Paul Chaat Smith A Conference by Paul Chaat Smith
OBORO
The first moving pictures of Indians that anyone knows about were made by Thomas Edison in 1894. One was a little kinescope number called Sioux Ghost Dance, and even though it showed no such thing, it was still a hit on the penny arcade peep show circuit. The modern cinema was still years in the future, but Indians were already establishing market share.
More than two thousand Hollywood features and hundreds of radio and television series later, the Western rocks on. Critics through the ages have pronounced it dead and buried, but most of them are the ones dead and buried and while the Western is still here.
Cars replace horses, flying machines turn into 747s, communism rises and falls. Through it all the Western escaped obsolescence by brilliantly reinventing itself time and time again.
So adaptable is the Western, an art form as supremely American as jazz or baseball, that in the 1960s the Italians rode to its rescue, breathing new life into a format that seemed hopelessly old-fashioned by creating the spaghetti Western: brutal, ironic and up-to-the-minute cool.
We're coming up on the second century of Westerns, but even that understates their importance. They have always been with us and always will. Flip channels if you want, try self-induced amnesia, but these efforts are useless, because the Western is encoded in our cultural DNA. If you live in North America, Westerns are the Book of Genesis, the story of our lives.
OBORO
Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche writer and cultural critic. He was born in Texas in 1954 and has lived in New York, South Dakota and San Francisco among other places. He currently resides in Washington, DC. His essays have been included in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, edited by Lucy Lippard (New Press, 1992), Border Crossings, Talking Stick, Aboriginal Voices, C Magazine, and other publications. In 1992, while invited as critic-in-residence at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, ho organized a film series of Hollywood Westerns called Story of Our Lives. A year later at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Thunder Bay, Ontario, he curated an exhibition and organized an international conference on Native art. Here’s what he’d like right now: cheeseburger, fries and perhaps one of those popular american soft drinks, from the Sonic drive-in right off the main drag in Chickasa, oklahoma.