Transnational Cinemas

ISSN: 2040-3526 (Print) 2040-3534 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrc20

‘As foreign as it gets’: indigenous immigrants,

transnationality, and rage in Sherman Alexie’s The
Business of Fancydancing

Katarzyna Marciniak

To cite this article: Katarzyna Marciniak (2018) ‘As foreign as it gets’: indigenous immigrants,
transnationality, and rage in Sherman Alexie’s The�Business�of�Fancydancing , Transnational
Cinemas, 9:1, 105-123, DOI: 10.1080/20403526.2018.1463689

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20403526.2018.1463689

Published online: 21 May 2018.

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tRansnational cinEMas
2018, Vol. 9, No. 1, 105–123
https://doi.org/10.1080/20403526.2018.1463689

‘As foreign as it gets’: indigenous immigrants,

transnationality, and rage in Sherman Alexie’s The Business of
Fancydancing
Katarzyna Marciniak
Department of English, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The article considers Sherman Alexie’s directorial debut, The Business Received 5 April 2018
of Fancydancing (2002), as an important contribution to transnational Accepted 9 April 2018
cinema. It invites us to review our conceptions of outside/ inside, liminality, KEYWORDS
borders, and interstitiality in the light of the complicated political status Indigenous immigrants;
of Native Americans—as (un)belonging members of dependent nations. transnationality; Native
It asks what cinematic aesthetic might be adequate to the contingent Americans; indigenous rage;
sovereignty of Native Americans. I examine the way a form of mise- interstitial space
en-abyme (in a story featuring a Native American poet heralded by
non-Natives but rejected as ‘selling out’ by his own people) informs the
challenges Native American filmmakers face themselves in trying to
avoid the exploitation of their own culture. The analysis acknowledges
how the ‘redundancy’ of Native Americans is given expressive form
through a sonic and visual play with ‘indigenous rage’ and through
discontinuous narrative structure. I argue that the film attests to Alexie’s
preparedness to risk potentially counterproductive representations
of indigenous self-realization in the context of a damaging history of
cultural appropriation, and explore how Fancydancing attempts to
transgress borders without erecting new ones.

The United States is a colony and I’m always going to write like one who is colonized, and
that’s with a lot of anger.

–Sherman Alexie (‘Seeing Red’ 1996)

This article considers the undertheorized status of representations of indigenous identities
within transnational cinematic cultures. Surveying the work of comparative literature and
cultural studies scholars, in their article, ‘Charting Transnational Native American Studies,’
Hsinya Huang, Philip Deloria, Laura Furlan and John Gamber, argue for providing ‘intel-
lectual space for representing Native American and Indigenous cultures and histories in the
transnational context’ (2012). They claim that while ‘the figure of the Native is frequently
invoked to articulate critical perspectives on the complexities of transnational racial/ethnic
performance,’ ‘the Native can also be an absent presence in the burgeoning discussion of

CONTACT Katarzyna Marciniak marcinia@ohio.edu

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
106 K. MARCINIAK

transnationalism’ (2012). This ‘absent presence,’ I believe, is clearly felt in film studies. While
other humanities and social sciences scholars have begun to explore the intersection of trans-
nationality and indigeneity,1 the cinema remains a potent ground for an examination of the
ambivalent status of indigenous populations in the U.S. that are both urban and relegated to
reservations. While they do not occupy a positionality comparable to immigrants, migrants,
or refugees from various elsewheres, who often experience a conflicted connection to the
host nation, nevertheless, they are marginalized and internally displaced while inhabiting the
land of their ancestors. In fact, as Sherman Alexie claims in the opening quote, ‘the United
States is a colony’ (‘Seeing Red’ 1996). A scene from Chris Eyre’s 1998 Smoke Signals, the
first feature film hailed as written, directed and produced by Native Americans, makes this
contradiction explicit. When the protagonists, Victor and Thomas, leave the Coeur d’Alene
Reservation, their friend asks jokingly, ‘You guys got your passports?’ ‘But it’s the United
States,’ Thomas protests in earnest, to which she replies, ‘That’s as foreign as it gets.’ This
statement speaks to the bitter legacy of internal colonization and domestic ghettoization
of indigenous peoples.
To theorize the concept of foreignness vis–à–vis indigeneity in the U.S. signifies an
obvious unease if not an insulting paradox even since the very idea of indigeneity stands
in logical opposition to the foreign that is typically defined as ‘non-native.’ Foreign comes
from the Latin foras connoting ‘outside’ and derives from fores – ‘door.’ So the concept of
‘as foreign as it gets’ articulated in Smoke Signals, suggesting that the U.S. is ‘foreign,’ even
if counter-intuitive, makes sense if we look at it from the indigenous point of view, which
sees ‘settler society’2 (Flowers 2015, 32) as foreign, as those who came from the outside. But
another paradox here lies in the transnational mobility of indigenous people who, upon
leaving the reservation – the sovereign nation – move into settler society and thus poten-
tially become a foreign curiosity. Roberta Estes explains the historical complexities of the
point that Indian reservations are sovereign nations, clarifying the contingent sovereignty
of Native Americans:
The federal government recognizes tribal nations as ‘domestic dependent nations’ and has
established a number of laws attempting to clarify the relationship between the federal, state
and tribal governments. The Constitution and later federal laws grant local sovereignty to
tribal nations, yet do not grant full sovereignty equivalent to foreign nations, hence the term
‘domestic dependent nations’ (2012).
All these contingencies are complicated by the fact that American Indians did not receive
their right to citizenship until 1924 through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and thus
were effectively treated as ‘foreign’ by the U.S. legal system.3 And, as Mahmood Mamdani
writes, commenting on the U.S. as ‘a pioneer in the history and technology of settler colo-
nialism,’ ‘Even then [in 1924], Indians were considered naturalized citizens, not citizens by
birthright as native-born Americans’ (2015, 608, 611). The political and citizen status of
Native Americans is thus complex and complicated since they are considered simultaneously
under federal law as being independent and as being wards of the U.S.A. These contentious
ideas around foreignness, borders and belonging are compellingly articulated in Sherman
Alexie’s (2002) feature film The Business of Fancydancing.
Focusing on The Business of Fancydancing as the principal case study, my analysis probes
the following questions: Since indigenous characters belong to a nation within a nation,
what is their relation to the discourses of the transnational? If modalities of border-cross-
ings are critical to the examination of transnationality, what is the value of discourses of the
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 107

transnational when exploring indigeneity, especially if, as one character proclaims, ‘borders
don’t really matter to us that much’? I approach Fancydancing not as a specialist in Native
American film studies, but as a scholar and pedagogue of transnational cinema who has
invested intellectual energies in the exploration of immigrant rage as a taboo modality of
expression in various cultural contexts.4 In fact, I started teaching Fancydancing because of
the performativity of political aesthetics of rage the narrative unapologetically offers and
because I wanted to complicate the notion of the transnational in my classroom, considering
indigeneity vis–à–vis other discussions of transnationality.5
Indeed, one tonality that emerges most strongly in Fancydancing is the eruption of exces-
sive affect and, as such, the narrative synergy enacts what I call ‘the aesthetics of indigenous
rage.’ Focusing on the idea of ‘indigenous rage,’ as a strategy of decolonization, resistance
and oppositionality, I examine the way the narrative is structured as a series of encounters
that present multiple irresolvable, if not incommensurable, clashes between indigenous
characters and the culture at large: interactions with predominantly white audiences during
poetry readings, interactions on the reservation and institutional interactions with educa-
tional administrators. These encounters, I argue, demonstrate the precarity of indigenous
characters as trans-figures, positioned across the nation: of it but, paradoxically, not fully
in it. As I will advance an argument about the impact of Indian redundancy and show how
Fancydancing mediates this in important ways for cinema, Judith Butler’s understanding
of precarity is of crucial consideration here: ‘Precarity designates that politically induced
condition in which certain populations suffer from social and economic networks and
become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (2009, 25). The imagery of
injury, violence and death, in fact, permeates Fancydaning.
Rage often subtly and often not so subtly drives Fancydancing and it is not a gratuitous
anger but a politicized rage that Alexie as a public speaker embraced many times. While
promoting his recently published memoir about his late mother, You Don’t Have to Say You
Love Me (2017), he speaks about the importance of anger again:
For all the damage my mother did to me,’ he said, ‘the thing she gave me, and that has saved
me, is the arrogant belief that I deserve to live.’ Arrogance isn’t an admired trait in the Indian
world, but when Alexie teaches, he tells his students to embrace it – and to be unafraid of anger.
‘I didn’t survive all the stuff you’re gonna read about in this book because of humility,’ Alexie
said. ‘I survived because I’ve been pissed off for 50 years. (Petersen 2017)

Hermeneutic irresolvability

I think positive stereotypes are possibly even more damaging than negative stereotypes.

(‘An Interview with Sherman Alexie,’ McDonald 2002, 49)

Alexie, of Spokane-Coeur d’Alene descent, is well-known as an acclaimed poet and novelist
and The Business of Fancydancing is his directorial debut for which he also wrote the script
(though this is not his first cinema engagement as he wrote the script for Smoke Signals,
which he co-produced with Chris Eyre). The additional material, Sherman’s Sandbox: Behind
the Scenes (2002b), offers a production history of the film. It specifies that Alexie made the
digital film on a shoe-string budget, using the local Seattle venue, 911: Media Arts Centre,
which he describes as a ‘commie video co-op.’ ‘I was by far the least experienced person on
the set,’ claims Alexie, describing himself as someone with ‘a bunch of ideas and no idea
108 K. MARCINIAK

how to implement them.’ Despite his lack of filmic experience, Alexie says he wanted ‘to
make a movie that agreed with [his] politics’ and ‘hire all women’ since ‘most film sets are
boys’ clubs, stinky, stinky boys’ clubs.’ ‘I approach filmmaking the way I approach all my
art,’ claims Alexie, speaking about the need to ignore the hierarchy of authority on the set
and the need for improvisation (‘improving helped the poetic nature of the film’).
As a product of such an approach to creativity, Fancydancing is a formally unconven-
tional narrative – its fragmentation, rhythmic style, and its non-linearity, temporal jumps,
improvisations, elisions, and retellings mimic the indigenous mode of storytelling. In many
ways, watching Fancydancing is like reading an intricately constructed poem – figuring
out metaphors, gluing episodes into a coherent whole, succumbing to the complexity of
images, feeling its pulse. The richly layered and episodically structured narrative, punctu-
ated by poems, drumbeats, dance performances and unfolding the story through a series
of flashbacks and flashforwards, indeed create ‘the poetic nature of the film,’ exemplifying a
transborder aesthetics and demanding a different kind of spectatorship.6 Following Michelle
H. Raheja’s contention, we could see how Alexie’s film participates in what she calls ‘visual
sovereignty’:
While legal and social science discourses have used the term to describe a peculiar, problem-
atic, and particular relationship between the Anglophone colonies/United States/Canada and
indigenous nations of North America, I would like to suggest a discussion of visual sovereignty
as a way of reimagining Native-centred articulations of self-representation and autonomy.
(2007, 1163)
This visual sovereignty is evident not only in the narrative but also in the film’s look and
sound. The imagery is often gritty, unpolished, guerrilla-style, a stylistic decision which
critics overwhelmingly read as a deficiency, as for example, ‘the visual clunkiness’ (Mitchell
2002). The audibility of the film honours indigenous heritage as various characters sing,
recite poetry, chant and perform ritual dances (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Seymour performing in the interstitial space.

 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 109

The protagonist of Fancydancing, Seymour Polatkin, is a famed American Indian gay

poet who leads a cosmopolitan life in Seattle where he resides with his white boyfriend,
Steven and embodies the contradictions of what Trinh T. Minh-ha, for example, calls
‘elsewhere-within-here,’ underscoring his complex (un)belonging (Trinh 2010). The film
explores his (un)belonging by following Seymour’s return to his Spokane Reservation roots
for the funeral of a childhood friend where he is confronted with his past and controversies
that surround his status as a poet. He comes from the reservation and its stories feed his
poetic talent. Yet, he is simultaneously shunned by his friends on the reservation who regard
his poetry as exploitative, using their indigenous stories of dispossession and abject poverty
to advance his career. The story thus revolves around the friction between Seymour and
two of his childhood friends, Aristotle and Mouse. They perceive Seymour as ‘foreign’ –
already ‘outside’ – and believe, in turn, that his exotic ‘foreignness’ has helped him achieve
his fame. At different moments in the narrative, he is mockingly referred to as ‘Mr. Indian
poet,’ ‘smart Indian,’ ‘affirmative action poet,’ and ‘public relations Indian.’
The point about Seymour ‘stealing’ his friends’ experiences to infuse his poetry is exem-
plified most strongly in reference to Mouse. Seymour’s poetry is recited by various char-
acters in the narrative and at one moment we see Mouse delivering a poem about kittens:
‘Memorial day, 1972/I was too young to clean graves so I waded into the uranium river
with the cat that later gave birth to six headless kittens/Oh, Lord, remember, do remember
me.’ As Mouse and Aristotle ridicule Seymour’s book of poetry, All My Relations, Mouse
comments: ‘It’s all lies, Ari. Those were my kittens. He took my life, man. All my relations,
it says. All my relations. It’s all lies, man….It’s like I am not even alive. It’s like I am dead.’
The last line is ominous since the main event of the narrative is Mouse’s funeral on
the reservation, which precipitates Seymour’s return after many years of absence. When
Seymour enters the reservation, he sees a sign, ‘Welcome to the Spokane Indian Reservation/
Home of Seymour Polatkin,’ and the words scribbled beneath ‘not anymore.’ With this
focus on an Indian returning home, which clearly once celebrated him but now rejects him,
Fancydancing delves into intricate issues of being a successful artist outside the reservation,
of being perceived as a ‘sell out’ to white culture, of responsibility to one’s cultural roots and
their ‘betrayal,’ but also of being shunned by one’s own culture. The politics of the film is
thus complex as the narrative refuses one-dimensionality, sentimentality or romanticization
and it privileges hermeneutic irresolvability. The film neither condones nor vilifies Seymour
and his reservation friends, thus refusing to suture us into a gratifying story about an Indian
who ‘made it.’ Instead, the narrative interpellates the viewers into a position of spectatorial
discomfort, speaking to Homi Bhabha’s idea of the colonial stereotype as both ‘phobia and
fetish’(1983, 25) and thus offering a plethora of varying moments, some confirming, some
defying the prevalent stereotypes: disturbing images of violence, drug and alcohol abuse on
the reservation, difficult interracial relationships, a cocky protagonist, often mistaken for an
Asian, who calls himself ‘a pathological liar’ – all mixed with moments of affect exemplified
most strongly through recited poems.
As Alexie says about the need for complexity: ‘Even we who are Native don’t portray
ourselves as complicated as we are. Because the rewards in the Indian and non-Indian world
are for being the kind of Indian that’s expected’ (Petersen 2017). The Indian that is ‘expected’
is the Dances with Wolves Indian: useful to the white people through his ‘native’ wisdom,
and grateful for his or her ‘usability.’ In many ways, Fancydancing portrays an unexpected
Indian world. As the editors of Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, Theory
110 K. MARCINIAK

conclude: ‘For Native critics arguing that mixed-audience Indigenous films should focus
on positive aspects of tribal culture to combat generations of negative imagery, Alexie’s film
represents a decidedly problematic approach’ (Marubbio and Buffalohead 2013, 16).7 As if
anticipating such a reception, Alexie wrote a cameo role for himself, appearing as a nameless
character on the reservation, directly challenging Seymour during Mouse’s wake: ‘When
was the last time Seymour talked to Mouse? Writing all those poems, walking around here
thinking he’s too good for us.’8

Fetishization: indigenous as foreign

Seymour Polatkin’s poetry is funny, angry, authentic, and ultimately redemptive.

–New York Literature Quarterly

Seymour Polatkin is full of shit.

–Indianz.com
These two very different and clashing assessments of Seymour’s poetry frame the narrative,
appearing on screen as intertitles early on. In fact, the discrepancy around the perceived
value of his poetry underpins a certain doubleness that envelops Seymour’s figure: he is
treated as an ‘authentic’ Indian voice outside his reservation, while characters such as Mouse
and Aristotle with whom he shared his growing up on the reservation, see him as a fraud,
a thief and a traitor. After a series of denigrating experiences, as Aristotle is about to leave
Seattle where he and Seymour are both college students early on in the narrative, he delivers
his sharp critique to Seymour: ‘Man, you like it out here, don’t you? Playing Indian, put-
ting on the beads and feathers for all these white people. Out here you’re their little public
relations warrior. You’re a super Indian. You’re the expert and the authority. But at home,
man, you're just little Indian who cries too much.’ This idea of doubleness, expressed as
aporia, unresolvable and ambiguous, also closes the narrative as Seymour is shown leaving
Mouse’s wake prematurely, unable to address the mourners, and, upon exiting the house,
sees himself still sitting in a car as if he had never left it. This doubling of his character of
simultaneously sitting in his car and being outside it underscores his tangled positionality
of belonging and unbelonging on the reservation.
During his public poetry readings, we indeed see the way Seymour self-consciously exploits
the impulse of fetishization and his otherness; he knows how to smugly perform ‘a super
Indian,’ entertaining his audiences with stories about his gay identity (being the two spirit-
ed-man, as he says: ‘I am very out and very proud, lots of pride of being an American Indian
gay man’) and his upbringing on the reservation. Paradoxically, his status as a rarity – a prom-
inent Indian poet who also happens to be gay – invites this kind of adulation of his figure;
he is talented, charismatic, different. He knows how to play a palatable Indian (Figure 2).
But Seymour’s high visibility and his experiences of fetishization outside the reservation
also bring audibility to Indian voices. Agnes, Seymour’s Spokane-Jewish ex-lover, friend and
a fellow college peer, whom Alexie calls ‘the moral center of the film’ (Sherman’s Sandbox)
because she returns to the reservation as a teacher, tells Seymour: ‘When you are speaking,
white people are listening.’ Commenting on the power of his poetry and defending him in
front of his childhood friends on the reservation, she claims, ‘He grew up with us. He belongs
here. He is out there. He is fighting a war. He is telling everybody that we are still here.’
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 111

Figure 2. Seymour during a poetry reading – palatable Indian.

While Seymour’s poetry readings are staged performances aimed to satisfy the curiosity
of white audience members (in various vignettes we often see close-ups of their faces – atten-
tive, eager to listen, fascinated), one of the opening scenes featuring Seymour demonstrates
the narrative awareness of the fetishization of the Indian figure. Seymour sits in the window
of a bookstore reading from his collection of poems; he is on display like an exhibit, con-
scious of his ‘exotic’ value. He is literally a window display, reciting his poem to an empty
street except for one white male who briefly stares at Seymour and enters the bookstore.
The window has a poster – ‘National Indian Month’ – an ironic resonance. Seymour’s
placement as a display, behind the window, offers a scene of being caged, reminiscent of
Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s experiment in faux anthropology they performed
in The Couple in the Cage (1993), ‘playing’ two ‘undiscovered’ Amerindians, an identity they
fabricated to challenge colonialist-racist gazing and the historical European institutions of
‘human zoos,’ which utilized indigenous people as public displays at circuses and sideshows.
Fancydancing appears to be conscious of this historicity, inviting the audience to ponder
the figure of an Indian behind the glass, untouchable yet visible, offered up for a street gaze.
The poem Seymour recites while sitting as a window display makes fun of the limited
representations of American Indians:
This is how to write the great American Indian novel
all of the Indians must have tragic features, tragic eyes, arms,
their hands and fingers must be tragic and they reach for tragic food…
The great American Indian novel, when it’s finally written,
all of the white people will be Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts.
During the recitation of this poem, we also see Seymour embracing and kissing the statue
of an Indian figure of Chief Seattle, ‘a Suquamish and Duwamish leader famous for his
friendly relations with European invaders during the nineteenth century’ (Youngberg 2008,
65). This moment of Seymour kissing the statue on the mouth in a public space – offered
112 K. MARCINIAK

Figure 3. Kissing Chief Seattle.

provocatively through a close-up – might be read as hinting at the long history of usability
of indigenous people – as Seymour recites: ‘Indians must see visions. White people can
have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian,
then a white person is an Indian by proximity’ (Figure 3). ‘A white person’ as ‘an Indian by
proximity’ – a discursive expression of appropriation working as an enhancement of white
identity, a certain fantasy of consumptive power, a mode of benefitting from an appeal of
Indianness without being an Indian – is a historical construct hinging on racial fetishization
and a stereotype of sexualization of Native Americans: ‘the image of the Native American
as intensely sexual – more creature than human, more bestial than celestial’ (Kilpatrick
1999; xvii). As Kobena Mercer has argued in a different context, ‘stereotypes of black men
– as criminals, athletes, entertainers – bear witness to the contemporary repetition of such
colonial fantasy, in that the rigid and limited grid of representations through which black
male subjects become publicly visible continues to reproduce certain idées fixes, ideologi-
cal fictions and psychic fixations, about the nature of black sexuality and the ‘otherness’ it
is constructed to embody’ (Mercer 1993, 311–312). A similar contention might be made
about ‘brown men’ (this is the term Seymour uses for himself when he improvises a poem
for Steven about ‘a brown man and a white man intertwined’), especially in the context of
colonial fantasy, and it is the idées fixes – ideological fictions and psychic fixations – that
particularly interest me in examining Fancydancing.

Borders and border crossings: Indians ‘in reserve’

–You broke a lot of rules in The Business of Fancydancing.

–Yes, and I didn’t break enough.

(‘An Interview with Sherman Alexie,’ McDonald 2002, 48)

 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 113

Figure 4. Mouse-a documentarian.

One of the intriguing formal aspects of Fancydancing is the recurring presence of Mouse’s
handheld video camera in the narrative (we frequently see him filming others, often film-
ing himself and thus recording reality around him), a diegetic self-reflexivity that provides
internal framing and blurs our borders of perception. Mouse’s filming has an autobiograph-
ical-ethnographic feel as if counterpointing Seymour’s early image of being positioned as
an exhibit in a window display.9 The fact that Mouse is a filming agent (and not the one
being filmed) is of critical importance as a resistant act, reminding us of a history of eth-
nographic gazing at indigenous people being recorded as racialized curiosities, a practice
Fatimah Tobing Rony calls ‘the third eye’ – the experience of seeing oneself through the
First World gaze (1996). As a talented violinist and a documentarian, Mouse at one point
calls himself ‘a tool user,’ making us think how his violin and his camera are tools of artistic
creativity and self-representation. His wandering camera infuses the narrative with a certain
audio-visual intimacy and it literally and figuratively provides a critical aesthetic lens that
acts as a witness (Figure 4).
These borders of perception are also blurred by Mouse’s character himself since he is
appearing as a somewhat spectral figure at different moments, ghosting the narrative and
taking us back to Seymour’s poem’s ending line – ‘all the Indians will be ghosts.’ As the
narrative is framed by his funeral, we see him sitting with his violin in the audience during
one of Seymour’s poetry readings as if taunting Seymour; we see him in the backseat of
Seymour’s car; we watch him reciting the poem about the kittens against a black back-
ground – sort of a non-space. In all these instances, Mouse’s spectral appearances seem
to be attached to Seymour, perhaps calling on him to question his opportunistic choices
regarding his poetry and his career. We could say that his spectral figure embodies the ‘van-
ishing Indian’ trope that nevertheless returns and haunts the narrative space, thus defying
its racist ideological construction. Raheja summarizes the myth of the vanishing Indian
succinctly: ‘From Columbus to James Fenimore Cooper to nineteenth-century photographs
114 K. MARCINIAK

to western films, Native Americans have been envisioned as disappearing’ (2010, 242).10
Fancydancing self-consciously plays with this myth of indigenous people as destined to
vanish; as Alexie explains: ‘We didn’t make reservations. The military, the US military and
government made reservations. And it was a place where we’re supposed to be concentrated
and die and disappear’ (‘Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Borders,’ 2013).
The narrative opens with Mouse filming Seymour and Aristotle as the two high school
valedictorians laugh and talk about their plans to attend a university in Seattle, while Mouse
claims he will be working in a uranium mine. His camera stays on Seymour and Aristotle
(‘buddies forever,’ exclaims Aristotle, imagining his life with Seymour in Seattle), but, at
the last moment of this sequence, Mouse turns the camera on himself, immediately writing
himself into the narrative and signalling self-consciousness. From this early point, crossing
a border – moving away from the reservation in search of an educational advancement – is
cast as a privilege accessible to only few. When Agnes returns to the reservation to work
as a teacher in an elementary school, she inverts this idea as her border-crossing violates
these expectations. Mouse, his camera in hand, meets Agnes on the road as she is asking
for directions and, upon learning that she is a teacher, observes sarcastically: ‘You know,
you are doing this all backwards. Most smart Indians move away from the Rez.’ ‘Maybe I
am starting a new trend,’ claims Agnes.
However, borders also take on an ambivalent valence in the narrative as, driving with
Aristotle, it is Mouse who makes a claim that ‘borders don’t really matter to us that much.’
So, borders emerge as an aporetic notion, confining and liberatory, difficult to cross yet,
at the same time, without much potential significance. Driving somewhere, Mouse and
Aristotle dialogue:
Mouse: Hey, what state are we in?
Aristotle: Oregon, California, Idaho, I don’t know.
Mouse: It don’t matter which state we are in. Borders don’t really matter to us that
much because it don’t matter when you are feeling extra existential.
This is a difficult conversation to unravel, especially in the context of Agnes’ earlier
comment about Seymour: ‘He is out there. He is fighting a war. He is telling everybody
that we are still here.’ Agnes’s point underscores the inside/outside dynamic, creating a
sense that the reservation is an enclosed, almost forgotten space, separate from ‘out there.’
In fact, etymologically, ‘reservation’ has its roots in Latin reservare meaning ‘to keep back,’
and Joshua B. Nelson observes: ‘In the reservation era, the United States created rural ghet-
tos where Indians could be contained, surveilled by the state – kept in reserve with all due
legality and beneficence’ (2010, 44). Nelson’s point about Indians ‘kept in reserve’ reminds
us of Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘superfluous’ humans (2004, 41), or ‘redundant humans’
(2004, 71) – those perceived as not needed and thus disposable.11 But his comment also
speaks, yet again, to a potential usability of indigenous people, taking us back to the image
of Seymour in the window display and, even more importantly, to the idea of ‘human zoos’
in the 19th century exhibitions.
Simultaneously, Mouse and Aristotle’s road trip is framed by Mouse’s initial point: ‘things
would be different if we were around when Columbus landed.’ This comment historicizes
the idea of borders in the context of colonial encounters and makes the border a decid-
edly colonial construct, which their trip acknowledges and contests at the same time. In
fact, the spectre of colonialism is explicitly evoked by Seymour in the first interview with
a female African-American reporter. As Fancydancing engages the trope of borders and
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 115

borderlessness, a series of interviews between Seymour and the reporter takes place against
a non-descript black background, a kind of borderless narrative non-space of liminality,
which Alexie calls ‘the in-between’ and which Holly Taylor, the DP of the film, explains as
‘sort of this no-man’s land’ (Sherman’s Sandbox). These ‘in-between’ interviews punctuate
the narrative, introducing a mixed modality of aggression, defensiveness, sarcasm, pomp-
ousness and lyricism. The first interview already sets up the unnerving tone that permeates
all these encounters with the reporter:
Reporter: Seymour Polatkin, it’s a very interesting name. Where does it come from?
Seymour: It’s Russian.
Reporter: Yes, I know that. Where does it really come from?
Seymour: Well, I’d tell you but I don’t want to get into a long and detailed discussion
about colonialism and the missionary position.
Reporter: Hm, that’s amusing.
This ‘in-between’ space – an interstitial location – might be thought of as a symbolic rep-
resentation of Seymour’s ‘in-between’ positionality, marking him further as a trans-character.
Crucially, this interstitiality also appears to function as a space of interrogation, challenging
him, as Amy Corbin aptly writes, ‘as an absentee spokesman for the tribe’ (2013, 178). It tests
Seymour, as if eliciting confessions from him, often provoking him quite mercilessly as, for
example, when the reporter says, responding to Seymour’s musing that ‘the rez is equal parts
magic and loss’: ‘Well, I’ve got some magic statistics right here. The average income among
reservation Indians is less than 10,000 dollars a year. The average lifespan of a reservation
Indian man is 49 years.’ ‘And what does this have to do with me?’ Seymour responds. This
is the last interview and the camera circles Seymour and the reporter, their faces in close-
ups, creating a sense of visual anxiety and an escalation of affect. ‘10,000 dollars a year,’ as
the reporter mentions is quickly juxtaposed with another figure she specifies: 10,000 dollars
Seymour charges for his lecture fees. Through this exchange, Seymour emerges as callous
and opportunistic, denying that he has any ethical obligations to ‘reservation Indians.’ And
yet, this representation of callousness is undercut when moments later, tearfully, he tells the
story of his little sister’s death on the reservation and the fact that as a Christmas gift from
his mother he received a dictionary (‘Seymour, you get out of this place – that’s all she ever
gave me – my life and that dictionary’).
While the interstitial location incessantly engenders Seymour’s unease, it also functions
as a space of historical reckoning. Shrewdly, the reporter also cites Primo Levi during this
interview: ‘The Jewish writer, Primo Levi, while writing about the Nazi death camps, he
said: ‘It wasn’t the best people who survived. You must remember,’ he wrote, ‘it was the liars,
cheaters, and thieves who survived.’’ ‘And how did the whores do?’ asks Seymour, challeng-
ing her. The reporter’s comment is meant to insult Seymour but, at the same time, it also
performs a different work by implicitly drawing attention to indigenous genocide, which
has not received the same historical attention like the Holocaust. The audience already has
an inkling of this connection when Seymour and Agnes first meet as college students in
Seattle. Hearing that Agnes is both Jewish and Spokane, Seymour says: ‘Damn, so you’ve
got, like, tribal numbers tattooed on one arm and death camp numbers on the other.’12
This interview ends with Seymour’s emotional outbreak as he refers to himself as a whore:
‘So don’t tell me what I can write. And don’t tell me what I can remember. And don’t tell me
how to live. I’ll be a hard-ass whore if I wanna be.’ Seymour-as-a-hard-ass-whore directly
116 K. MARCINIAK

acknowledges his own selling out, his commodification, while also asserting his right to
his artistic vision and creative autonomy. In this moment he performs as one of the ‘angry
interstitial persons,’ to use Mary Douglas’s anthropological formulation, marking the ‘in-be-
tween’ space as a location that allows his anger to emerge (1966, 103). In a way, this last
interview confronts the viewer with an idea of a certain overdetermination that surrounds
an Indian identity that is expected to serve its people. And, metadiegetically, Alexie spoke
about this issue defiantly while discussing Fancydancing: ‘That’s another thing about being
Indian and an artist, people assume I have some sort of social responsibility to everybody.
I don’t. All I owe the world is my art’ (Capriccioso 2003).

Colonial rage and revolting aesthetics

I think for Indians the largest problem is inarticulate rage. I think that’s our dominant mode
of expression. And I want to portray that… As articulate, poetic, and literary as I can be, I also
know about my rage and that has not been explored in the Indian world because we’re afraid
of negative stereotypes.

(‘An Interview with Sherman Alexie,’ McDonald 2002, 50)

The most drastic scene in the narrative occurs during Mouse and Aristotle’s road trip when
they encounter a stranded white male motorist. ‘Hey, look, there is a lost white guy,’ Mouse
observes, ‘pull over, that’s the Indian way. Injuns helping lost white folk.’ ‘You guys are
Indian, right?’ the traveler initiates, greeting them with some anticipation for help. Mouse
comments to Ari: ‘He thinks we are Sacagawea. Hey, Ari, he thinks we are Sacagawea.’
Mouse’s mockery is telling as he is directly defying the expectation that Indians are meant to
help whites – they are redundant when not needed but usable when needed. What happens
next is the eruption of anti-colonial rage, seemingly coming out of nowhere since the man
appears harmless and non-confrontational. As Aristotle initiates the unprovoked attack,
Mouse’s camera keeps recording. Mouse tries to stop Aristotle but Aristotle is unstoppable
and forces Mouse to participate: ‘Hit him, hit him, hit him. Hit him or I am gonna hit you.
Stop being a mouse and be a man.’ Mouse initially refuses, saying ‘what about my hands?’
reminding us that he is a violinist. When Mouse finally starts kicking the traveler, Aristotle
is visibly pleased and the entire scene ends while the two shriek, overjoyed, as if relieved.
As they leave, we see through Mouse’s camera a white man lying on the ground.
‘Colonial violence has not ended’ (2015, 41), writes Rachel Flowers: ‘Given that the vio-
lent colonial history of domination and dispossession of Indigenous peoples continues to
structure our daily lives and has profound effects on our health, colonial rage overtly and
covertly shapes our relations with self and Others’ (2015, 45). In ‘Settler Colonialism: Then
and Now,’ Mamdani’s point about an American exceptionalism offers a further context for
the persistence of the colonial rage discussed by Flowers: ‘If there is an American excep-
tionalism, it is this: treated by organs of government as a perpetually colonized population,
the fate of Native Americans is testimony that the US, the world’s first settler-colonial state,
continues to function as one’ (2015, 610). If we read the scene on the side of the road through
the historical context of colonial rage, it begins to present itself not as an unexpected and
inexplicable eruption but rather as a manifestation of affect that profoundly influences both
Mouse and Aristotle. It is one of those psychic underpinnings that are often politically and
aesthetically buried since to represent rage the way Fancydancing does is certainly risky,
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 117

Figure 5. Aristotle during test-taking.

bringing to the surface the modality we might not expect to be so blatantly articulated on
screen.
In that scene Mouse wears a jacket whose back reads ‘Alive to tell the tale’ and he has
a pin on the front with the word ‘destiny,’ reminding the viewers of the ‘Manifest Destiny’
doctrine. These are easily missed details that, upon a close scrutiny, suggest that Mouse is
a signifier to be read, wearing indigenous history on his body. The ‘Alive to tell the tale’
signage is especially poignant since narratively we already know that he is not alive to tell
the tale as he committed suicide. In fact, in various moments, both Mouse and Aristotle
are shown toxifying themselves (‘How to Make a Bathroom Cleaner Sandwich’ vignette
in which Mouse eats a disgusting sandwich sprayed with a bathroom cleaner and another
scene in which Aristotle is huffing gas). These are brutal scenes of self-intoxication and they
evoke visceral feelings of disgust, bringing the viewers up-close to the imagery and sounds
of self-inflicted pain. Both the road-side attack and the self-intoxication scenes offer the
audience images that are difficult to digest, challenging our spectatorial comfort.
One way to apprehend these scenes is through the notion of revolting aesthetics and
the politics of disgust; as Imogen Tyler comments: ‘disgust is an urgent, guttural aversive
emotion, associated with sickening feelings of revulsion, loathing or nausea’ (2013, 21),
which may translate itself into socially performed stigmatization. In Revolting Subjects:
Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, Tyler plays with the dual meanings of
‘revolt’ and ‘revolting subjects,’ messing up the boundary between the two seemingly dis-
tinct meanings of ‘revolting’: an emotional register evokes an expression of disgust, while a
political register refers to acts of protest and rebellion that trouble authority and defy forms
of violence experienced by those deemed revolting. By engaging in the sickening activities of
gas-huffing and eating a bathroom cleaner sandwich both Mouse and Aristotle’s characters
are placed into the discourse of disgust. They are represented as revolting subjects – in a dual
118 K. MARCINIAK

sense – and their attack on a motorist might be thus read as revolt against various forms of
historical and personal violence experienced by them and their community.
One such form of violence is offered in an earlier scene when we see Aristotle, in a
flashback, in Seattle. The vignette is titled ‘Colonial Aptitude Testing Service, Seattle, WA
1985’ and Aristotle is talking to a patronizing white male school official, presumably in
charge of these tests:
Man: Son, we have been informed that there are certain irregularities in your test
taking. We were informed that your test-taking apparel was, to say the least,
quite distracting.
Aristotle: There was nothing in the room about a dress code.
Man: No, there wasn’t but I want an explanation.
Aristotle: My grandmother told me that your little test was culturally biased and that I
might need a little extra power to do my best.
Man: It’s an interesting definition of power.
As this conversation unfolds, in yet another flashback, we see a test-taking moment when
Aristotle is dressed in a regalia outfit (Figure 5). Speaking to the school official after the
test, before a final outburst, Aristotle states calmly: ‘I was thinking that I am Crazy Horse,
I am Geronimo, and I am Sitting Bull. And that the required number two pencil is a bone
arrow and every math question is Columbus and every essay question is Custer. And I am
gonna kill them dead. But, hey, I am sure I have fucked that little test because I am just an
Injun from a reservation, ain’t it? I couldn’t be that smart, ain’t it? I am the first person in
my family to ever graduate from high school. So who the hell I think I am trying to go to
college, ain’t it? As Aristotle exits the room, the man winks, saying, ‘Joseph, you are one of
the bright ones,’ reminding us of the significance of Artistotle’s nickname meaning ‘superior,’
or ‘best of thinkers.’
This is an incommensurable encounter where very different worlds, experiential realities,
and epistemologies clash. It is not a dialogically commensurate encounter as it is Aristotle
who is asked to explain himself, facing an unequal power dynamic and benevolent racism.
He knows that the school official already sees him as ‘just an Injun from a reservation;’ he
knows he is under a smirking colonial gaze. Unlike Seymour who entertains his poetry
audiences with stories and smiles and allows his rage to emerge predominantly in an inter-
stitial place, Aristotle refuses to play a palatable Indian and functions as an embodiment
of indigenous rage. The encounter with the school official ends with Aristotle’s shrieks,
revealing how such a rage sounds like.

Conclusion: transborder aesthetics and politics

Alexie: I was a first-generation immigrant (commenting on his leaving the reservation to go

to all white high school)…I’m an indigenous immigrant.

Moyers: What is it like to be an alien in the land of your birth?

(Sherman Alexie, ‘Sherman Alexie on Living Outside Borders,’ 2013b)

In an interview with filmcritic.com, Alexie (2002c) talks about a dichotomy that struc-
tures his own life and, since he acknowledges that the film is semi-autobiographical, this
dichotomy also influences the representation of Seymour’s positionality: ‘that being a mem-
ber of a tribe and being an artist are often mutually exclusive things’ (‘Hold Me Closer’).
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 119

Figure 6. Split Seymour.

Thus, Fancydancing enacts this dichotomy, revealing the often painful antinomies of being a
Native American who dared to cross borders successfully. This dichotomy is visually coded
already in the first scene with Steven in Seattle when Seymour is putting on a formal suit,
and we see both characters in the mirror. Unlike Steven’s, Seymour’s face is strategically split
through a vertical line of the mirror, foreshadowing his (un)belonging that preoccupies the
narrative trajectory (Figure 6).
When Alexie calls himself an ‘indigenous immigrant,’ he forms a semantic cluster that
feels incongruous, aporetic, infusing current discussions of transnationality with yet another
dimension of complexity. In fact, returning to the etymology of the foreign, deriving from
fores (‘door’), we could also recognize Seymour as an opening, a fissure that complicates
identitarian politics. In a way, it takes us into the territory of what Walter Mignolo and
Madina Tlostanova, following Gloria Anzalduà’s work, call ‘border thinking’: ‘Border think-
ing is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and
as such, it is always a decolonial project’ (2006, 206). In fact, filming ‘the in-between,’ or
filming in-between – the interviews, but fancydancing as well, which also occurs in such
an in-between space – repeatedly sutures the viewers into the dark spaces of nowhere,
offering the point, in Mignolo and Tlostanova’s words, that ‘border thinking then emerges
from the colonial and the imperial wound’ (2006, 207–208). We see the manifestation of
this colonial wound and the aporia it has opened at the close of the narrative through two
different moments. Before exiting Mouse’s wake, we see Seymour standing in the mid-
dle of the room in front of the mourners and screaming loudly, expressing an emotional
anguish, only seconds later to reveal that Seymour is silent and solemn, unable to scream,
a sound-bridge carrying his screams and crying. This silent screaming leads us to a final
moment at the reservation when the narrative doubles Seymour who is shown leaving
and not leaving the reservation. This moment, yet again, clues us that the titular concept
of the film – fancydancing – has more than one meaning. It encapsulates various types of
120 K. MARCINIAK

traditional dancing13 and the complexities of living in-between, in the interstices of two
different and clashing cultures.

Notes
1.  See, for example, Forte (2010).
2.  Discussing indigenous resistance and offering what she calls ‘an anticolonial approach to the
maintenance of alterity,’ Flowers conceptualizes the notion of the settler: ‘It is a critical term
that denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands,
but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial
power relations into their consciousness’ (Flowers 2015, 33).
3.  See, for example, Rollings (2004) and Svingen (1987).
4.  See, for example, Marciniak (2006, 2009, 2014).
5.  And, quite likely, Alexie would call my effort ‘colonial literature,’ as he spoke about the issue
of approaching Native American art by non-natives: ‘What do you think of artists of any
kind – like authors, painters, and media makers, etc. – making work about a race, gender,
or nationality that’s not their own? Like, if non-Native American people were to write about
Native Americans and vice versa? ‘Well, artists can follow whatever path they want to, but they
should also realize that they’re gonna be held to close scrutiny by the people they’re [making]
work about. They have to expect it, but it also should be seen as what it is. You know, when
non-Natives write about Natives, that’s colonial literature’ (Alexie 2013a).
6.  Analyzing Fancydancing and looking at ‘innovative use of place and spectator positioning,’
Amy Corbin coins a term ‘nomadic spectatorship,’ which she explains as an experience
‘in which the visual positioning and structure of the film deny the spectator a constant
point of view and therefore simulate a mental feeling of hybridity and contradiction’ (2013,
175–176).
7.  See, for example, Estrada’s critique. Estrada critiques Fancydancing for ultimately not being
able to perform as a ‘queer Native movie,’ which embraces ‘the Two-Sprit traditions’ (2010,
106).
8.  In an interview with Robert Capriccioso, Alexie compares Smoke Signals and Fancydancing:
‘It’s interesting because Smoke Signals has really become a mainstream film; it has mainstream
ambitions….It’s much easier for audiences to digest that work. It’s much more approachable,
much more accessible. Fancydancing is not only odd because of its characters – you know,
Indians – but it’s odd because of its aesthetic and its structure, so I think Fancydancing is
much harder for people to get into it. When I was making it, one of the crew members said,
‘You know, Sherman, you’re making a film about a gay Indian poet – It’s too Indian for white
people, it’s too white for Indians, and it’s too gay for everybody – nobody’s going to see this!’
So, I think he was right….It’s going to have a limited audience, always, but I don’t care. I
made it because I wanted to make it, and the people who see it are great, I’m happy for that,
but I’m not really interested in making a movie like Smoke Signals again’ (Capriccioso 2003).
9.  Lee Schweninger pays particular attention to Mouse’s filmic recording: ‘The handheld
camera serves both to insist on the realism as it evokes the ethnographic or anthropological
documentary, and as witness’ (Schweninger 2013, 132).
10. The ‘Vanishing Indian’ is also a key figure and trope in American painting and sculpture. See,
for example, Robert F. Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian
from Columbus to the Present (1978), the breakthrough work on the history of the uses and
abuses of the white man’s Indian.
11. Bauman uses these notions in relation to his discussion on what he calls ‘wasted lives,’ the
superfluous population of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers deemed by contemporary
societies as ‘human waste or wasted humans’ (2004, 6): ‘Redundancy’ shares its semantic
space with ‘rejects’, ‘wastrels’, ‘garbage’, ‘refuse’ – with waste’ (2004, 12).
12. For a compelling read on this moment in the context of divergent spectatorships, see Hausman
(2010).
 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 121

13. Youngberg, for example, focusing on the film’s coding practices and coded meanings –
‘trapdoors,’ as he calls them – draws attention to the meaning of the Shawl Dance, the first
dance performed in the opening scenes by Seymour: ‘In this case, Seymour, the gay male,
literally becomes a woman through his performance of the Shawl Dance, a dance that is
intended to be exclusively in the cultural sphere of women’ (2008, 63).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Katarzyna Marciniak is a professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio
University. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (University
of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes
in Poland (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2010), co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film
and Media (Palgrave, 2007), Protesting Citizenship: Migrant Activisms (Routledge, 2014), Immigrant
Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent (SUNY Press, 2014), and Teaching Transnational
Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2016). With Anikó Imre and Áine O’Healy, she is series
editor of Global Cinema, a new book series from Palgrave.

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 TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS 123

Filmography
Alexie, Sherman, dir. 2002a. The Business of Fancydancing. USA: FallsApart Productions.
Alexie, Sherman, dir. 2002b. Sherman's Sandbox: Behind the Scenes. USA: FallsApart Productions.
Costner, Kevin, dir. 1990. Dances with Wolves. USA/UK: Tig Productions/Majestic Films International/
Allied Filmmakers.
Eyre, Chris, dir. 1998. Smoke Signals. USA: ShadowCatcher Entertainment and Web Film Pursuits Ltd.
Heredia, Paula and Coco Fusco, dir. 1993. The Couple in the Cage: a Guatianaui Odyssey. USA: Coco
Fusco and Paula Heredia/Authentic Documentary Productions.