “There weren’t that many native actors back then. I myself drifted into acting slowly.”

“It was a major step forward in casting native actors,” says Rene Haynes, who found the extras for “Dances” and is now an L.A.-based casting director widely known for her focus on Native American actors.

This may be another watershed time in that history. Several recent or upcoming theatrical releases and a television movie feature new discoveries among Native American actors, as well as showcase veterans. “Windtalkers,” which opened in June, was based on the true story of Navajo soldiers whose native language provided an unbreakable code for use in the Pacific theater during World War II. Director John Woo cast actors Adam Beach and Roger Willie in key roles, although the movie still relied on a white lead (Nicolas Cage) for star appeal. Next come two grittier features created by native talent about contemporary native life in the U.S., Chris Eyre’s “Skins” (which is scheduled to open next month) and Sherman Alexie’s “The Business of Fancydancing” (scheduled for release in Los Angeles on Oct. 25), as well as the PBS “Mystery!” special “Skinwalkers” (also directed by Eyre), based on a Tony Hillerman novel. Taking place largely on today’s Indian reservations, the projects have casts that are mostly Indian.

Also, scheduled for release later this year is Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” which includes pivotal Indian characters, while Kate Montgomery’s “Christmas in the Clouds,” featuring a Native American cast in a romantic comedy is seeking a distributor.

For some it is high time there were more films about contemporary Native American life, rather than those that regurgitate the romance of the noble savage, usually by white filmmakers. For actors, it’s a chance to move beyond the grunt and sink their teeth into far meatier stuff.

“Nine times out of 10 in these period pieces there wasn’t much acting involved,” says Eric Schweig, who co-stars with Greene in “Skins.” “There were a lot of monosyllabic dialogue, a nod here and there--that’s all they wanted. You can’t do much acting when you’re just grunting.”

While “Dances With Wolves” moved beyond grunting, it still lacked the right point of view, according to native filmmaker Eyre. His directorial debut “Smoke Signals” (1998) was the first feature by a native director to gain national theatrical release. “ ‘Dances With Wolves’ served a great purpose--it was a beautiful movie, but it was not an Indian movie,” he says.

And what was that purpose? “It galvanized Indian men and women to want to take acting on as a craft.”

Exact head counts are hard to come by, but there is consensus that more native acting talent is available than ever before. Casting directors may still find this area a challenge, but it just means they have to stretch and go beyond the usual talent pools in Los Angeles and New York.

Take “Windtalkers,” for example. From the beginning the producers sought the support of the Navajo Nation, which, says co-producer Terence Chang, had felt burned by past movie portrayals. “You know, like all those films where Lou Diamond Phillips played Indians,” he says. Although only one-eighth Cheyenne, Phillips has played a string of Indian characters in such films as “Shadow of the Wolf” (1992) and “Sioux City” (1994).

At first the tribe insisted on Navajo actors for the Navajo parts in “Windtalkers,” then eventually agreed that at least “they should be 100% Native Americans,” Chang recalls. In addition to a six-month search through the usual channels, casting director Mindy Marin set up open casting calls in six cities in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Five hundred people responded.

In a Cinderella twist, Roger Willie, an artist who showed up at one casting session to chaperon two hopeful nephews, was noticed by Marin and asked to audition. They ended up sending him and two other nominees to Los Angeles, and after a week with an acting coach, Willie was selected for the part of Charlie Whitehorse.

“Whenever we see American Indians in big Hollywood movies, we never know what they’re thinking, we never know how they feel--they’ve only got one expression, pretty wooden,” director John Woo says. “Roger was really natural, I liked his charm and his realism.”

Meanwhile, they couldn’t find a Navajo suitable for the Ben Yahzee role, so they went with Adam Beach, a Saulteaux native from Canada. They had liked him from “Smoke Signals,” Chang says, and felt that “Adam was the best actor for the job.”

“Smoke Signals” set a benchmark for Native American actors. It debuted auspiciously at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998, winning the Audience Award and the Filmmaker’s Trophy. The story of two friends, stoic Victor Joseph (Beach) and chatty Thomas (Evan Adams), who try to reconcile the past to the present, it touched on the pervasive reservation problems of alcoholism and broken families, while maintaining a voice of dry humor.

The success of the film has proved a jumping board for writer Sherman Alexie, who has gone on to direct his own film, “The Business of Fancydancing,” actors Beach (“Windtalkers,” “Skinwalkers”) and Adams (“The Business of Fancydancing”) and, of course, director Eyre.

For Eyre, the characterization of the native roles was key. “I believe it is a landmark movie in that it revolves around the humanity of the characters and not the romance of the loincloth,” he says. “I know for a fact that Native American actors want to stretch. They want to play characters that are people, people that exist in the gray area. They want to be challenged by human complexity. Those movies before ‘Smoke Signals’ were about using Indian actors as vehicles for some non-Indian writer’s liberal political message. They’re history lessons in guilt, and I’m not into that. I’m into examining my characters and their story.”

In his new film “Skins,” two adult brothers live in uneasy proximity on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rudy (Schweig) is a local cop turned vigilante by all the trouble he has seen; Mogie (Greene) is a down-and-out alcoholic who, despite his joking, is on a downward spiral no one can stop, not even his well-meaning teenage son (newcomer Noah Watts).

For “Skins,” casting director Haynes saw actors from L.A., New York and Canada, in person and on tape, then took the extra step to go to South Dakota. There she set up workshops in schools on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations to find potential 10-year-olds to play Mogie and Rudy as boys.

On the other hand, casting the two adult leads was easy. Eyre contacted his friend Eric Schweig for Rudy, and after reading the script, he threw his name into the hat. “Eric’s a very focused, intense individual,” the director says. “He says very little on screen, but he’s powerful.” Eyre and producer Jon Kilik agreed that Graham Greene would make an ideal Mogie “for the depth that he had,” Eyre says. Greene agreed after some hesitancy. “The role was so dark,” explains the actor, who decided to lighten things up by inserting his own jokey ad-libs during shooting.

These days it is de rigueur to seek Native Americans for native parts, even non-headlining ones. For “Adaptation,” which includes Seminole Indian parts, casting director Kim Davis-Wagner says that she and her colleague Justine Baddeley “cast a very wide net; we even auditioned in Canada.” They finally chose L.A.-based Jay Tavare for a supporting role opposite Meryl Streep.

For Sherman Alexie, “the tricky part was not the lack of great actors, but we couldn’t afford them.” He adds: “Certainly in Canada there are dozens and dozens of seriously trained actors.” Indeed, Canada has been the training ground for many native film actors today--Beach, Greene and Gary Farmer, for example.

To keep under the $1-million budget, “The Business of Fancydancing” was shot on digital and includes native actors from both sides of the border.

The protagonist is Seymour Polatkin (Adams), a successful poet who, after a long absence, returns to his Spokane reservation for a funeral, and faces the jealousy and resentment of those left behind. In flashbacks, we see Seymour and pal Aristotle (Gene Tagaban) look forward to college in Seattle, then their explosive rift when Aristotle decides to head back to the reservation and thinks Seymour should go too. As an adult, Seymour has created another life, that of a man on the literary circuit, that of a gay man.

“Ideally you would love to cast people within your tribe to play your tribe,” says Alexie, but he says that it’s not always possible. Many extras in his film are Spokane Indian, but while Adams is from the Northwest coast, Tagaban is a mixture of Tlingit, Cherokee and Filipino and doesn’t look particularly Spokane, Alexie says.

“I don’t draw lines about blood content--[whether a person is] a quarter, a half, a full blood,” Haynes says. “I don’t draw lines about what tribe actors are because that would be too limiting to my options.” In the end, the choice was “always for the best actors for the role.”

Meanwhile, native actors are keenly aware of the limited roles offered them--in number and in type--and most are delighted when they have a chance to break out of the box.

Recently, Schweig and Greene were happy to take on roles that were not the usual for them. Schweig mentions a part as a gay man in the upcoming “Mister Barrington,” in which there is only a passing reference to his Indian background. Greene, who finds himself swamped with acting offers, especially relishes a comic part he had in “Christmas in the Clouds,” a romantic comedy set in a ski resort run by a native tribe in Utah. He plays a vegetarian chef who tries to convert all his diners. “I like being funny,” he says.

So far, “Christmas,” unveiled at Sundance in 2001, has been hitting a block in terms of distribution. Writer-director Kate Montgomery set out to make a film about contemporary Indian life that would be funny, upbeat, even heartwarming. “There’s no self-pity in this script, it’s all positive without being schmaltzy,” she says. “I chose to really celebrate the humor and poke fun at the stereotypes.”

Sheila Tousey, a veteran actress of stage and screen and co-producer of the film, has a key part as Mary, the resort’s overeager marketing director, sporting giant glasses and a beehive hairdo. And if good native roles are hard to come by, good native roles for women are even harder, Tousey says.

In 1996 the actress had the lead in an HBO special, “Grand Avenue,” and its success prompted her to move to Los Angeles to be closer, she thought, to work. Instead, she says, “I found it much more difficult. In New York, casting directors go to plays and actually see you. In L.A., they look at photos and demo tapes. It was more difficult to get parts here; the funny thing is that I would get offers through New York for parts here!”

On stage, she says, “I’ve played everything under the sun.” But in films she’s faced heavy-duty typecasting. Interestingly, as a result of her strong performance in “Grand Avenue” as an alcoholic Native American, “I was offered roles for any kind of drunk woman.”

“I’m quite choosy about the native parts I pick,” she says. “Hollywood expects leather and feathers or some serious drama that usually involves dysfunctional behavior.” Thus, “Christmas” proved a welcome relief. “It was really refreshing to play something fun and light,” she says. “It’s exciting to do something that hasn’t been seen before.”

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Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.