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Community

The Seventh Fire (USA, 2015)

Directed by Jack Riccobono, written by Jack Riccobono, Shane Omar Slattery-Quintanilla, and Andrew Ford

On an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota, two men face trouble with the law as they struggle to build better lives.

Smoke Signals (USA/Canada, 1998)

Directed by Chris Eyre, written by Sherman Alexie

The first movie to be written, directed, coproduced, and acted by Native Americans, about two young men going on a road trip of grief and acceptance.

Kathleen

I once gave the commencement address at South Dakota State University and was glad to see that a pole representing traditional Native American spirituality, with feathers and medicine pouches, was on the dais. But as the students came forward to receive their diplomas, I was distressed to see so few Indigenous young people among them. The university works hard to attract Native students and offers many programs to encourage them to stay. When I told a professor what I had observed during the ceremony, he said, “For many of them, the pull of the reservation is too strong; they can’t bear to live apart from their communities.”

Community is a basic human need. For most of us family is our first community, and parents know that their children need to socialize and form new communities at school, religious institutions, or on sports teams. A big part of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood is finding communities in which we feel free to be ourselves, respected and loved for who we are. People tend to form transitory communities when the need arises, during natural disasters, or when they’re stranded for hours at an airport waiting out a storm. Assistance is offered, life stories are exchanged, and confessions are made that might be easier to share with strangers than with friends or family.

Community has special meaning for Benedictine men and women as they welcome into their monasteries candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds and must help them grow into people who will place the group’s needs over their own. In our individualistic society this is a tall order, and the process takes about seven years. At a time when people are reluctant to make lifelong commitments, it is inspiring to see how the young learn from the old in a monastery and vice versa. They have promised to remain with and support each other until death, and this allows deep, intergenerational bonds of friendship to develop that strengthen the community.

In their 1,500 years of existence, Benedictines have learned that community does not happen by accident. It requires deliberation and perseverance. But it’s remarkable to see what ensues when a person is determined to create a community in an unlikely setting. I live in a condominium with 136 units, an ordinary apartment building, except that our resident manager encourages everyone to get to know their neighbors. It’s catching on: now when people are moving in, I welcome them to the building. Some people don’t respond, but I have found that most are glad to talk about where they came from and what drew them to the neighborhood. And community proves its worth in a crisis: when a malfunctioning drain in my apartment caused flooding on my floors, neighbors were quick to come with sponges and mops to help me clear the mess.

Community is of vital importance for people in close-knit ethnic groups and Indigenous tribes. Without it they can become lost. In the early 1950s, the American government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) launched a “voluntary relocation program” to get Native Americans off reservations and move them to cities where they could be assimilated into American society. I have a childhood memory of one family from a South Dakota reservation who came to Waukegan, Illinois, where my family then lived. My dad was the choir director at a Congregational church that had offered to assist the family. One church member had found the father a job at Abbott Laboratories. Someone donated a used car, and others provided furniture for their rented house. Their rent was to be subsidized by the government for several months.

My parents, who were raised in South Dakota, invited the family to dinner. My brother and I played with the children; our family dog seemed glad to have new kids to chase around the yard. I had heard my father say that the relocation program made no sense, and I’m certain that he knew this family was miserable in Illinois and longed to go home. When the family suddenly returned to South Dakota, leaving not long after that dinner, many in the church felt that they had been ungrateful. But my parents noted that trying to “help” Indigenous people by severing them from their roots, their culture, and their community was not only foolish but a recipe for disaster.

The relocation program’s stated goal was to integrate Indigenous people into mainstream American society. But the aim of many BIA leaders was to erase Native culture entirely. People who had lived off the land, farming, fishing, and hunting in traditional communities, became isolated, working low-wage jobs and subsisting in urban slums. This created a trauma whose effects are still being felt by Native people today. I believe it’s behind the reluctance of many young people to remain at South Dakota State University, because they fear that being there puts them in danger of losing their community and their identity.

It’s good to see that after years of Native Americans being stereotyped and misrepresented in film, often portrayed by white actors wearing “red face,” Indigenous novelists, screenwriters, and directors are producing works that reflect life as it’s lived by Natives today. Their resistance to romanticizing the “noble savage” is neatly summed up by the great Indigenous actor Graham Greene’s response to a white director who had once asked him to “Stand there and look stoic.” Greene replied, “I’ll do that, if you stand there and look stupid.”

Smoke Signals (1998), directed by Chris Eyre, with a screenplay by Sherman Alexie based on his short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, is, for me, the most engaging of these films. Set on Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Reservation, it’s suffused with ironic humor: a woman drives a car that will only work in reverse, and a radio DJ announces, “It’s a good day to be Indigenous” while turning to the traffic monitor stationed at a rural intersection and reporting, “A big truck just went by.”

No stoic symbols here, just two young men, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who have a complicated and strained relationship. Thomas is a dreamer and storyteller enamored of Native spirituality. Victor is more cynical and angry, an impatient man who often becomes exasperated with Thomas, accusing him of getting most of his knowledge of Indigenous tradition from Dances with Wolves. But the two men share a bond because Victor’s father, Arnold, rescued Thomas as an infant from a house fire that killed his parents.

Victor has bitter childhood memories of Arnold’s alcoholism and abuse. He hasn’t forgiven him for running away after the fire and abandoning his family. But when he learns that Arnold has died in Arizona, he feels compelled to go there to retrieve his ashes. He and his mother don’t have the money for the trip, and Victor is surprised when Thomas offers to cover their expenses if Victor allows him to come along.

Smoke Signals has both classic road trip and coming of age elements, but the film transcends both genres. As the two men come to understand each other, we sense that they’re both becoming more adult, more prepared for the information that the woman who has been living with Arnold has to offer. Consumed with guilt over accidentally causing the fatal fire when he was drunk, Arnold—magnificently played by Gary Farmer—had decided that he was a threat to his family and had to leave them and the reservation behind. He stopped drinking and built a new life for himself. As Victor and Thomas decide how to dispose of his ashes and begin the journey home, we realize that the men have experienced a much-needed healing.

Other remarkable films about contemporary Native communities include Skins, another Chris Eyre film, based on a novel by Adrian C. Louis, set on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, and Powwow Highway, based on a novel by David Seals, set on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, directed by Jonathan Wacks and produced by George Harrison (also known as a Beatle). What sets these films apart from earlier representations of Native life in cinema is that they offer compelling stories about Native people living in the present and not the past. Their sardonic wit and humor temper the natural bitterness many Natives feel about how badly Native people have always been treated by the newcomers in America. They feature fine performances by well-known actors such as Cardinal, Farmer, and Greene, and younger ones including Evan Adams, Adam Beach, A. Martinez, Lois Red Elk, Joanelle Romero, and Eric Schweig.

But it’s a 2015 documentary, The Seventh Fire, directed by Jack Pettibone Riccobono and produced by Terrence Malick, that speaks most directly to me about the pitfalls of life in an insular community. Set on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, whose residents gave the filmmaker extraordinary access, it features Rob Brown, a gang leader and drug dealer who has spent much of his thirty-seven years in prison. He is currently facing his fifth prison term and will leave behind a pregnant girlfriend. His regret for all the violence he’s brought to the reservation is amplified by his concern for a teenage protégé, Kevin Fineday, who also has a pregnant girlfriend and seems destined to repeat Rob’s mistakes unless he can get off drugs and abandon his dream of becoming the reservation’s crime boss.

Rob’s troubled past includes a series of foster homes from which he ran away, committing petty crimes as a juvenile that soon led to more serious ones. He has a daughter in third grade and clearly wants better things for her. Kevin’s girlfriend hopes he’ll settle down, but he struggles to find a job and is lured by the easy money found in dealing cocaine and meth. Both men seek healing by reconnecting with the spiritual traditions of their tribe.

But scenes of women casually cutting dope on a kitchen table in front of their young children make you realize how normalized drugs have become on the reservation and why Kevin says that the only way he can get clean is to leave. He observes that few people, maybe one every ten years, have succeeded in making a life for themselves off the reservation, in what he calls “the real world.” But he struggles to remain in a rehab center, and its director, Albino Garcia, tells Kevin that he needs to be willing to get sober. Both Garcia and Rob believe that culture and community can heal, and as the film ends, we see a photo of Rob as a boy, dressed in traditional clothing to dance at a powwow. But it’s difficult to maintain much hope for him, Kevin, or their children.

The film’s reception does bring some hope. Selected to screen at the White House in March 2016 as part of President Obama’s campaign for criminal justice reform, it was followed by a panel discussion. Both Rob and Kevin participate, along with Troy Molloy, a Chippewa who serves as a liaison between the Department of Justice and Native tribes, and Karen Diver, a White House adviser on Native affairs, who had been elected the tribal chief on Minnesota’s Fond du Lac Reservation.

All have experience battling stereotypes of drugged or drunken Native people, and Diver said she was worried that the film would perpetuate them. But the scene of Rob consulting with an attorney and reading aloud his history of childhood abandonment, foster homes, and extensive rap sheet convinced her that the film could instruct people about the failure of the American justice system to address the mental illness that arises out of continued trauma. Rob’s downward spiral might have been checked if someone had recognized early how troubled he was and provided him with counseling and treatment. But for many reasons—poverty, lack of resources, and untreated trauma—his community could not do that.

Rob says that since he was released from prison, writing has helped him find a voice and he hopes to use it to help members of his community. Kevin went to prison shortly after the film was completed, and since his release he has been trying to help others avoid making the bad choices that got him into trouble.

An audience member mentions a comment Kevin makes early in the film about feeling overwhelmed by hopelessness and the sense that his community would never change. She asks how he feels about that now. He replies that the town has changed for the worse; children as young as nine are now using and dealing drugs. He had to leave the reservation to save himself. Kevin adds that he never expected to be invited to speak at the White House and makes one comment that illustrates how different his world is from that of middle-class Americans. This trip was his first airplane ride and first trip outside Minnesota.

Gareth

As a child in northern Ireland, I heard about “two communities,” Catholic-Irish and Protestant-British, but I didn’t identify with either.1 My family’s mixed heritage left me unsure where I belonged. Many folks didn’t feel safe to share too much about themselves, so the idea of a community seemed to belong to other people. But I wanted it so much.

I lived vicariously through movies about people living together, looking after each other. Loneliness is a killer, and community the antidote, although the most whole communities also honor and make space for the inner life. Isolation and contemplation are not the same thing, which is partly why wise elders are often found on the outskirts (literally and metaphorically), but they’re not hiding. There they lead examined lives, with open doors, but also know when to close them. Two men in The Seventh Fire appear to be this kind of elder. One offers Kevin support but also holds boundaries when he crosses them, and the other is Albino Garcia, founder of La Plazita Institute, where culture does indeed heal.

The Seventh Fire is a challenging and painful story, one not immediately obvious as a portal into exploring community. There’s also a risk in using a story about the underbelly of a marginalized community, especially when the cinematic treatment of Native American people has so often been dehumanizing. But The Seventh Fire loves people and respects suffering, and it doesn’t need to explicitly evoke colonization and genocide to ask how things got so bad for these people and what must happen next. Smoke Signals is tonally warmer, a treasure of a film, but it also points to how community often forms in response to pain, pressure, and scarcity. Perhaps we are all “children born of flame and ash,” as one of the protagonists says, looking for a hearth that can hold both.

Early in The Seventh Fire, Kevin goes looking for a little lost girl, anxious for her safety. He’s doing what community is for, and he’s showing something that should be obvious but may be unnoticed. Community does not just happen—it takes somebody to begin it. Once it’s underway, it takes somebody to repeat it, to pass on traditions and to facilitate the ways in which community will continue. As when Kristine, Rob’s ex-girlfriend, swaddles her newborn, there must have been a time when humans figured out that babies needed to be cozily wrapped in order to adjust to life outside the womb. Whoever learned that passed it on. Community depends on it.

Many movies deal with community, but I’ll mention just two here. The Godfather presents a kind of community that draws the boundaries too tightly, focusing on its own survival rather than the common good. A community defined by who it excludes is a prison. There is life-giving contrast in my favorite movie about community: Smoke (1995, directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster). Set around a Brooklyn cigar store, it has a physical hub, an elder (in the form of the store manager), and eventually a purpose bigger than itself: reaching out to help someone in need results in the expansion of the community. Smoke is one of those lovely films that helps me feel less alone just by watching it, and it gives a model for community to aspire to.

The best communities are not just a safety net in times of trouble but also help prevent the trouble in the first place. They are places where trust is deepened among folks who have known each other a long time and who model that trust for the new people, who will always be welcome at the table. They are places where your pain is welcome.

It sounds like Kathleen’s condo building is such a place—and the manager an elder, encouraging a welcome to new residents. He knows that for community to exist, someone needs to begin it.

Questions and Conversations

1. What community has sustained you in your life, in childhood, young adulthood, and now?
2. What are the most positive and the most negative aspects of belonging to a community?
3. Have you ever felt trapped in a community, sensing that in order to discover and live as your true self you would have to leave?
4. What would a week in the life of your ideal community look and feel like?
5. What’s one need you have that could be healed in the culture of a good community?
6. If you’re part of a group that has historically been oppressed, has a sense of community helped you cope with trauma?
7. What’s one gift you could bring to help nurture the culture of a good community?
8. How could you help initiate more community where you are?