Review of "Thunderheart" The Women's Show December 19, 1992 This is the last film review I'll be doing during 1992. For much of this past year I have had a photograph taped to my office door, a photograph of a Latin American Indian woman sitting in front of whitewashed wall on which someone has written the grafitti "500 (quinientos) anos de que?" -- 500 years of what? So it seems to me more appropriate to ring out this problematic cinquicentennial of the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas talking about a film that honors and respects Native peoples than to review another one of the splashy holiday movies opening every week at this time of the year, The film, released earlier this year and now available on video tape, is called "Thunderheart" and it was directed by Michael Apted. It's a film that totally passed me by during its theatrical run--I'm not even sure it played Tampa--but I just came back from a visit to Minneapolis, a city with a large Native American population where people are attuned to Native American issues and concerns. (Yesterday, for example, on the way to the video store to get this film we passed the Meridel le Soeur Center for Peace and Justice, named in honor of the distinguished Native American woman poet now in her mid-nineties). While this film is fictional, the credits indicate that its screenplay is based on a number of incidents that happened in South Dakota in the 1970s. That was the period in which AIM, the American Indian Movement (thinly disguised as A.R.M. in the film) and other activist groups were fighting for Indian rights and the restoration of traditional Indian ways of life against U.S. government agencies and against other Indians whose politics were more assimilationist. (I don't know why I write this in the past tense, for these battles are by no means over--a more recent manifestations of this conflict has been in Canada and upstate New York over the building of gambling casinos on Mohawk Nation property). Anyway, "Thunderheart" is the story of what happens when a gung- ho young FBI agent Ray Le Voy (played by Val Kilmer) is sent from Washington to join a legendary FBI veteran (Sam Shepard) on an assignment to capture the murderer of a Sioux tribal council member; ARM activists are presumed to be the guilty parties. Le Voy has been touted by the FBI as being "one of their own" because he happens to have had an Indian father; but his father died when he was seven and he was adopted by white parents and raised middle- class and conservative. He rejcts the notion of the Sioux being "his people" just as much as the Sioux reject him as a "Washington Redskin." But in this film hardly anything is what it seems and Ray is no exception. As he meets the Indian inhabitants and these encounters have their effect on him, he gradually begins to change. Among those he meets are a tribal policeman on a Harly-Davidson who's a kind of trickster and a very astute law enforcement officer (played by Grahame Greene whom you will remember from "Dances With Wolves"), a young woman schoolteacher and ARM activist, and a very old medicine man who does him out of his Ray-Bans and Rolex but who gives him the clues he needs to solve the murder and save his life. Gradually he begins to change his perception of himself and of Indians: in the course of a ceremony he remembers his father and eventually he even joins in the collective memories of his people by means of a vision. And, of course, he solves the murder in an unexpected manner. As with "Dances With Wolves" this is not an overtly feminist film (though the one important woman character is impressively strong and dedicated to revolution), but it is a film that advocates the liberation of an oppressed people. Since such films rarely emerge from the Hollywood filmmaking machine, I think we ought to support those that do. Renting "Thunderheart" would be a good way to ring out 1992. For the WMNF-FM Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.