“An artwork is an occasion for fruitful inscrutability; it affords an opportunity for us to figure out how to make sense of the artwork itself.  We need to reorganize ourselves so that the artwork can be there for us.”

—Alva Noë, “The Aesthetic Predicament,” The Entanglement

“This new world / was endless, centered everywhere, our study / of place and peoples dangerous, surprising, never / completed.”

—an excerpt, from “Rock Shelters,” originally a letter in the form of a poem sent to the Osage Nation News in an intriguing piece of fiction by Osage writer Carter Revard called “Report to the Nation: Repossessing Europe” in Nothing But the Truth

“I’ve mentioned my frustration when people of colour are missing, misrepresented, and marginalized in Canadian journalism.  I believe these three problems are at the core of how the white gaze affects how people of colour are depicted.”

—Christopher Cheung, “Of Gaps and Gazes,” Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism

Beans (2020) by Tracey Deer

Inspired by true events in 1990 Quebec, Beans is about a young indigenous girl’s coming of age during a time of social protest, focusing on her parents’ plans for the young Native girl’s education, and on a strategic protest the larger Kahnawake Mohawk community takes part in: this is a story illustrating participation in the knowledge, civic life, and current events of the times.  These are modern Natives—people engaged by complexity, aware of history but not confined by it.  The balanced, good-looking and believable film, directed by Tracey Deer, opens on the beautiful image of a nervous, pretty, conservatively dressed Native girl in a car, in the front passenger seat, then on the girl’s admission interview at a new school, in which she gives her name to the admissions official of the prestigiously scholarly school, Queen Heights school in Montreal, the city in which her mother works as an executive assistant, but the school official has trouble pronouncing the name—Tekahentahkwa—and the girl suggests using her nick name Beans, which almost everyone calls her.  She is a good student, determined and directed, and says she wants to be a doctor or a lawyer. 

Beans (Kiawentiio Tarbell), later, tells her younger sister Ruby (Violah Beauvais) that she wants to study art at the school, though she identified an ambition to be a doctor or lawyer to the school official.  Beans says the school has an amazing art studio.  Her father Kania’tariio (Joel Montgrand) does not want her to go to the Montreal school, but her pregnant mother Lily (Rainbow Dickerson) does, thinking it will prepare her daughter for the world.  The parents argue, but Beans is too sensitive to defend her preference.  Beans cries in the face of her parents’ conflict; and her father tells her that she needs to toughen up.

There is an ancient pine forest on the Mohawk reserve.  The pine forest is the subject of the town of Oka’s plans to enlarge a golf course into what is Mohawk sacred land, a cemetery site, a conflict between a local community and a provincial government—suggesting a disrespect of the site’s history and significance to the Native community, and something the Natives intend to protest; and the family attends the protest.  They bring posters and food.  Beans and her younger sister collect firewood for the protest group in the forest; and see gravestones, and the golf balls hit into the cemetery.  They begin to pick up the golf balls (there is a similar scene in Charles Burnett’s film To Sleep with Anger—and the story of disregard for the cemeteries of minorities is not a new event).  The girls put flowers on the gravestones.

There are gunshots.  Fear.  Chaos.  Running.  The riot squad enters the forest to clear it of protesters—and a police officer is shot.  Natives fortify their barricade.  Beans’ father Kania’tariio (Joel Montgrand) is on a bridge with a gun, with other men.  They’re taking over the bridge to keep forces divided—to prevent bloodshed.  “This is Mohawk territory,” someone screams.  “You make sure this doesn’t turn into cowboys and Indians,” Beans’s mother, Lily (Rainbow Dickerson), says.  Each side has its barricade.  Over a 78-day period, the conflict will take on symbolic importance: representing history; representing the current state of contentions between aboriginal land rights and the Canadian government. 

“First Nations people had little say in the laws that governed their lives.  They were denied the vote until the second half of the twentieth century, with a couple of exceptions.  The Indian Act established a process of enfranchisement for some if they surrendered their Indian status (and received an individual land holding on the reserve) as part of eventual assimilation into the majority society.  Also, from 1885 to 1898, some First Nations people in eastern Canada could vote; it was felt by parliamentarians that they were more ‘civilized’ than First Nations people in western Canada as they had been under British influence for longer.  Like Indigenous peoples in the Dependent Empire, most were ruled despotically and lacked political power,” summarized writer and lawyer Jim Reynolds in Canada and Colonialism: An Unfinished History (Purich Books, University of British Columbia Press, 2024; page 166).  “The Indian Act was at the heart of the system of colonialism administered by the Department of Indian Affairs through Indian agents,” Reynolds explained (page 173); and while the natives may have had elected representatives on band councils, the councils had little real power.  The federal government commissioned a First Nations study in 1966, and the report would recommend First Nations people be given special status and rights, but that was dismissed by the government in a White Paper of 1969 (the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, released June 1969, according to Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism; page 188).  Eventually, “The increased pressure for more self-government powers and greater legal recognition of treaty and Aboriginal rights started as a protest against the 1969 White Paper and the attempt by the federal government to remove the special legal status of ‘Indian’ people,” noted Jim Reynolds (page 214).

In Beans, after the chaos of the gun shots, and the arrival of the riot squad, the mother and her two daughters, Lily with Beans and Ruby, leave the reserve.  Meanwhile, Kahnawake Mohawks, south of Montreal, are defended by some French speakers who see them as simply defending their land.  Some commuters, however, do not see the sense of the blockade (and no doubt resent its personal inconvenience).  The natives use everyday items—furniture, tires, planks—to block the road.  Cops put up barbed wire to fence the forest.  Beans wants to put ribbon on the barbed wire so it can be seen easily, preventing injury—but older, rudely tough Native kids arrive and bully Beans and her sister Ruby (misunderstanding, criticizing).

“Drawing on her own childhood experience of the 1990 events, Mohawk writer-director Tracey Deer’s powerful, impassioned film Beans picks at an unformed scab,” wrote reviewer Guy Lodge in the April 17, 2021 Variety, concluding, “The rhetoric of revolution is simpler than the draining, disorienting process of living through one: Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.”  The Canadian Tracey Deer, a Mohawk Native and member of the Bear clan, attended Karonhianhnonha School Elementary and Queen of Angels Academy, and studied film at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College in the United States; and before Beans, she directed a documentary profile of Native teen girls, Mohawk Girls (2005) and another documentary on Mohawk identity and blood quantum laws, Club Native (2008), for which she won a Gemini Award.  Apparently, Beans took eight years to write (the screenplay was co-written by Deer with Meredith Vuchnich).  The film’s production designer was Andre Chamberland, and the property master and props maker was Mylene Bilodeau.  Beans was photographed by Marie Davignon, and edited by Sophie Farkas-Bolla, with music by Mario Sevigny.  We see the world, the complicated world, through the perspective of a young, sensitive girl.  “So I chose to tell the story through a child really hoping to inspire people to go out into the world within the power they hold—and we all hold power—to do better, to make the world a better place for our Indigenous kids because they need help,” Deer said in September 16, 2020 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio report, including an interview from Q with Tom Power, an online report written by Jennifer van Evra.

In Beans, the girls Tekahentahkwa (Beans) and Ruby, at home, sit in a yard tent.  Their mother Lily (Rainbow Dickerson) brings them an oatmeal lunch.  Beans (Kiawentiio Tarbell) gets her disappointed sister Ruby (Violah Beauvais) to pretend it is ice cream.  Their mother Lily with Beans, Ruby, with other women and children, take a boat to town to shop (avoiding the troubled bridge)—and Lily stops by the office where she works to retrieve mail and sees a response from the academy Beans interviewed with (she has been accepted—jubilation!)—but, at the grocery store, after the women have filled their carts, the storeowner refuses to sell them food—because of the political protest.  Lily knows the store manager Adam, but he still refuses her entreaties; and some of the townspeople applaud the rejection.  There, the store manager had the opportunity for relation, for dialogue, for understanding, even for fairness and generosity; but he refused that—he chose sides, narrowly, predictably.  Some French Canadians insult the Mohawk (talking about white people’s rights and mocking Native customs).  Men harass the women and girls, who leave.  These difficult moments are balanced by Beans’ good news: the letter saying that she was accepted into the prestigious school.

Beans, subsequently, goes to the home of the tough girl she met in the woods, April (Paulina Alexis), with something she had planned to buy at the store but snuck into her bag when the manager refused the family groceries (and she brings that token item as an offering of friendship).  Yes, the good girl steals, and offers this transgressive gift, this new evidence of an adventurous spirit, to her new acquaintance, a communion.  The other young people remain rude, vulgar.  Beans tells April, “I want to be tough like you.”  April calls her a baby, and challenges Beans to say something mean—Beans calls April’s room messy.  Thus, begins Beans’ apprenticeship in cool toughness.  Beans cuts a shirt short to try to look cool.  Her parents disapprove of her attempts to modify her clothing.  Her mom punishes her.  Beans is not deterred—and tries on lipstick.  She is about 13, 14, but wants to appear older, stronger.  Once out of the house, she modifies her clothing: she has put the clothes she wants to wear—a cropped T-shirt, exposing midriff, and shorts—underneath her coveralls.

Beans wants to present herself in a different way, to be seen as less girlish, more mature (even more sensual); and, thus, she is changing her style.  “Human beings are not merely creatures of habit; we are creatures of style…We don’t merely have styles, the way that we have fingerprints.  We inhabit our styles; we enact them.  To have a style, then, is to inhabit a way of doing something,” wrote Alva Noë, a philosophy professor at the University of California, in “Existential Style,” a chapter in The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton University Press, 2023 / 2025 paperback edition; page 143).  Noë describes styles as perceptible, intelligible, imitable, habitual, as lens and filter and as how we make contact with the world, as both aspirational and operational, as the domain of the human, as inevitably aesthetic.  Alva Noë states, “Art is an ecstatic undertaking with an emancipatory goal,” in “Existential Style” in The Entanglement (page 146).  The film Beans shows us a girl attempting a new style, claiming a new experience, a new freedom: it is an enactment of self-consciousness. 

April, the tough girl, reprimands Beans for being too sweet; and begins to teach Beans how to fight, to box (“As long as you’re punching, she can’t,” April says.)  April brings Beans to a room she uses as a refuge—with colored lights and a photo of her mother.  April encourages Beans to be less surprised by—and sensitive to—pain: “If you can’t feel pain, then no one can hurt you,” says April, whipping Beans.  Beans is shocked and amused as she learns to curse; and she repeats curses to a home mirror lined with furry toys.

“The young actor Kiawentiio is an exciting discovery.  She’s a formidable force, embodying Beans with a blend of youthful innocence, beyond-her-years wisdom, and forceful determination.  She’s natural and charismatic onscreen, which is sadly not true of every performer in the film.  It’s an understandable flaw; a dearth of roles for indigenous actors has produced fewer opportunities for sharpening their skills.  Still, it can hinder certain dramatic scenes that require a more nuanced touch,” wrote Jude Dry in the September 14, 2020 IndieWire review, “A Poignant Coming-of-Age Tale About a Mohawk Girl Under Siege.”  In the film, the protest on behalf of the sacred space, against the planned golf course, has led to an armed standoff.  Men with guns, behind barricades, opposing barricades, are on a road—a group of women step into the breach between the two groups, one Native and one white, and one Native woman says, “If we want respect, we have to behave respectfully.”  That is an important admonition, suggesting something humane, even humanist, a greater wisdom. 

That resonates with something suggested by the writer David L. Moore in his essay “Decolonizing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures” in the great anthology Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, edited by John L. Purdy and James Ruppert (Prentice-Hall Inc. / Pearson Education, 2001).  David L. Moore asserts that “A performative dimension frequently emerges in various genres of Native American literature, and this dimension ties Native texts to a vital context of both land-based and pan-tribal communities in at least three important ways.  Those communities reside as an audience in the texts, as a tacit chorus for the communal values reflected in those texts, and as a beneficiary of the writers’ political performances related to those communal values” (page 95).  Moore goes on to discuss interpretative responses, distinguishing among dualistic (or binary) polarities, such as civilization versus savage, Euro-American versus Native American, and dialectic (antagonistic and synthetic) responses and dialogical (conversational, relational) responses.  The dialectic suggests an argument or a battle that can be won or lost; but the dialogic suggests a relationship that can be open to evolution and improvement.  A woman’s insistence on mutual respect suggests not a battle, but a relationship. 

That might be an insight of gender, of intersectionality: “Intersectionality describes the ways in which social categories—such as race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, citizenship status, religion, appearance, and more—combine and shape how a person experiences life, from privilege to oppression,” summarized Christopher Cheung in “Of Intersections and Identity,” Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian Journalism (Purich Books, University of British Colombia Press, 2024; page 108).  Yet, one does not usually begin with insight: insight is where one arrives.  One often begins with confusion and cruelty.  Thus, Beans encounters disapproval and resentment in her new acquaintance, from whom she seeks guidance—leading Beans to misrepresent opportunity, possibility.  Beans (Kiawentiio Tarbell) and her new friend April (Paulina Alexis) play a ball catching game using a net.  The other girl, April, disapproves of the new high school Beans may go to (the school represents privilege, an alternative to ordinary Native life)—Beans says her mother is pressuring her to go, erasing her own ambition.  April throws the school catalog into the fire.  April’s brother Hank (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is attracted to Beans’ changed look; but there is an exchange of insults between Beans and him that is received as laughable: the feigned hostility establishes a gateway to (false?) trust, intimacy.  Beans, later, goes out at night, without her parents’ knowledge, to be with the older kids, who harass French officers, apparently the provincial police, with firecrackers and water balloons. 

The town (Chateauguay, a Montreal suburb) citizens protest outside the premier’s office and ask for army intervention for the Native protest.  Some suggest cutting off electricity and water for the Natives.  Robert Bourassa, the premier, calls in the Canadian army.  Women and children and elders leave their Native homes for safety—the Native men remain.  The traffic is slow on the Mercier bridge, with a five-hour delay, as the army is checking cars for weapons.  When Beans, her mother and sister, get over the bridge, there are people on the road harassing Native drivers, throwing rocks at cars, breaking glass.  A shocking demonstration.  Police just stand by.  Mother and the younger sister cry—and after the car stops, Beans yells at the police for not protecting them, and throws rocks at them—saying they are supposed to protect people. 

A motel is a refuge.  Natives fill out forms so the government will pay for their stay.  Beans scratches her own leg, forcing herself to tolerate pain (silencing her own tears).  Around the swimming pool are acquaintances, old and new.  Beans attends a small party, drinking with April, her brother, others—and she kisses April’s brother (the camaraderie between people seems natural); but then Beans gets into a fight with an observer, a French-Canadian girl she thinks is looking at her disrespectfully, upsetting her mother Lily, who says, “If they hate us, our people suffer.”

Lily drives Beans, Ruby, April and Hank away from the hotel, back home—after Beans’ fight with (pummeling of) the blonde girl.  Their car is attacked on the way by angry whites and feckless officers.  Lily argues with the army officers—and Lily drives away, then Beans shows the others a walking path home.  Through woods and water, Beans helps Lily and the others home, across water; and the excitement stimulates Lily into labor.  At home, Beans’ father and sister are displeased with Beans and the stress she seems to have caused—Dear ones, I have not loved you well enough—as Lily is attended by Havi and what seems a paramedic.  Beans runs to April, Hank and their associates—she drinks from a liquor bottle—and Hank asks Beans for fellatio.  She refuses, fights him off.  April realizes her brother Hank is becoming like their harassing father.

A healthy baby is born to Lily, a brother for the two girls.  Beans apologizes to Lily, who reassures her; and Beans picks up her new baby brother.  “Welcome to the world,” says Beans.  Beans and Ruby exchange I love you.  Subsequently, Beans visits April, leaves supplies.  There is a Mohawk rally, political dialogue, and documentary footage, and public support for the Mohawk and negotiations.  April packs to leave home, with the help of Beans; and April finds refuge with an older woman, her grandmother.  Barricades.  Yet, there is an agreement—the golf course is cancelled; and the burial ground is safe.  Relief, joy.  The Mercier bridge is back in business.  Beans starts seventh grade at her new school, with family support.  The film ends with Beans saying her Native name—Tekahentahkwa—to her new school class.  

Beans is a personal story and a political story, a story of new experience, of growth: a young girl embraces both tenderness and toughness—she has sympathy for others, learns to defend herself, reclaims her name, and declares her own ambition.  Her confidence and pride are matched by that of her community, which defends its history and its interests from disrespect and disregard.  Specific conflicts—but not all conflicts past or present—are resolved in a positive and satisfactory manner.  Of course, cinema itself offers many perspectives—it can help us recognize and reconcile conflicts: always, it has the potential to be dialogical. 

“A dialogic system generates interactions, oppositions, and alliances in four dimensions…The image is of a sphere of intersecting polarities, each a dialectic interacting dialogically with all the others, while the sphere’s circumference and center are constantly changing,” wrote David L. Moore in “Decolonizing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures,” (Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, edited by Purdy and Ruppert, Prentice-Hall Inc. / Pearson Education, 2001; page 105).  Further, “Dialogism acknowledges not only the primacy of context but also the impossibility of textual resolution, a productive indeterminacy, because it simultaneously accounts for a generalized force-field while it acknowledges the specificity of the other in that field” (page 105). 

Cinema, too, offers such panoramic views of the world.  While I cannot define a Canadian film canon, my researches and copious note-taking allow me to know that we have good places to start in our exploration of Canadian history, society, and culture: not only is there Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis (mini-series; Gil Cardinal, 2006), a drama about the conflict between government and Native community, and Reel Injun (Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes, 2009), a documentary focusing on the portrayal of Native Americans in cinema (primitive, noble, drunk, portrayed by other ethnicities); but also We Were Children (Tim Wolochatiuk, 2012), explicating the abuse of indigenous children in Canadian government’s residential school system; and Jordan River Anderson: The Messenger (Alanis Obomsawin, 2019), about gaining proper health care for Native children; and the works of Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Jeff Barnaby, Dana Claxton, Darrell Dennis, Bretten Hannam, Adam Garnet Jones, Jules Arita Koostachin, and, among others, Caroline Monnet, Loretta Sarah Todd, and Janine Windolph; but, also, Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001), a mythic ancient tale of a malicious spirit’s effect on a community, involving envy, love, murder, and exile, with an appeal to beauty and imagination; as well as films that can give us some insight into the evolution of the surrounding society, such as John A Macdonald: The Impossible Idea (Gordon Burwash, 1961), a dramatic interpretation of Canada’s confederation and its first prime minister; and, The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson Bay Company (Martin Defalco and Willie Dunn, 1972); Tommy Douglas: Keeper of the Flame (Elise Swerhone, 1986), once Saskatchewan premier and New Democratic Party leader; Status Quo: The Unfinished Business of Feminism in Canada (Karen Cho, 2012), on women’s liberties and issues; War for the Woods (Geoff Morrison, Sean Stiller, 2023), on the battle to save old-growth forests; and Canada, the Immigrant Story (Christian K. Kalambay, 2020), about the celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary as commemorated by four immigrants, Belinda (the Philippines), Kamlesh (the Mauritius Island), Nayla (Lebanon) and Zulf (Uganda). 

There is, also, the drama The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Ted Kotcheff, 1974), about the attempt of a poor young Jewish man (Richard Dreyfus) to do well in the real estate business, but who becomes entangled in dubious schemes; and Black Bodies (Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, 2020), a Canadian short film about a trip to California that was marred by racial profiling (wrongly suspected theft); and Brother (Clement Virgo, 2023), based on a David Chariandy novel, featuring Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), two sons of Caribbean migrants to Toronto, haunted by their father’s absence, making their way in the hip-hop scene; I Don’t Know Who You Are (M.H. Murray, 2024), about sexual assault and the health care system, a realistic story of personal horror; as well as Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (Robin Spry, 1973); Back to God’s Country (David Hartford, 1919); Becoming Nakuset (film short; Victoria Anderson-Gardner, 2020); Bimibatoo—Win: Where I Ran (film short; Erica Daniels, 2022); The Bitter Ash (Larry Kent, 1963); The Champions (documentary mini-series; Donald Brittain, 1978 and 1986); 1867 and After (short film; Donald Peters, 1950); Evangeline (William Cavanaugh, Edward P. Sullivan, 1914); Forty Acres (R. T. Thorne, 2024); Front Lines (film short; Claude Guilmain, 2008); Goin’ Down the Road (Donald Shebib, 1970); How to Lose Everything (mini-series; Terril Lee Calder, Christa Couture, Megan Kyak-Monteith, Bekky O’Neil, Meky Ottawa, Taqralik Partridge, 2023); Listen for Something…Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation (Dionne Brand, 1996); Mackenzie King and the Conscription Crisis (Erna Buffie, 1991); A Married Couple (Allan King, 1969); Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971); Nobody Waved Good-bye (Don Owen, 1964); Nurse. Fighter. Boy (Charles Officer, 2008); Les Ordres (Michel Brault, 1974); Rhapsody in Two Languages (Gordon Sparling, 1934); Spirit to Soar (Tanya Talaga and Michelle Derosier, 2021); Stories from the Land (mini-series; Wendell Collier, 2021); Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012); The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997); The Things I Cannot Change (Tanya Ballantyne, 1967); Warrendale (Allan King, 1967); and Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967), an experimental film of place and people—a sparsely furnished loft space and visitors are seen from a fixed camera angle, using different kinds of film stocks; My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007), an eccentric personal tour of the town, featuring documentary and recreated scenes; and Wolfe and Montcalm (short film, Allan Wargon, 1957), anticipating and illustrating the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the death of two generals.

The Business of Fancydancing (2002) by Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing, starring Evan Adams as Seymour Polatkin, begins with the post-graduation home movie of two friends—Aristotle and Seymour before beginning college—taken by a third friend, Mouse, who says he got his GED and will work in uranium mines.  Obviously, these Native American friends in Spokane, Washington, seem destined to lead very different lives, and the film, in an episodic and fragmented way with current events and memories and imaginings, will show us what became of them.

Seymour Polatkin, the published poet, is a creature of a cosmopolitan Seattle, and a visitor to similar locales, where he and his work are objects of curiosity and significant contemplation; and in one of the motion picture’s opening scenes Seymour reads his work—sitting behind a Seattle bookstore window, commemorating Native heritage month—and the “title page,” with white type on a black screen, quotes his reviews, positive and negative.  Seymour comments on the romantic cliches of interracial/intercultural romance; and about beauty, mystery, visions; about identification and influence.  Meanwhile, we see Mouse and Aristotle drinking, getting high, to excess.

The Business of Fancydancing is an unusually complex presentation of Native American lives, focusing on someone whose life followed a distinct path—we will see Seymour (a strong Evan Adams) in youth and older, at school and work, alone and with others.  Seymour (Evan Adams) and his boyfriend Steven (Kevin Phillip), a white man, are together at home, with Seymour’s boyfriend Steven being affectionate, mocking, amusing, imitating Seymour’s quirky fans, sometimes complimenting, sometimes insulting; and the two lovers talk about a poem about fathers.  There is a glimpse of Seymour, against a black screen, dancing in traditional dress.

The film’s director Sherman Alexie is a celebrated Native American writer, born to a Coeur d’Alene father and a Spokane mother, who grew up on Washington’s Spokane Indian Reservation, and sometimes had childhood seizures, but he became a dedicated reader and a disciplined student, graduating from Washington State University, before publishing poetry in I Would Steal Horses (1992) and The Business of Fancydancing  (1992), First Indian on the Moon (1993), Old Shirts and New Skins (1993); and the story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), winner of a PEN/Hemingway Award; and the novel Reservation Blues (1995), which won an American Book Award.  Other works followed; and Alexie has written a memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (2017).  He also wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals (1998), before making the film The Business of Fancydancing (2002) with cinematographer and editor Holly Taylor, production designer Jonathan Saturen, and music composer Brent Michael Davids. 

Sherman Alexie compared Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancydancing (2002), when speaking with Rob Capriccioso for the online culture site Identity Theory for a March 23, 2003 article: “It’s interesting because Smoke Signals has really become a mainstream film; it has mainstream ambitions.  It’s based on my work—I wrote the screenplay, but it’s still more audience-friendly than my other work is.  It’s much easier for audiences to digest that work.  It’s much more approachable, much more accessible.  Fancydancing is not only odd because of its characters—you know, Indians—but it’s odd because of its aesthetic and its structure, so I think Fancydancing is much harder for people to get into it.  When I was making it, one of the crew members said, ‘You know, Sherman, you’re making a film about a gay Indian poet—It’s too Indian for white people, it’s too white for Indians, and it’s too gay for everybody—nobody’s going to see this!’  So, (laughs), I think he was right.  I thought he was right then, and I’m sure he is right now.  It’s going to have a limited audience, always, but I don’t care.  I made it because I wanted to make it, and the people who see it are great, I’m happy for that, but I’m not really interested in making a movie like Smoke Signals again.”

Quentin Youngberg’s essay, “Interpenetrations,” in Studies in American Indian Literatures (the Spring 2008 issue, Volume 20, Issue 1), discusses Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing as a work of dual penetration, of double valence, both queering the Native sphere and ‘Indianing’ the literary sphere (and one suspects—and can see—other borders are crossed, too).  In The Business of Fancydancing, the poet Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams) drives to the reservation—the return of the prodigy (he is returning, apparently, for the funeral of his friend Mouse).  Dear ones, I have not loved you well enough.  Seymour is, of course, more a visitor than a home boy; he no longer has the obligations or responsibilities of a resident.  Others, there, have obligations, responsibilities: a young woman, Agnes (Michelle St. John), takes out Mouse’s musical instrument (and the film’s score has her singing, “Goodbye Mouse, Mouse” and “Why’d you take pills?”).  Agnes puts the instrument, a violin, in Mouse’s now dead hands, wraps him in a colorful blanket on a bed.  (We learn that she is a teacher on the reservation; an ex-girlfriend of Seymour—and involved, somehow, probably as a friend, with Mouse).

Then: A memory?  A montage of moments?  A city scene.  Traffic.  A dance club.  Seymour enters.  Seymour Polatkin talks to a literary audience, speaking about coming out as queer to his grandmother, an accepting, funny woman.  He has an interview with culture writer Rebecca Carroll, a tough interviewer.  Seymour is charming, smart, evasive during the interview.  He has an experimental sense of thought and work—for him, work is a vital experience, necessary.

Mouse’s large, plain casket is covered by Aristotle and Agnes with a blanket—Agnes (Michelle St. John) is involved now with Aristotle (Gene Tagaban): she seems to have become involved with Aristotle after Seymour (when they were no longer a couple), and when she returned to the reservation. There is a memory of the handsome Mouse (a persuasive Swil Kanim) and Aristotle (Tagaban) reading and discussing a book by Seymour, All My Relations, with Mouse claiming Seymour stole his personal stories.  In a segment filmed by Mouse’s camera, Mouse talks about feeling as if he is dead, saying, “Sing me a memorial song.”

At Mouse’s memorial service, a blonde young woman, who was Mouse’s lover, talks.  She has water from a local river—one of her favorite places is there, the first place she heard Mouse play a violin.  (We see a glimpse of Mouse playing, walking down a path.)  “Digital Video lensing by Holly Taylor is uncommonly rich, with painterly, hyperreal effects such as a ravishing long shot in which Mouse—who otherwise gets short shrift in character development—is seen striding through a verdant Northwest forest, playing his fiddle like a medieval minstrel.  Editorial and sound elements are likewise imaginative, untethered to linear form,” observed Variety’s reviewer Dennis Harvey (January 22, 2002).  Mouse’s blonde lover recalls Mouse’s insult, “What are you doing here, and when are you leaving?”  (We see another glimpse of Mouse playing his violin, while holding the blonde, loving and sensual.)  The young woman says, “I’m going to miss that mean bastard.  I’m going to miss the way the river changed when he was making his music.”

“Forgive him, forgive him,” Aristotle says, tearing pages out of a book, Seymour’s book, and tossing it into a fire.  Seymour is seen in bed with his lover Steven; and he does not want to answer the ringing phone, but his boyfriend does and learns that Mouse has died.  Seymour, apparently later, is reading in a bookstore to an audience, about blood donation for money, when he sees Mouse appearing in the audience with his violin, an apparition, a projection of Seymour’s consciousness. (We see Seymour in traditional dress, an occasional filmic punctuation; and, here, Agnes dances with Seymour, both using shawls as part of their dance.)  Seymour drives—with Mouse in the backseat playing music, a haunting, an imagined visit.  There is overlapping dialogue of Steven asking Seymour why he is going back to reservation after so much time away.  Seymour answers that Mouse is his cousin, his brother—and he does not want Steven to come with him.

The Business of Fancydancing is an intelligent film, informed by genuine experiences and observations, sometimes presented in a fragmented style (like fabric squares in a quilt?)—but sense is made as there are connections of mood and story and themes.  The writer Sherman Alexie embraces different aspects of artistic sensibility—diverse cultural influences, facticity, humor and skepticism included, accepting difficult realities, including conflict within and among tribes; and by creating a lead character in Seymour who is not an obvious warrior but is a small man, and a successful poet, and a homosexual (or—using the Native term—two-spirited, containing the masculine and the feminine) in an intercultural personal relationship, Alexie is affirming personal complexity, social complexity. 

In his own memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Alexie talks about being a young visiting writer at a college and meeting a full-blooded and hostile Navajo woman student: “‘What’s your clan?  What’s your Indian name?’ that Navajo woman asked.  I had not met her previously.  I have not seen her since.  She was obviously angry at me.  Ready to argue.  I think she saw herself as being a real Indian artist and saw me, the world-traveling writer, as something less than artful and also something less than indigenous.  I was suddenly involved in an Indian-versus-Indian cultural battle—a fight that I have faced again and again and again and again.  Yep, that shit has come at me from all four directions.  To paraphrase that tribal elder named Shakespeare, we Native folks are ‘more than kin and less than kind.’” (You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Little Brown, and Company, 2017; large print edition, page 189).

Sherman Alexie refuses the appearance of purity; and he has created a character in Seymour Polatkin who presents an interesting sensibility and persuasive stories, but cannot embody an easy authenticity: “Seymour’s simultaneous abandonment/exploitation of his Spokane roots is charted in numerous wickedly astute scenes, while interspersed throughout are wordless bits with lead characters ‘fancydancing’ in full tribal garb,” noted reviewer Dennis Harvey in his January 22, 2002 commentary in Variety.  I am reminded that Sherman Alexie’s original poem entitled “The Business of Fancydancing,” published in a 1992 book of the same name, was about betting money on a boy who can win first place for fancydancing from powwow to powwow, money that can be used for drink or paying bills. 

I am reminded, as well, of Susan Perez Castillo’s opening essay “Postmodernism, Native American Literature and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy,” in the impressive anthology Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, edited by John L. Purdy and James Ruppert (Prentice-Hall Inc. / Pearson Education, 2001), in which Susan Perez Castillo recounts Leslie Marmon Silko’s interrogation of the work (The Beet Queen) of Louise Erdrich.  Nothing But the Truth is an excellent book of essays, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, full of history, thought, and imagination, featuring writers such as Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Maurice Kenny, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, and Ray Young Bear.  Susan Perez Castillo discusses reality, representation, and modern and postmodern theories and practices as they relate to (Laguna Pueblo) Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of (Anishinaabe) Louise Erdrich’s novel, with Silko questioning whether Erdrich values literary prestige and postmodern techniques more than affirmation of Native culture and politics, a questioning of identification and loyalty.  Yet, Susan Perez Castillo affirms the complexity and value of both writers—there is more than one way to be, and to be creative.  Let us not lament difference.

At Mouse’s memorial in The Business of Fancydancing, someone asks, “How many funerals have you been to?”  Different attendees answer, “Many,” a suggestion of the reservation’s tragedies.  Melancholy is not rare: In a café in St. Jerome University, Seymour (Adams) comes in, walks to Agnes (St. John) and talks about a student group—and he learns Agnes’s dad was a Spokane Indian, and her mother Jewish.  Seymour says that his own mother drove a car into the river.  The two, Seymour and Agnes, leave the café, and embrace, kiss.  He, subsequently, tells her that he loves her but thinks that he is gay.  When Agnes, a new music teacher, apparently after graduating, drives to the reservation, she stops and asks Mouse for directions.  Mouse says that most smart Indians leave the reservation; and she says that she, maybe, is starting a new trend. 

Women sing “Amazing Grace” at Mouse’s memorial: some of its words are “‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, / And grace my fears relieved; / How precious did that grace appear / The hour I first believed!”  We see Aristotle (Gene Tagaban) playing with children—diverse looking Indian children—and Agnes.

The poet Seymour Polatkin has moved beyond the confines of reservation life.  “You’ve had dinner with the President of the United States, the Pope, and Robert Redford,’ says writer Rebecca Carroll to interviewee Seymour Polatkin, wanting to know why he writes so much about the reservation when he has other experiences.

Aristotle (Gene Tagaban) recalls his grandmother’s apple tree, its green apples—and children climbing the tree to steal apples she does not want them to eat, thinking they are not edible.  (Seymour tells the same story—his appropriation of the stories of others?)  Seymour arrives at the reservation; and Aristotle brings him a green apple—but Seymour remains sitting in his car.  When he does get out, Agnes (Michelle St John) welcomes him, hugging him; and they stand before Mouse’s covered coffin.  Agnes and others, later, talk about Seymour’s absence from the reservation and work in the world—and she defends Seymour from criticism.  

There is a sports game, football, as part of the memorial gathering devoted to Mouse: the reservation Indians versus the urban Indians.  Then, we have a scene of Mouse spraying bathroom cleaner on bread and eating it.  Those are not lives illustrating textbook virtues—and the deaths are not mourned with predictable rites.  In his memoir the writer Sherman Alexie recalled attending his own mother’s funeral and how one of her ruder male friends remarked that Alexie’s shirt was wrinkled—and Alexie admitted he had pulled the shirt out of his suitcase wrinkled, and considered ironing it, but “Rez funerals are way casual and 90 percent of the Indians will be in T-shirts and jean shorts anyway, so it doesn’t really matter” (You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Little, Brown, 2017; his italics, page 132)—and then, the grieving women in his family, one after another, had hugged him close, crying into his wrinkled shirt.  (Even if it had been pressed, it would not have remained that way.)

We see Seymour (Evan Adams) at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: he shares a poem about being called by alcohol, a drum.  (Aristotle—actor Gene Tagaban—is seen joining Seymour in bed as Seymour writes, an imagined visitation: a projection of an original inspiration; an erotic possibility?)  Might Aristotle have been more than an inspiration?  Might he have accomplished something of his own?  In college we see that Aristotle (Gene Tagaban) as a student got into trouble for wearing traditional Native dress while taking an aptitude test—Aristotle wanted to draw the cultural power to do well.  (Rebecca Carroll is shown interviewing Aristotle, asking about his dwindling grades.  The acting of the actor playing Aristotle is sometimes exaggerated.)  Aristotle, though once a good student, decides to leave school; and he and Seymour argue.  Thus, we know how and why Aristotle returned to the reservation—and renewed his acquaintance with Mouse.

Agnes (Michelle St John) and Seymour (Adams) talk about his successful career—people listen; and people expect his anger, complaint.  She says that she and Aristotle have rented a few movies together, the occasion of their dates; and she is making the crispy Native bread of flour, salt, baking powder, and warm milk, a survival food called fry bread.  (We see a glimpse of Seymour’s domestic life: Steven films Seymour while Seymour bathes; and Seymour recites an erotic love poem.)  Seymour and Agnes talk—and she tells him that his ambition made the reservation a prison.  They talk about what a life together might have been for them.

Seymour (Adams) tells Aristotle (Tagaban) that he loves him, and that is why he writes about him—not exploitation but tribute—but Aristotle is angry and asks where Seymour was, where he has been.  Aristotle says that Seymour’s subject—the Indians—has been helping him: the inspiration is nutrition, strength.  Of course, both men are telling the truth from their own perspectives: Seymour’s love is the love of the particular, the love of his long known friends, not the sanctimonious love of culture or tribe, but of personal experience; but Aristotle knows that these men came together because they lived on the same reservation, were part of the same community and culture—what is nourishing about their friendship is part of that culture. 

We see the first meeting between Seymour and Steven, who asks what Seymour is (nationality, ethnicity).  We see Seymour dancing—sometimes in modern dress, sometimes in traditional dress—in an urban dance setting: he brings more than one self wherever he goes.  (Critic Elvis Mitchell, in the New York Times, October 18, 2002, described the film as a “tale about the burden of constantly being asked who you are and where you come from—a question that artists of color constantly hear, either from others or themselves.  Mr. Alexie is smart enough to know it’s never satisfactorily answered”).

Fragments.  Can the fragments of perception, of experience, of a life, be brought together so that it has meaning?  How do the fragments of a picture or a text come together to make meaning?  The philosopher Alva Noë in his book The Entanglement: How Art & Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton University Press, 2023) discusses human experience as fundamentally aesthetic experience; stating, “The aesthetic is a live possibility, an opportunity, and a problem, wherever we find ourselves.  We and the whole domain of our experience and our world, are no more scrutable than the artworks that we make.  We are not fixed, stable, defined, and known; the very act of trying to bring ourselves, our consciousness, our worlds, into focus, reorganizes and changes us.  We are an aesthetic phenomenon” (2025 paperback edition; page 97).  Noë discusses the attitudes, ideas, and skills that we bring to perception, that allow us to bring things into focus, to be in relationship—but how, sometimes, we find ourselves at a loss, not able to define quite where we are or what we are seeing, in a state of aesthetic blindness.  “Sometimes we just don’t have the knowledge, the skills, the orientations, to bring what is there into focus,” Noë states (pages 102 and 103).  We have to look more closely, to ask new questions, to adjust our sights.  “So the engagement with an artwork is an engagement with oneself, and also others, and the work of aesthetic engagement with an artwork requires a kind of unveiling of the self to oneself that also tends, of its very nature, to alter us, to reorganize us.  Again, this is why, on my understanding, art and philosophy are reorganizational practices, and this is why they offer something like emancipation: they free us from the ways that we just find ourselves, as a matter of fact, organized by habit, by culture, by history, and even by biology” (pages 104 and 105).   

To be an artist, an intellectual, or a writer can be mysterious, surprising—one’s work can begin with little perceptions, with a possibility or a problem, with personal permissions and prohibitions, that grow into a passion or a philosophy.  In The Business of Fancydancing, the journalist and critic Rebecca Carroll interrogates Seymour about his life in relation to other indigenous people, to other American Natives, and the direct facts of their lives.  (Seymour recounts his sister’s accidental death—shot by a neighbor boy.)  Seymour says that life and a dictionary and his sister’s ring are what his mother gave him.  The questioner can sound hostile, but she is trying to shake him free from prepared answers, from easy comments, to draw from him something true.  She is trying to achieve a certain freedom. 

“Amazing Grace”—the song.  Seymour stands in front of others at Mouse’s memorial (he imagines screaming)—but he does not speak; he walks away.  Agnes sings.  Seymour drives away.  Aristotle dances on the road behind the car.  Seymour crawls into bed with Steven.  (The end.)  What a wonderfully idiosyncratic film.

(DG/May 2025)

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Film Reviews   canadian film   indigenous film   poetry