The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle His Picture House

By Adam Piron

This essay is part of the Crocker’s Indigenous Voices in Film project, an initiative dedicated to exploring the artmaking practices of Indigenous peoples in the Sacramento and Northern California regions through the lens of film, video, and media arts. For more information on the Indigenous Voices in Film project, follow this link.

Cutting a hefty 250-pound frame, William Mortimer Belshaw was a man with an ability to bend reality to his will. Being the San Franciscan industrialist that he was, he naturally set off for Inyo County once word broke of a silver strike high in the mountains just east of Lake Owens’s shore. The ruckus of the Gold Rush of 1849 had cooled and silver was now on the rise. In April of 1868, he arrived at the Union Mine of Cerro Gordo, a silver-lead-bearing lode discovered just four years prior after the Paiute, the area’s Indigenous people, had been largely worn down through a series of brutal massacres, and by the US Army occupation at nearby Fort Independence, which eased the extraction of their land by the flood of white settlers.

After purchasing a stake in the mine, Belshaw soon became the local man in charge, due to his efforts in hauling a smelter, piece by piece, up the mountain. By December of that same year, his machine processed lead-silver bullion day and night at a then-unheard-of speed of four tons daily. His payload was then shipped by the wagonful across the Mojave Desert to San Pedro’s harbor and from there to San Francisco three days later. Upon reaching the city’s wharves, Belshaw’s extraction was transported to the smelting works of future San Francisco Mayor Thomas H. Selby, where an even more powerful smelter would separate the bullion into lead and silver. The silver was kept in the city’s first Mint building, constructed in response to the deluge of Gold Rush wealth, and the lead was used to create Selby’s signature commercial shotgun pellets. From 1865 to 1879, Cerro Gordo would reign as the largest producer of silver and lead in California and earn Belshaw the title of “The Silver King of Owens Valley.”

As its production waned in the 1880s, Inyo silver was still being mined at a steady pace. The completion of the transcontinental railroad allowed for a quicker turnaround for shipping the land’s spoils back east to the Philadelphia Mint as well as to various enterprises acquiring the metal, one of which was The Eastman Kodak Company. The extracted silver was an essential component in the chemistry of their film’s light-sensitive emulsion, and it played a key role in their eventual innovation and dominance of early photographic and cinematic technology. Working with Eastman’s funding, William Kennedy Dickson pioneered the use of 35mm film at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studios, the world’s first motion picture studio. It’s hard not to see an irony in two of Dickson’s landmark Kinetoscope works, Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, both filmed in 1894. The brief clips feature dancing Indigenous performers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, themselves survivors of the American Indian Wars. These were later classified as the first known films to depict Native Americans.

As an Indigenous artist working in the moving image, it’s been essential to weigh these histories. To know them is to realize that film is an echo, and one that only grows louder as it travels. At a material level, cinema was created by a series of shadows frozen in silver, a piece of time suspended and kept for reanimation in exchange for capital. In a historical sense, it was built from a series of reverberations formed by the land itself until eventually rolling into something seismic, unstoppable, and altogether singular before looping back in on itself. If anything, it’s easy to get pulled into its allure and, eventually, its undertow.

American Cinema is something like a braid twisted from strands of different histories on a loom forged from ill-gotten wealth and the violence that birthed it. Any attempt to untangle them will yield a Gordian knot at best and a noose at worst. While some of its early threads are indeed rooted in Indigenous realities, American Cinema has become something totally of its own and, in this writer’s opinion, beyond redemption. One needs only to look at the history of the image of the “Indian” that evolved from literature to Wild West shows, and consequently to film, to realize that the “Indian” has always been a fabrication, an oversimplification, and a necessity for white supremacy. The name itself was always a label of convenience for the colonial endeavor, the flattening of two continents of unique peoples and cultures into a single, distinguishable bucket defined by its deficiency or proximity to whiteness. It has become nothing more than a shape, a costume, or a space to be filled on-screen by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike who choose to embody it. It survives only in the constant attempts to correct it. How can one decolonize something that was birthed by colonization itself?

Sovereignty is a concept that we as Indigenous people grapple with perpetually. In the case of cinema, terms such as “narrative sovereignty,” “screen sovereignty,” and “reclaiming the narrative” have been utilized ad nauseam to express a spectrum of ideas, usually with the inferred goal of establishing representation within the non-Indigenous-controlled American film industry itself, rather than something truly independent of that system. While there are artists doing commendable work and creating real opportunities for fellow Indigenous film workers within that arena, cinema is still the youngest of the arts and one that has not been fully esteemed at the level of other mediums viewed as traditional within Native communities. Works such as pottery, weaving, and music are evaluated for their craft and the resonance that they hold to communities and traditions, whereas the metric for a film’s success is still measured by its connections to Hollywood and box office returns. This may be a consequence of how moving images evolved or even the reality of Indigenous people and their constant negotiations in navigating a world shaped by settler colonialism and its demands of capital, but it also points to a possibility and the need for an alternative.

The idea of Native American Cinema(s) existing outside of the system of the American film industry is not new, nor is it without precedent. In the wake of the social turbulence of the 1970s and the boom of accessible video technology in the early 1980s, a handful of Native artists of disparate backgrounds began to create films that were decidedly non-commercial, shrugging off the responsive dynamic to correct representation, rejecting authoritative stances on the Native experience, and rooted within their own interpretations of their Indigeneity. Victor Masayesva, Jr.’s Itam Hakim Hopiit (1984), a poetic visualization of Hopi philosophy, or Arelene Bowman’s Navajo Talking Picture (1985), an interrogation of documentary methods clashing with Diné traditions, are just some of the films that laid the groundwork for what Native American Cinema, both tribally specific and deeply personal, can be. Made on their cultural terms and conditions, these films are invitations to Indigenous audiences first and an open door for others to experience a specific cultural point of view on film, free from the Western European traditions of American narrative structures.

More importantly, these works were created independently of each other, forming something of an archipelago rather than a collective effort built around a solid core. This decentralization has been key to the blossoming of these Native Cinemas and their emphasis on subjectivity, leading the way to some version of sovereignty in their own rights. It’s the very unmooring of a pan-Indigeneity, a specificity that refuses a singular umbrella, that frees these works into their own open territories. In contrast to the scaffolding of the image of the “Indian,” it would be a mistake to categorize these works as a collective effort toward a singular goal (i.e., representation, correction) or even by their proximities to Hollywood. In a sense, their work paved the way for a generation of Native American artists that came to follow, the likes of which have come to include Sky Hopinka, Fox Maxy, Adam and Zack Khalil, Woodrow Hunt, and others. Like the analogy of film as an echo, the spirit of this cinematic trajectory continues forward, amplifying and modifying to the contours it weaves by, always bleeding out. It is free of the bounds of Hollywood, forever doomed to spin in its own feedback loop.

Like islands, each of these cinemas formed off the gravitational shores of American film, each their own shape and dotting a line toward the horizon, toward something new, constant, and unknown. If the land could be stripped to yield the white man’s cinema, imagine what it could give to the Indigenous people who have always been rooted in it.

Adam Piron

Adam Piron is a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and a Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) descendant. He currently acts as the Director of Sundance Institute's Indigenous Program where he helps oversee the organization's investment in Indigenous filmmakers globally. He also serves as a short film programmer for the Sundance Film Festival. He is also a co-founder of COUSIN, a film collective dedicated to supporting Indigenous artists experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of the moving image. He was previously the Film Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He received his BA in film production from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Piron currently serves on the editorial advisory board of Seen, a journal produced by BlackStar, which examines the visual culture of communities of color and features interviews, reviews, and essays about Black, Brown, and Indigenous visual culture. He concurrently serves on the Indigenous Advisory Board for TIFF. He has also been on advisory panels for Canyon Cinema, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Princess Grace Awards, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

The Indigenous Voices in Film series explores and highlights the work of Indigenous peoples at the intersection of film, video art, and media arts. Supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to broaden the understanding of American art history, this project is committed to presenting films and video art created by Indigenous peoples, as well as to advancing critical discussion of these works in the region and within the museum field.