Directed by Jonathan Wacks, and based on a novel by David Seals, "Powwow Highway" sees the surviving members of a Cheyenne tribe battling greedy strip miners and property developers.
It's a familiar plot, but Wacks approaches things from fresh angles. Structured as a road movie, the film watches as Buddy Redbow (Adolph Martinez), an activist, and Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer), a slow witted bear of a man, hop into a battered Buick and embark on several cross-country adventures.
Most interesting, though, is the way Wacks deals with "what it means to be Cheyenne". Rough and proud, Buddy sees it as his duty to resist what he perceives to be an oppressive white majority, even if this entails tearing himself away from his own tribal and familial customs. Philbert, meanwhile, is a more spiritual Cheyenne, resisting normative and popular white-American values in order to preserve the traditions of his ancestors. In doing so, he's oblivious to the many ways in which he's buying into things that are erasing his people's cultural identity (cheeseburgers, Buicks, chocolate etc). Philbert and Buddy also have radically different views on "wealth". Buddy embraces the coloniser's materialism whilst pretending to reject it, whilst Philbert pays little heed to the social status afforded by objects. Ironically, it is a clip from a Hollywood cowboy movie which allows Philbert to break a friend out of jail, Philbert appropriating the violence of the "cowboy" for his own ends. By the film's climax, both Philbert and Buddy seem to have reconciled, or learnt to acknowledge, their differences; they merge the active with the passive, the inner and the outer, the physical and the spiritual.
"Powwow Highway" runs into a number of clichés, and its climax is pure Hollywood cheese. Still, mixing drama with slacker comedy, identity politics with humour, it remains one of the first films to feature Native American Indians grappling with contemporary issues.
7.5/10 – See Michael Apted's "Thunderheart".
It's a familiar plot, but Wacks approaches things from fresh angles. Structured as a road movie, the film watches as Buddy Redbow (Adolph Martinez), an activist, and Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer), a slow witted bear of a man, hop into a battered Buick and embark on several cross-country adventures.
Most interesting, though, is the way Wacks deals with "what it means to be Cheyenne". Rough and proud, Buddy sees it as his duty to resist what he perceives to be an oppressive white majority, even if this entails tearing himself away from his own tribal and familial customs. Philbert, meanwhile, is a more spiritual Cheyenne, resisting normative and popular white-American values in order to preserve the traditions of his ancestors. In doing so, he's oblivious to the many ways in which he's buying into things that are erasing his people's cultural identity (cheeseburgers, Buicks, chocolate etc). Philbert and Buddy also have radically different views on "wealth". Buddy embraces the coloniser's materialism whilst pretending to reject it, whilst Philbert pays little heed to the social status afforded by objects. Ironically, it is a clip from a Hollywood cowboy movie which allows Philbert to break a friend out of jail, Philbert appropriating the violence of the "cowboy" for his own ends. By the film's climax, both Philbert and Buddy seem to have reconciled, or learnt to acknowledge, their differences; they merge the active with the passive, the inner and the outer, the physical and the spiritual.
"Powwow Highway" runs into a number of clichés, and its climax is pure Hollywood cheese. Still, mixing drama with slacker comedy, identity politics with humour, it remains one of the first films to feature Native American Indians grappling with contemporary issues.
7.5/10 – See Michael Apted's "Thunderheart".