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Summer Offensive: Depp's Tonto, Paula Deen's

N-Word, the NFL's R-Word
JACQUELINE KEELER 7/21/13

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STORY PRINT PRINT
Over the recent Fourth of July opening
Like You and 92 others like this.
weekend, The Lone Ranger was
trounced by Despicable Me 2 at the
box office. I also found myself at a
Tweet
Tweet 0 0 Subway deli looking at a cut-out of
Johnny Depp’s Tonto. And to be
honest, as an Indian myself, it does not
offend me as much as the Washington follow
Redskins mascot. Johnny is a good
soul; Dan Snyder and Washington
Redskins fans are not.
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“I wanted to maybe give some hope to
kids on the reservations.” Depp said in
interviews during production, “They're
living without running water and seeing problems with drugs and booze. But I
wanted to be able to show these kids, ‘F— that! You're still warriors, man.’”

Meanwhile, Amanda Blackhorse, a young Navajo woman protesting the

Washington Redskins mascot said “They [the fans] yelled at us, 'Get over it.' And,
'Go back to your reservation.' And all the stereotypical things that we are all
alcoholics: 'Why don't you go get drunk?' And they shouted so many profanities
that I won't repeat. I got to see firsthand how our culture was being mocked," she
says. "So many fans were wearing war paint and feathers and they were whooping
and hollering. Some of them got belligerent and angry with us. They threw beer at
us. That's not okay. I was afraid for my safety."

And despite Depp’s good intentions, photos released last year of him in character
as Tonto with a dead bird on his head were greeted with groans from Native
Americans and pretty much every other type of American. Celebrities are allowed
a lot in this world, but pretensions to serious issues and the reinvention of
outdated cultural motifs are tricky, even for an actor as loved and successful as
Johnny Depp.

Charlie Chaplin tried to do it in his film The Great Dictator, when he revamped
his Little Tramp persona to ridicule Hitler; it failed at the box office. And Depp’s
Tonto recalls Chaplin’s Little Tramp, shuffling along, dwarfed in moccasins next
to Armie Hammer’s towering Lone Ranger in high-heeled boots. The white
characters are made into caricatures of evil but unlike Chaplin’s The Gold Rush,
where the Little Tramp character, starving in a cabin in the frozen reaches of
Alaska while trying to make a meal of his boot, there are no moments where we
see the true humanity of the heroes and see ourselves in them. The Little Tramp
was motivated both by an innate generosity and, yet, was never above giving a MORE COLUMNS
kick in the pants to a bully when he could.

Chaplin, the product of a life of poverty on the streets of Dickensian London, Your Honor
expressed what he learned there: That these were the only forms of justice I’ve been a tribal
available to the powerless in this world. Depp’s Tonto is a disorienting mashup of Judge for four years.
poignant suffering and incomprehensibly inane behavior that is explained away in In the beginning, I
the narrative as not “being Indian,” but not being entirely sane. was an Associate
Judge for the tribe I’m
enrolled with, the
If it seems odd that a Native person such as myself would invoke Chaplin in a Sisseton Wahpeton...
critique of Tonto, but I am also American and I can wield a Chaplin reference as
well as anyone. What I have that Depp does not is that I actually am an Indian
Why the Poor Vote
(enrolled Navajo, and my father is Yankton Dakota Sioux). And this film, if Like They're
nothing else, convinces me that being Indian matters when we wish to change the Billionaires
perceptions about Indian people, because it seems most Americans do not know The left coast and the
as much about us as I know about Chaplin. right coast, California
and New York, have
gotten on board for
I have also noticed that most people have an Indian within them. And yes, I use raising the minimum
the term Indian here despite the fact I know, like most Americans, it is a wage to $15 an hour.
misnomer; “Columbus got lost—he thought he had sailed all the way to India” That has...
everyone knows that and yet, after all these years and after the growing use of
Native American and Indigenous and—in Canada—First Nations, we still can’t A Legacy of
find a word that better describes who we are to other people. Just like the dead Domination in
Catholic Church
bird on Johnny Depp's head, it stays firmly in place and yes, sometimes even we, Decrees
us Indians, feed it out of necessity.
The Canadian
Conference of Catholic
I have found in my travels that Indian is the most universally understood way of Bishops (CCCB) is
describing myself to most of the people of the world. In Mexico, I couldn’t speak comprised of four
Spanish, all I could attempt to say was, “Indigena de la Estados Unidos” to Catholic organizations
across Canada. On
describe myself, but the locals just looked at me blankly so in desperation, I stuck March 19, 2016 the
my fingers up behind my head (to pantomime a feather) and said “Indian” and CCCB...
they nodded and smiled and patted me on the back and greeted me like I was a
long-lost relative. The names Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse spilled from their lips. Native Journalism
They were Spanish speakers, yet they knew by name the great leaders of my Benefits Us All
father’s people, once known as the Great Sioux nation. Even to them, our relatives Writer’s block, oy,
to the south, we are known only frozen in time as we were in the last throes of our what a flu that is to
struggles with the Americans and the relentless, westward march of Manifest have. Last year, I
believe I did not write,
Destiny across our lands. and if I did it was of
no consequence.
I say this because I want you to understand the complexity of being what I am, of However, there...
being Indian. The living descendent of the original people of what is now the
United States. And I want you to know that the complexity does not end there.

On the flip side of the celebrity spectrum to Depp’s earnestness to right past
wrongs, we find Paula Deen, a celebrity fallen from grace for saying the N-word.
In a tearful June 26 interview with Matt Lauer on Today, she said, "If there's
anyone out there that has never said something that they wish they could take
back, please pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me.”
She said this while her food empire crumbled, the Food Network dropped her
show, and Walmart, HomeDepot, Sears and JCPenny cut ties with her. Yet, in
another part of the American universe of racial epithets, the Washington Redskins
owner, Dan Snyder remained buoyantly defiant as fans rallied around him while
79 percent of Americans polled agreed that the name should not be changed.
“We'll never change the name. It's that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.”
Snyder said this in the face of potentially losing the copyright to Redskins because
it is a derogatory slur.

Believe me, I understand that the N-word trumps the R-word. When I first heard
the epithet “Prairie N-" (meaning Indians) my heart almost stopped. And no, the
R-word does not fill me with that visceral feeling of fear of bodily harm. I do
wonder, why is that? Why do two words used for centuries to demean and justify
lethal violence now generate different levels of outrage? It is as Public Enemy
once said, “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back,” and the power of the
words needed to hold them back still contain the immediate threat of violence.
The denigration that these two syllables reveal can be seen in the economic status
of black people and the high incarceration rates of black men. But Indians? To
this same public, our modern-day existence is invisible and the R-word’s original
meaning has been forgotten and now can be repurposed to “honor” us.

But I am a citizen of the Navajo Nation, which has grown to a population of

300,000 since 1868 when some 6,000 survivors returned to our homeland after
being held at a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo by the U.S. To this day,
tribes still control 55 million acres of land in the United States, 4 percent of U.S.
oil and gas reserves, 40 percent of U.S. uranium deposits, 30 percent of U.S. coal
reserves, and $2 billion in trust royalty payments, not to mention water rights,
which in the West are becoming increasingly valuable. In June, the Klamath tribe
of Oregon called in their water rights, after the state found after 38 years of
adjudication the tribe’s rights to have dated “from time immemorial." The tribe’s
assertion of these rights has shut off water to ranchers in the area. No other
minority group or special interest group can lay claim to such powers. Tribes also
exercise limited jurisdiction over their lands.

Tribes are nations recognized in the U.S. Constitution and are not just "special
interest” groups, a fact most Americans do not realize; so our demands for
recognition of these rights has created a backlash. Most Americans assume
conquest and ownership over our lands was completed in the 19th century when
the fictional Tonto roamed the land with his buddy and fellow outcast, the Lone
Ranger. They find it an annoyance when they discover we are still holding out.

Back to the film: The Lone Ranger has gotten reviews for being tasteless (deemed
“grotesque” by one reviewer) for featuring Depp in full hammy/slapstick humor
mode in the same scene where Comanche warriors are mowed down by U.S. Army
Gatling guns. These dead Comanche are played by actual Native American actors
although only one, Sac n Fox/Oto actor Saginaw Grant, has a speaking role. His
character expresses typical Hollywood Indian fatalism “It doesn’t matter; we’re
already ghosts.” There are no options here for the continuation of Indian people
in this West. Just like in Dances with Wolves, where the white couple adopted by
the Lakota ride off before the final slaughter, the Lone Ranger and Tonto escape
while all the sane Indian people are left dead and motionless on the ground. There
is no middle ground, even though in real history there must have been. I’m here,
the Comanche are still here—after all, they held an adoption ceremony for Johnny
Depp and he rode with the top down in a convertible in their tribal parade in
October. What of the stories of those Comanche? I mean, they must be just as
interesting.

I should also mention that throughout this scene, the bad guys are holding the
white female love interest of the Lone Ranger and we are expected to cheer for her
to be saved above all else. Juxtaposed against the slaughter of the Comanche
people just outside the window of the train she is in was, once again, grotesque
and in poor taste.

So what does it mean that in Hollywood, when real Indians still have no voice and
non-Indian actors still put on the face paint and play us? And in the sports world,
how much harm do Indian mascots really do? I can quote studies that have found
that mascots have a measurable negative effect on the self-esteem of Native youth.
Native youth who have the highest rates of suicide of any ethnic group in the
country. The state of Oregon took those studies seriously enough to ban the use of
Indian mascots in schools. Conservative legislators tried to gut the ban, but the
governor threatened a veto and the bill died. And yet, I spent the Fourth of July in
Wenatchee, Washington with my daughter, in a parking lot, astonished, gazing up
at the giant roving-eyed and winking Skookum Indian caricature above us. It had
once been perched in the 1930s on top of the old apple-packing plant in town, and
had been rediscovered in storage in 2000 and placed on top of an Office Depot.

“This is what we are up against," I told her. Around us the asphalt spread out
around us in the Office Depot parking lot. The eye leered down at us and I
wondered at the gap between me and those around me. How so many could agree
this was okay and not feel the way I felt, like I imagine the Lone Ranger’s brother
felt as his heart was taken out of his chest and eaten by the over-the-top bad guy
who chews scenery and co-stars’ hearts.

The majority of Americans claim to have never met an Indian in person; they
probably have and just didn't know. Especially since most modern-day Indians
live in American cities, colleges, office and suburbia and without feathers (even
pantomimed ones) and are thus largely unrecognizable as Indians. I almost never
get asked if I am Indian—Hawaiian, yes, Mexican, yes. One in a 100 Americans
are Indians and the majority live off the reservation. Yet, the only Indian most
Americans still know is the caricature that they see on packages of butter and
mascots and on top of Office Depots.

Then there are the Americans claiming the term Native for themselves as native-
born United States citizens. While it is true that the word can mean both things,
this is a blatant attempt to undercut the primacy of Indian people’s claims to the
land. And it is in pursuit to dilute this claim of primacy that the use of Indian
mascots arises. Everyone knows the story about the Boston Tea Party: colonists
dressed up as Indians while they threw tea into the harbor to protest taxation by
the British crown. Americans have used the Indian as a symbol of their own
yearnings for freedom for centuries from the oppressive Old World social
structures they no longer could accept. Even after the Revolutionary War, tenants
of landowners (who were the only ones who could vote) dressed up as Indians to
drive their landlords out of their homes and tar and feather them. Being Indian
gave the landless and powerless colonists the outsider identity (actually like the
masked and bird-wearing duo in The Lone Ranger) to lay a claim to rights they
would not normally have in the old order.

In the film, there is a vain, golden-haired officer obviously modeled on Colonel

George Armstrong Custer, and despite being set in Texas, much of the scenes with
soldiers made me think of similar battles and massacres our Lakota and Dakota
people faced. Before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Crow Scouts in Custer’s
regiment chose to take off their soldier's uniforms and don traditional regalia.
They told Custer that they wanted to die as warriors, not soldiers. The way the
scouts chose to die reflected the way in which they would have chosen to live if
circumstances had been different. In this choice I see the story of America, this
choice between two worlds, the New World and the Old. There is in the force of
that collision the exchange of ideas about what it means to be human, to be truly
alive that still catches the imagination of the entire world. It is what makes us
American and it is both tragic and filled with potential. This is why the names of
our leaders, like Sitting Bull, are still held in esteem and make people know us and
have compassion for our Indian people’s continued struggle to survive—and this
is why people want to be us.

But really, I have to say: Johnny, your desire to help Native Americans would be
better expressed by helping us tell our own stories. And yes, I’m sure there are
Little Tramp roles in the films we would write, too. Some tales and characters are
universal and some are particular to a people. It’s obvious that "Indian" people
have a unique perspective the world wants to hear and we have more to say than
“Kemo sabe.”

Jacqueline Keeler is Navajo and Yankton Sioux. She is producing 7-Oil-1: Inside
 the Bakken, a documentary about the oil boom on the Ft. Berthold reservation in
North Dakota. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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