From: beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!selway.umt.edu!demeler (Borries Demeler/Biophysics)
Subject: Re: movie "Blackrobe"
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 17:45:35 GMT

Original-Sender: selway.umt.edu!demeler (Borries Demeler/Biophysics)

[Although reviews usually go to nn.general, I am posting this one to
NatChat because it is part of an ongoing discussion of this film.--mkk]

This is a reprint (without permission) from the AISES magazine "Winds of
Change" - Summer 1992. It contains a review of Blackrobe and Clearcut, two
films about Native Americans. Only the portion about "Black robe" is
reprinted here. For more information on video releases of Black Robe and
Clearcut contact:
Nothern Arts Studio, Williamsburg, MA 01096
Incidentally, good movie reviews can always be found in "Winds of Change"
magazine. Thunderheart and Incident at Oglala were discussed as well.
-Borries
*******************************************************************************
Controversies about two Canadian dramatic feature films Black Robe
and Clearcut, which currently show in cinemas across the United
States reveal much about mainstream North American society's lack
of willingness to pay attention either to environmental concerns or
to the beliefs and values of indigenous cultures.

   Black Robe and Clearcut both are thematically grounded in
spiritual issues, the former focusing on the historic beginnings
of the clash between two ideologies, and the latter focusing on the
contemporary consequences of the 'white man' still failing to
comprehend the existence of power beyond human power. Numerous
interviews reveal that aboriginal people are offended deeply
by Black Robe's desecration of aboriginal spirituality and other
historic inaccuracies, while they realize that Clearcut communi-
cates honestly on several levels about survival. Meanwhile,
non-Natives view Black Robe as a major step forward, and Clearcut
simplistically as a violent film.

Black Robe

The first controversy about Black Robe is that the story is based
almost solely on information trom the Jesuit Relations up to 1634.
Bryan Moore, an award-winning Irish-born novelist, wrote the
original (bestselling) book and screenplay. Moore, in a interview,
acknowledged this fact, with the rationale: "Writing a book about
that period we can't know more than they knew then. The only
literature in the world on the North American Indian ot that period
is the Jesuit Relations."

   Moore says that he and Black Robe's award-winning Australian
director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy)
agreed to minimize the graphic descriptions of aboriginal religious
tortures recorded in Jesuit Relations. "I don't want to shock
people," says Moore. "I want to show in the film the
misunderstanding between the Jesuits, with their Christian culture,
and the Indians and their animistic culture. Both sides considered
the other side totaIly wrong."

  "This is a period in North American life when the Indian
considered himself quite superior to the white man," says Moore.
"So what I'm really writing about is the period before the Indian
became a victim of the white man. They became the victims because
they accepted gifts - axes, tools, guns. In that process, as
Algonquin Chief Chomina (August Schellenberg) says in the film, 'we
have come to need their gifts, and we will change and become just
as they are."' Moore's film story does demonstrate the generosity
of Indians who shared everything, and even the Jesuit priest's
young French assistant Daniel (Aden Young) points out how the
Indians are "true Christians" because they live for each other.
Time restrictions of a film story disallowed more details about the
Indians as a caring human community, Moore adds.

  Black Robe's story line focuses on a trip from Quebec City
hundreds of miles into the northern bush, where Jesuit priest
Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau) and Daniel are escorted by
Algonquins to a Huron community where the priest will be stationed.
Bluteau read the entire Jesuit Relations as research, and views the
film's theme as "opposition between two points of view, two
philosophies." The film, he says, also has moments of discovery
about what the individuals have in common as human beings. Such mo-
ments, for example, reveal "what you dream about, what are your
goals, why you go on, what is your definition of courage, of im-
proving things, making them better."

  Yet, while Moore and Bluteau envision a story of human
convictions and frailities, and some non-Native audiences may see
more clearly the inappropriare intrusion of one way of life upon
another, the aboriginal people interviewed see major errors in
Black Robe that perpetuate longstanding srereotypes. The original
script was not acceptable to certain aboriginal actors, such as
Tantoo Cardinal, who lobbied for changes. Cardinal, a Cree actress
who played Chomina's wife, says that Native women, and their
significant role in traditional society, have yet to be given
justice in any film portrayal. She took the Black Robe role re-
luctantly, believing, "I knew that I had to do it whether I liked
it or not" because the story is "all part of something that is
happening, that is going to touch us, whether we're ready
for it or not." Cardinal believes that a film which causes people
to think and which provokes discussion, is a film worth doing. In-
deed, certain scenes are hotly controversial.

  The depiction of a medicine man and the murder of a child in an
Iroquois longhouse have enraged many aboriginal people. First
of all, concerning the medicine man Mestigoit, he was portrayed by
actor Yvan Labelle, a dwarf whose face was grotesquely painted and
who treats the Jesuit priest and his own people in a demeaning way.
"Shamans are people of almost physical perfection," says Jane Ash
Poitras, a Chippewa/Cree artist and lecturer based in Alberta.

  Medicine people are not "sorcerers," a European term in the film,
she says, adding that a medicine person conducts himself or herself
with dignity. Visitors come to them with an offering. In Black
Robe, however, he chases after the priest, harassing him and
shaking a rattle, calling the priest "a demon." Poitras says that
a medicine person instead would say, "This priest is from another
land, from another cultural belief, and his systems are just as
strong as ours. But it's your choice. If you want to take his way
over your own ways, then that is your choice."

  "When he came out, everyone in the cinema laughed, says Ramona
Gutierrez, a Chican-lndia nurse and member of the Native American
Church, who saw Black Robe in Phoenix, Arizona. She was distressed
to see a medicine man laughed at, and she feels that the film
showed no respect for aboriginal spirituality. Moreover, like
Poitras, Gutierrer felt that Black Robe was degrading to aboriginal
people in its violence and sexually explicit scenes.

    In Montana, Luana Ross, an Interior Salish woman who is
professor of Native American Studies at Montana State University,
was so enraged by the longhouse scene, she says, that she jumped up
and cussed, then stormed out. The three woman agree that nowhere in
their research or histories have they ever heard about kidnapped
aboriginal children having their throats slit by aboriginal tribes,
particularly to a gleeful audience of onlookers, as shown in Black
Robe. Cutierrez was disgusted to hear that the film had won several
Genie Awards in Canada, and questions the inclusion of spiritual
aspects in fllms whose purpose is "entertainment". She also points
out, "images on the screen are absorbed by people whom the images
represent." Indeed, many generarions of aboriginal people have had
to live down continuing stereotypes.

    "Perhaps the biggest crime in the movie," says Poitras, "where
they (filmmakers) really attack the sacred" is the sweat lodge
scene in which participants conspire to harm the adult captives.
"This film has set a precedent now. Throughout history we've been
attacked as far as drinking, sex, the way we look...But the sweat
has never been attacked in the hisrory of film or writing." Don
Waboose concurs. He is a First Nations Ojibwa traditionalist and
owner of the First Nations Dance Team & Drum Group based in
Ontario. "In the sweat lodge. we do not pray for violence, or seek
vengeance. We tell the people in the film industry not to play with
our sacred things, do not make a mockery of them."

  Sweat lodges did not exist among the Mohawk until a later period
in history, according to Billy Two Rivers. He was the Mohawk
language coach and an actor in Black Robe, and is a member of the
Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, near Montreal, Quebec. "The Iroquois
people have never held a sweat lodge in a spiritual sense. We use
it more in a physical sense," says Two Rivers.

  As for the fate of kidnapped children, Two Ri vers explains.
"Children are very, very valued in our society. They would have
been adopted and raised as Iroquois." Adult captives, considered to
be formed in their ways, would be bludgeoned. Yet, in Iroquois his-
tory, says Two Rivers, adults would be captured in raids on other
communities to be brought back and adopted, in order to become
providers for impoverished families who had lost providers in
warfare or illness.

  The original script, For example, depicted the Indians as
cannibals. The captured child, says Two Rivers, not only had his
throat slit, but also he was "dismembered, put into a boiling pot
and force-fed back to his father and the Jesuit. This was totally
unacceptable to us, because it is not factual.

    Concerning the medicine man, Two Rivers confirms that the image
was demeaning. "That's the way the Jesuits described anybody that
was their equal. The spiritual people in the community would give
trouble to the Jesuit, because they would depict him as an
intruder. So, his writings would have to give a poor image of that
(aboriginal medicine) person." As an outspoken advocate on Mohawk
selfdetermination, Two Rivers gives his opinion about the classic
Iroquois image as ferocious savage.

  "I don't mind our ancestors being depicted as the most fierce
people in defending their lands, their rights and their freedoms.
You have to explain, whether to the white person or to the young
Indian person, that in our Iroquoian-structured society we valued
freedom so much and defended it the most. In defending against the
intrusion of the white man the most, he deemed us to be the most
savage."


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