Interview: Chris Eyre, Native American Director, and Ric Burns, Documentary Filmmaker

The codirectors of <em>We Shall Remain</em> discuss Hollywood Indians and the US that almost was.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license by flickr user <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/pbs_press_tour/">PBS Press Tour</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Feature film director Chris Eyre has been giving a voice to contemporary Native American people ever since his 1998 indie hit Smoke Signals. Director Ric Burns has built his career on documentary films about innovators like Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams.

The two filmmakers recently teamed up to create We Shall Remain, a five-part PBS documentary that traces Native American history from the Mayflower through the 1970s. Mother Jones spoke with the two directors about Martin Scorsese, the US map that almost was, and how Hollywood usually handles Native American characters.

Listen to the interview as a podcast, or read a condensed version of the transcript below.

For more free Mother Jones podcasts, subscribe here, or in our iTunes store.

Mother Jones: Ric, you have a long history with documentary filmmaking, but Chris, your background is more with features. How did you both come together to film this series?

Chris Eyre: It was like an arranged marriage.

Ric Burns: It’s really the worst idea you can imagine. I mean, to put two directors on the same project. But it worked out fantastically well. It’s funny—I think some of the differences between feature filmmaking and documentary filmmaking are more apparent than real. In both cases a camera has to be looking at something that has conviction and power.

MJ: Chris, I was perusing your website this morning and I noticed many quotes calling you “the preeminent native American film director.” I think the last one was from People.

CE: Yeah, I told them to say that and they were nice enough to. Really, I love making movies about native people because there’s such an absence of three-dimensional native people in the mass media. We are nobles or savages whether you watch Walker, Texas Ranger or Dances with Wolves. So in We Shall Remain, what we tried to do is to make something slightly different. We didn’t do huge battle scenes with stunt coordinators, because I feel like it’s not my job to romanticize Indians; that’s Hollywood’s job, and it’s been done ad nauseam. I’m more interested in portraying native people in ways that actually give us respect as just human beings. For example, people think they know the story of Tecumseh or Geronimo or the Trail of Tears, but we slightly step to the side of the conventional history and show these leaders as three-dimensional characters. Nothing is black or white, and these people are not romanticized as Indians who fight and scream and shoot arrows.

RB: This history is so loaded it’s easy to polarize it, and the real stories are much more riveting. Maybe we as Americans have arrived at a point where we can look at even terrible aspects of the American past—essentially the removal of Native American peoples from the eastern half of the continent in the 18th and 19th century—and see the people involved in the round. That was definitely our attempt with Tecumseh and his younger brother Lowawluwaysica, who was a very complicated failed holy man who became the catalyst for a spiritual revival in the early 19th century.

MJ: When you were casting for the reenactment portions, to what extent were you trying to cast from the tribes being portrayed?

CE: We worked on that quite a bit. We had a casting director named Renee Hanes who has been the native consultant for a lot of Indian movies, and she has a database of native people from around the country who are actors, or kind of actors, or not really actors at all but wonderful cultural advisers. A lot of times we did cast actual Shawnee people for “Tecumseh” as extras. For “Trail of Tears” we cast Cherokees for some small speaking roles and we cast the actor Wes Studi, who grew up speaking Cherokee, but had never spoken his language in a movie, though he’s done over 50 movies. He actually got to speak his own first language. And I would listen to elders reenacting characters and talking to each other in Cherokee for this Cherokee movie and I would think, “Wow, this is progress in some great way.”

RB: One thing I definitely learned is that there’s no difference between fiction filmmaking and documentary filmmaking. Something a great filmmaker like Martin Scorsese has always known is that there are certain realities you don’t have access to, so you have to create them so you can put your camera down in front of them and document them. Like Casino. He couldn’t have had that kind of access, so he created the access and then he filmed it. And I felt that in a certain way we were trying to basically do the same thing, which is create a situation and then drop a camera into it and if there was enough conviction and commitment coming out of that situation then the camera would have something worth seeing.

CE: If there are moments where people can say, “Yes, I get it, these people actually were alive and they did walk the Earth and they did make mistakes and they did struggle and strive, often against fearful odds.” And if you can feel that for a moment then, speaking for myself, I’ll be thrilled that we’ve at least pushed back the veil enough so that people will include in their repertoire of things they understand about the American past these people who are so easy to either render as cliché or to lose sight of altogether. I mean, I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 20 miles from a town called Tecumseh, and never asked myself once why it was called Tecumseh, right near the border of Indiana, a state that has the word Indian in it. So totally has Native American history been clearcut east of the Mississippi that you can have a state called Indiana and no longer hear the word Indian in it.

MJ: And still the end of the film is very hopeful. It ends with a great amount of optimism toward the preservation of Native American culture. Was that on purpose?

CE: Absolutely. The series is called We Shall Remain, which means not just an adage from 30 years ago with the American Indian movement, but that we’re still here. I think about my daughter who’s 10, and I think, “We’re not just here—we’re thriving and progressive and healthy.”

RB: And also, not to sound too gloomy, but life ends somewhat darkly for all of us. We all die; we all slip into the past. The fact is in each of these stories people did really extraordinary things under the most adverse of circumstances. I love the idea that Tecumseh and his pan-Indian movement came within a heartbeat of creating a state of affairs in which if you looked at a map of the United States there would be a big horseshoe-shaped bite out of it in the middle of the country—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—which would have been a permanent united Indian states of America within the United States, not a reservation. It could’ve happened differently. Many of us may agree that it’s too bad it didn’t work out differently, but it’s always optimistic, always thrilling to understand the occasionally heroic stature human beings can attain. In these stories there’s a tremendous sense of hope and pride in the complexity of the human character and of the American experience.

Alexis Fitts is a Mother Jones editorial fellow.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate