While I will mostly be confining myself to narrative dispatches from La Paz and possibly other locations in Bolivia, TSD is also interested in the racial politics of U.S. pop culture. (see Janet's excellent post about Ugly Betty. Also, Janet, feel free to contribute! Our public misses you!) Also, I don't have anything to say about healthcare that hasn't been explained 20 million times, and I haven't delved extensively into Bolivian pop culture as yet. I suspect it'll be better than the U.S.-based drivel discussed here.
So I've been writing this paper about globalization and indigeneity, and it occurred to me that a disturbing number of summer movies (actually, all the ones I saw that weren't sloppily-plotted political thrillers) feature white actors performing indigeneity--either playing Native American roles or just performing Native ceremonies and rituals. In the late spring we witnessed X-Men Origins:Wolverine, with Lynn Collins playing Native legend-telling femme-fatale Kayla Silverfox. Granted, she turns out to be not exactly human, so perhaps we can understand a white actress in this role as a comment on racial impersonation, but I think that may be giving everyone involved too much credit.
Next we have Public Enemies, my pick for most disappointing summer movie: instead of the stylish outfits and snappy quasi-Marxist dialogue you might expect from a movie about 30s gangsters, Michael Mann and co. decided to go for boring misogyny and men limping around in the woods shooting at each other. One of the few actresses in the entire movie, Marion Cotillard somewhat mutely plays Dillinger's Menominee girlfriend Billie Frechette. She gets zero clever lines, and her biggest monologue, oddly given her whiteness, is when she tearfully recalls her childhood on the reservation.
But those were not even the scariest Native impersonations on film this summer. That honor goes to Betty White in the shamelessly and violently misogynist Sandra Bullock vehicle, The Proposal (which I swear I only saw for reasons involving blackmail by my 16 year-old sister), in which White, as the filthy-rich Grandma Annie (the joke is that Sandra Bullock has been bossing around her assistant Ryan Reynolds all this time thinking he is poor, not knowing his family has a ton of money and their own island in Alaska. Ha ha.), apparently does daily Inuit rituals out in the woods involving chanting and animal skins. While the movie mocks every other woman on screen for daring to open her mouth, Grannie's racial impersonation passes without ridicule. Unfortunately, I cannot find a still of the scene, but trust me that it's excruciatingly horrible and not worth seeing the movie for.
The final example is a little less offensive, but still worth mentioning: economic-collapse-inspired indie comedy Sunshine Cleaning, otherwise thoughtful; somewhat conscious of class and gender issues; and for the most part, quirky without being annoying, seems to harbor a Native American presence in strange ways, even beyond the Southwest setting and various Native accoutrements (see Alan Arkin above). For example, in the box of the Sunshine cleaners' (played by Emily Blunt and Amy Adams) dead mother's things, there is a seemingly sacred feather that the daughters take out and gaze at solemnly every now and them, leading at least me to believe for most of the movie that her mother was actually Native American. But no. We see a picture of her at the end, and she's totally blonde.
There are several conclusions to be drawn from this: a) Hollywood is as racist as ever; b) impersonating Native Americans is still okay; and c) these impersonations create a climate in which others can put on Native-face with impunity, like the zionist protesters at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv who decided to mock Palestinian refugees' claims to the land Israel stole in 1948, 1967, and today by painting their faces and jokingly calling for the return of Manhattan. Great to see Israel adopting on the quintessentially American combination of genocide, apartheid, and impersonation, the third of which bolsters the first two strategies by depriving oppressed groups of the ability even to represent themselves.
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