Are you seeing yourself on TV?

Page 24

In 1992, a television series called North of 60 made its way into millions of Canadian homes. Starring Aboriginal actors Tina Keeper, Dakota House, Jimmy Herman and Tom Jackson, the show chronicled the trials and tribulations of the people who lived in the fictional First Nations community of Lynx River.

Hot on the heels of that successful CBC show, The Rez followed in 1996. It featured a stellar cast that included Jennifer Podemski, Darrell Dennis and Ryan Black. South of the border, Northern Exposure, about life in the eccentric town of Cicely, Alaska, enjoyed a steady five-year run on CBS and featured actors Graham Green and Elaine Miles. Aboriginal people were on television and North Americans were watching.

Just when it looked like significant strides were being made to increase the visibility of Aboriginal people on prime-time television, the momentum began to wane. The question now, as 2004 comes to a close and we commemorate World Television Day on Nov. 21, is why have Aboriginal people become absent from mainstream television once again?

The 1990s were a time when Aboriginal issues were at the front and centre of the Canadian consciousness. The Oka standoff kicked off the decade and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People operated throughout. As a result, there was a heightened awareness about the spectrum of concerns bedeviling Canada's first peoples.

"I think that those two things really made people aware of the fact that [Canadians] knew very little about Aboriginal people," said Marian Bredin, an associate professor and chair of the department of communications, film and popular culture at Brock University. Her research is focused on Aboriginal media and images of minorities in media. She said that before the '90s, Native people weren't on the radar screen; they were invisible. Actor and producer Jennifer Podemski, best known for her work on the film Dance Me Outside, agrees.

"When you're invisible on television, you're invisible in life and reality," she said. "Overall I think that we just have very little representation on television, and when we do, most of the time it doesn't come from our own perspective. And when it doesn't come from your own perspective, you risk not being authentically portrayed."

Podemski refers to Hollywood's portrayal of Indians as the 'buckskin Indian.'

"It's a pan-Indian with no culture, no language. It's just an Indian with feathers and buckskin. The danger in that is it totally takes away from our differences, the beauty in our diversity, all of the different cultures and languages and nations that there are. It would be great if you turned on the television and saw a Cree show or an Ojibway show or a Saulteaux show or a Lakota show. It would be a different situation. But right now we're living in a world [where] most people, especially outside of Canada, don't even think Indians exist anymore," she said.

The beginnings of the Hollywood buckskin Indian can be traced to the 18th century in fiction, literature and poetry that depicted the days of European contact with Aboriginal people, said Bredin. In novels such as The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was published in 1826 and subsequently turned into a major Hollywood motion picture in 1992, the cliche of the noble savage became entrenched in the western imagination.

"It's really the way Europe and the West imagined itself as being superior, as being civilized. Then you set up these other peoples as being somehow different by making them primitive or exotic or romantic. So it's a story not so much about First Nations people. It's a story about how the West, how the mainstream society sees itself, and so those images really go back four to five hundred years ago," said Bredin.

Kimberly Norris Guerrero is a Los Angeles-based Native American film and television actor of Colville/Salish-Kootenai descent. Some might remember her from her role on Seinfeld, when she playedinona, a Native American woman dating Jerry. When he gives the Elaine character an antique cigar-store Indian as a peace offering, Winona thinks Jerry is racially insensitive.

Norris Guerrero, who most recently appeared in the film Hildago, said period pieces make up the majority of the work she's been getting lately.

"I'm back in buckskin and I don't mind being in buckskin and I think, you know, a job's a job and they've been really beautiful roles and well done and I'm so thankful for it," said Norris Guerrero, though she recognizes the stereotype.

"We're not really that well represented and when we are given opportunities, they tend to be pretty much stereotypical or status quo, like what you would expect. We have a fabulous show called The West Wing. It's a really well written show. They had a Native storyline, but, of course, it was on the Thanksgiving week episode ... which is wonderful but why couldn't they just have a person who happens to be Native on the White House staff? I don't really see the big issue with that. There are Native people within the administration and the high ranks of the U.S. government," said Norris Guerrero.

Bredin said creating a romantic image of Aboriginal people by relegating them to the past is one way to avoid the contemporary issues they face, such as the legacy of residential schools and the effects of colonialism.

"I think that the invisibility factor has a lot to do with people's inability to imagine First Nations' communities as modern and contemporary. Like it's OK to make these fictional images of them as people in the past, but when you start to tell stories about contemporary Native people, then you run into all these negative effects of colonialism, and so if we don't look at some of these issues in contemporary Native communities today, we don't have to deal with that," said Bredin.

While that may be one explanation for why Aboriginal actors only work when historical projects are being done, Podemsioffered up a more practical reason.

"The only way a television show can be on the air is if that network that's airing it has advertising dollars to pay for that air time. So how do you get advertising dollars? You get all the corporate people around and you have a sales meeting and you say 'This show is called The Rez and it's an all-Native cast. These are the good characters. These are the bad characters. This is our demographic we're looking to show it to and it's not only Native [viewers]...We're looking 600,000 viewers, so will Shell Canada come on board and buy advertising space on this show?' Because the commercials you see during the fragments of the show are the advertisers who invest in the show," said Podemski.

Advertisers buy time to air their commercials on shows that appeal to their target audiences. Podemski said if a corporation determines that only one per cent of Aboriginal people buy their product, chances are they will take their investment elsewhere.

"What happens is when you get close to getting a role, the producers have to take your face and your likeness, not only to the network, because the network takes your face to their advertisers and say 'Will this face sell your soap? Will this face sell your car?' And if the advertisers say 'She's too black, or she's too Asian, or she looks too different. We're looking more for a white girl-next-door [type] because that's who our clients will trust, will buy our gas [from] and, ultimately, that's what it has to do with. It's this really perverted cycle and it all revolves around money," Podemski said.

Norris Guerrero agrees that the relationship between "product and creativity" plays a major role in casting decisions. There's also a lot of packaging deals being made.

"Let's say a company that's doing a TV show, they have some kind of affiliation with, say William Morris (an American talent agency). And William Morris is representing the writers, the directors and show runners (the peolewho promote new shows to network executives) that are doing the show. William Morris will do their best to attach their actors," said Norris Guerrero. "Very few in the industry have the gift of being able to choose who they want. It's just a big old machine and the director might really want somebody for the part ... but the executive producer, who's got the money, says, 'Well, no, I really want this girl because she reminds me of my granddaughter.'"

Kimberly Norris Guerrero said there is also some reluctance of writers afraid of overstepping the bounds of political correctness.

"So many people that I have met, they don't want to write something [for which] they're going to get lambasted, or, God forbid, fired. I'll never forget the writers of Seinfeld ....They came up to me on a regular basis and said 'Are we going to far?' Any Native person would have said 'No, keep going. Don't back down,' because being able to laugh with and at ourselves brings dignity ... and I'm telling them 'Look, anything you write is going to be offensive to somebody. Don't be afraid.' And I know it's a big burden to bear as a Native actor or writer or director, but you're doing your best for your people," said Norris Guerrero.

The Media Awareness Network, a non-profit organization that promotes media and Internet education, estimates that by 2006 one in six Canadians will be a member of a visible minority. Findings in a report released on July 15 by the Task Force for Cultural Diversity indicate that, excluding Quebec, Aboriginal and other ethnic minorities make up 15.3 per cent of the Canadian population. These statistics show a growing diversity in Canadian society, but what we see on television remains a poor reflection of that society. Still there is hope. This year, Aboriginal actor Lorne Cardinal was cast as the police chief on the CTV hit series Corner Gas. Last year, Moccasin Flats, which was sold to the Aboriginal People's Television Network (APTN) and Showcase, gener