Smoke Signals (1998) and Environmental Adaptations

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.