Cars and Driving Backwards (Cultural Notes)

In my 101 class last year, I showed the movie "Smoke Signals" based off of Sherman Alexie's novel, Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven. Alexie wrote the screenplay for the movie and helped with some directorial decisions. I had always wondered about that car. Cars, actually, play quite a key role in the film: Deloria mentions the reservation car driving backwards, but perhaps a more significant vehicle is that of the Victor's father. I thought it interesting, then, that Deloria makes reference to this idea of progress and pacification in terms of technology (albeit, Deloria goes on to point out the two different rhetorical narratives given to explain the juxtaposition between Indians and cars). Victor's father's truck serves as a type of metaphorical progress, seen darkly through the Victor's childhood eyes: it is progress (the truck) that takes his father away from him; progress that makes possible the divorce between his father and mother; progress that, arguably, was rooted in his father's feelings of shame and alcohol abuse. Conversations between Victor and his father take place within that vehicle--conversations about becoming a man, growing into a forgotten culture and learning to never trust the white man. These conversations, call them rites of passage or individual progression, ring distantly similar to those coming of age stories touched upon earlier in Deloria's historical narrative: the sons of Two Sticks entering the house and, leaving with four men dead. Some sides arguably make the point that such an act could be considered the young men's rite of passage, in a similar sense as was Plenty Horses' killing of Casey. However, one thing I continued to come back to while reading these chapters was Deloria's exploration of the actions taking place within a contained area. That is, one of the most important visuals I had while reading was this idea of the fence, the border and the surrounded territory--a notion with which, before these historical events, Indians were unfamiliar.

I remember after showing the Alexie film in my class one of my students, from a South Dakota tribe, speaking up and saying in response to the scene of driving backward, "It's because the carburetor's dead. You see that all the time on the reservation." I think that remark was burned into my mind along with that image of the fence--my own juxtaposition of Indian expectation. The expectation that progress is a busted carburetor. A backwards glance. A story told to "barter" for a ride to the border of the reservation--a self-contained space that did not exist before the times of self-proclaimed "white progress."

The implications of this book are haunting. I'm so glad we read this following Stewart the week before. I feel that my response to Stewart's work in Appalachia was greatly influenced by what my perceived expectations of that culture were. Deloria gave me some framework in which I was able to look back, humbled by my own uninformed sense of ideology and discourse, and read that text with new eyes.

--Julie Lauterbach-Colby