After watching Charlie's Country (2013) about aboriginal journeys, Smoke Signals came to mind. In Smoke Signals, the so-called ecological
Indian faces neither banishment nor annihilation because he adapts the hell of
both the reservation and the wider Euro-centric world into a home. By
translating four of a series of disjointed and primarily bitter stories from The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into a filmic collaborative journey with what he calls
“integrity,” Sherman Alexie has constructed a narrative of environmental adaptation
with a clear and cohesive structure that follows an evolutionary pattern
focused on place. Characters in Smoke Signals embrace a focus on
“adapting themselves to their circumstances in every possible way” while the
film adds the element of ecology and emphasizes a relationship between human
and nonhuman nature through Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds-the-Fire
(Evan Adams) journey toward Mars, Arizona, where Victor’s father’s ashes
remain.
To build this
narrative, the film follows a three-act narrative grounded in ecology:
- Establishing the reservation as an inhospitable setting for human
and nonhuman nature.
- Leaving the reservation on a journey of landscapes.
- Returning to the reservation able to transform hell into a home.
The Reservation as Hell on Earth
The reservation’s ecology seems less than life
sustaining during the film’s first act. Social images of reservation life
highlight some of the real economic, environmental, and social problems still
prevalent for American Indians. In one scene, for example, we see a drunken Arnold
Joseph (Gary Farmer), Victor’s father, who stumbles out of his house, throwing
firecrackers to prolong the celebration. Beer cans and fireworks cover the
lawn. The party is over, but Arnold fires a roman candle into the house, and
the curtains and living room furniture burst into flames. Thomas’ voice tells
us that the “fire swallowed up my mother and father,” but Arnold catches an
infant thrown from an upper story window, saving it from the raging fire. It is
Thomas, and Arnold places him in the arms of his grandmother (Monique Mojica).
When the grandmother thanks him, he says he
“didn’t mean to,” a sign of the
guilt he will carry that the father validates when he cuts his hair and, as
Thomas states, “practiced vanishing.” Thomas and Victor have almost literally
been “born of flame and ash” on a reservation where the only hope seems to be
survival.
A Journey of Landscapes
The opening act closes when Victor and Thomas consult
with their mother figures and move closer to their journey to retrieve Victor’s
father’s ashes. Although Victor bears his pain in isolation, Thomas helps his
grandmother make fry bread, illustrating the communal strength on which
environmental adaptation can be built. Victor associates fry bread with
relationship building when he hugs his mom and compliments her on her bread, the
best on the reservation. As Arlene explains, “I don’t make it by myself,”
Arlene tells him. “I got the recipe from my grandmother and she got it from her
grandmother, and I listened to people,” she says, showing him how building a
new and better life—or fry bread—requires a collective process. When the two
arrive in their father’s valley, his friend Suzy Song (Irene Bedard) continues
this communal approach by offering Victor his father’s ashes. Thomas amplifies
the connection with a story about Victor’s mother feeding a hundred hungry
American Indians with fifty pieces of fry bread, a clear reference to the
loaves and fishes parable from the Sermon on the Mount and interconnected
relationships.
Transforming Hell Into a Home
One last conflict moves Victor and Thomas toward
environmental adaptation and serves as the entrance into the third act of the
film. While fighting over visions of Victor’s father, Victor and Thomas crash
Arnold’s truck, avoiding a car parked in the middle of the highway. They turn
what could be a dangerous altercation with police “off the Rez” into a triumph,
changing Arnold’s past crimes into communal solutions. Instead of leaving the
scene and avoiding a confrontation with police, Victor helps an injured girl
from the accident, running all the way to the town hospital for assistance.
Even when questioned by the police before leaving the hospital, Thomas and
Victor transform an expected altercation into a ride home. The driver of the car
responsible for the accident accuses Victor of assaulting him, but before
Victor can defend himself, the white police chief (Tom Skerritt) lets them go,
saying, “Mr. Johnson’s wife Holly says he’s, and I quote, ‘a complete
asshole.’”
In Smoke
Signals, Victor and Thomas turn a bleak hell on the reservation into
a thriving ecology in a narrative of environmental adaptation that includes
collective views of human and nonhuman nature and provides a living community.
Victor adapts to his once-bleak environment and finds hope and life. For Victor
and Thomas, who have been born of ashes and fire, it is the water of the
Spokane River that leads them to love and life, because it is the river that at
least metaphorically turns Arnold into a fish, connecting him and the two young
men who scatter his ashes with nature and each other. They have fulfilled, as
Meeker explains, an effective evolutionary process, “one of adaptation and
accommodation, with the various species exploring opportunistically their
environments in search of a means to maintain their existence” (164). As Meeker
concludes, “The lesson of ecology is balance and equilibrium, the lesson of
comedy is humility and endurance” (168). Victor and Thomas learn all of these
lessons well.
