Baudot: Week 5: Powwow Highway and Saint Marie

Scene taken from Powwow Highway 

In both "Saint Marie" and the film Powwow Highway, we see what it is like for these different individuals to face the ongoing struggle of protecting personal and tribal identity, and the emotions and psychological effects that come along with the struggle to try to inculcate and thrive with white, American society, which is portrayed in the film more than the short story. Each of these characters' personal aims and objections are forced to clash with modern day social and economic genocide as well. Both the film and the short story track the journeys of these individuals as they seek to embrace who they are in a cultural where who they are is not accepted, and/or they are trying to "go against the grain" in a time when social genocide is still very prevalent for their people. We can first take a look at Powwow Highway, which tracks the journey that Buddy Red Bow and Philbert Bono take together to Santa Fe. Before they set out in the journey, the film helps you better understand the character of Bono, and what his main objective is, which can be seen in 2 striking scenes. He claims to be guided by the "spirits," and he wants to start his long journey to becoming a warrior by trading drugs, money, and more to get his "war pony," which he first lays eyes on and gets the idea from by sitting in an old cafe where he sees the car lot advertised on television. He goes to the lot, and you can see that all of these cars are very old and run down and in extremely poor condition, yet he makes an exchange for on of the oldest cars and names it "Protector." This scene is highly symbolic to what it is like for Bono to be a Cheyenne within the United States because he believes that he is getting something of value and something that will be important to helping him become who he wants to be, yet he cannot realize that what he has just made an exchange for is actually worthless, especially in terms of most Americans (one could argue). He is limited and being denied the best advantages of being in the US, which can be represented through the transaction of the car and the state that the car is in. It can also be seen in the way in which the name for his car is completely inappropriate considering the transmission is deplorable, the window falls off, the bumper falls off, etc. 

The next striking scene that we see in the film is when Bono gets out of the car, goes to the top of a peak, and uses a Hershey bar to claim his territory after seeing other marks left behind of the yellow and red strips of cloth. His choice of the Hershey bar is symbolic of using a highly identified American symbol of production and wealth and industry and commercialization to represent his own journey. As Dr. McCay states, "Philbert is trying to return to a time when Native Americans had power over their own lives and had a cultural identity that was meaningful." We can see how he is desperately attempting to do this through these scenes. Likewise, Buddy Red Bow is a very important character because he is on this journey with Bono in order to save his sister from the FBI to which she has been subjected to unfairly. As stated in the notes, he "is trying to empower his reservation to resist the incursions of profiteering mining companies on reservation land." Red Bow is much more of a non-traditional character than Bono in the way in which he goes about trying to inspire and encourage change for the reservation and the ways in which Native American culture is inculcated with the United States. For him, pride and character are important, and he seems to be much more inclined to fight against the ways in which the US has oppressed the Native American culture as opposed to Bono, who is more invested and interested in looking inward and learning to not necessarily resist, but embrace a newer culture and means of cultural identity. Together, however, both characters especially suffer from the economic and social genocide and its effects of what it is like to lose a sense of where your culture and identity come to play in a certain society. There is a line in the film: "Indian wisdom? I ain't got none." Clearly, a sense of identity has been lost. There is also an interesting commentary on the American perspective of this oppression stated in one of our articles which states, "Native cultural groups are often denigrated and romanticized. Their demise is depicted during many of America's celebrations making its success at colonization. This demise is linked to the collective American mythos of Western dominance and exalted under the principle of Manifest Destiny. In these facile assertions of national pride, which hide the price of native lives, Americans do not seem to comprehend their own complicity in the legacy of death and destruction."

When we shift to "Saint Marie," we can see similar motifs of identity and cultural oppression. The story illustrates the way that cultural and religious oppression as well can result in the destruction of a group of people. Marie, an Indian student, is up against Sister Leopolda, a nun at the school at which Marie is treated unfairly and with cruelty and abused. Sister Leopolda is described as a "definite hard trial for everyone." She firmly believed that because of the child's race, she contained "evil" and needed to be ridden of this evil that contaminated her. Sister tells her she needed to "suffer for her smile." Ultimately, Sister stabs Marie in the hand, and everyone believes that she has received the stigmata, which has everyone bowing and kneeling down to her (essentially worshiping her) including Sister Leopolda. The text states, "I saw her kneeling there. Leopolda with her soul like a rubber overboot. With her face of a starved rat. With her desperate eyes drowning in the deep wells of her wrongness." Overall, Marie is exalted for who she is, which is symbolic of triumphing over the cultural oppression she experienced within her school. She triumphs over cultural and individual deprivation, which is a theme that can  be related back to Powwow Highway.