High Definition Vision Quest

Hugo Nominee “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse.
Short Story Review by Kerey McKenna.

Your name is Kerey McKenna. You are 33 years old, stand about 5’9”, have some flab around your middle, and have swarthy skin and dark curly hair which you attribute to your Brazilian heritage. And by heritage you mean to say that you are right off the boat Brazilian. Except in some ways you aren’t. Coming to the United States through an international adoption as an infant, naturalized as a toddler, and raised by a family with Irish/Swedish roots, your ties to Brazil are genetic, not cultural. You are a first generation immigrant, with a second or even third generation mentality. You are a Latin American immigrant, but you wonder sometimes if you represent an “authentic” Latin American immigrant experience. You lived it, it happened to you and surely others, but is that considered “authentic” if it’s not “expected” or “dramatic?”

You are also a nerd and write nerdy reviews of comic books, novels, and sometimes movies or TV shows for the blog Nerds Who Read. With the Hugo Awards coming up, and in order to not let your editor know how few of the nominees you actually read this year, you attempt to bang out as many reviews of them as you can during the week before the ceremony.

Scanning the short story nominees, one title catches your eye: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”. You think you might have an inkling of the story’s theme: the marketing of Native American culture as pop culture kitsch. Last year you saw the documentary Reel Injun on Netflix about the history of Native Americans (or often enough Europeans playing a fantasy version of Native Americans) in cinema. You recently caught up on HBO’s Westworld and you saw a slick internet video using Westworld as a jumping off point for the concept of “hyperreality”—art that creates experiences that blur the distinction between reality and artifice.

And even if “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” doesn’t delve into any of these things, it already won a Nebula Award so you figure you aren’t going to pick a dud.

The story is written in the second person. You are told by the author, Rebecca Roanhorse, that you are now Jesse Turnblatt, a middle aged Native American man, who makes a living playing out virtual reality “experiences” of Native American culture for the benefit of white tourists. You are struggling to walk the line between fact and fantasy, history and myth, what is true and what is “authentic.” You find the use of second person narration by the author jarring. It is intimate yet dictatorial. Just like the virtual reality technology envelopes that offer tourist and tour guide the opportunity to inhabit the skins of others. Just like the way Jesse is told by forces greater than himself who he is and who he is not.

Writing up the review you realize just how much better Rebecca Roanhorse is at carrying a narrative in the second person than you are and you decide to drop the gimmick in 3, 2, 1...

Welcome back, dear readers. Kerey McKenna is once again me, myself, and I. You, dear reader are once again you, yourself, and, um, you, however and by whomever that might be defined.

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” is an enthralling short story about the complex struggle to separate reality from fiction and how blurry that line is on so many levels.

The protagonist, Jesse Turnblatt, is a Catholic Native American. There are factual historical reasons why a modern Native American man would have that European name and that religious affiliation. But to satisfy the tourists’ search for “authenticity” he adopts the alias “True Blood” and presents himself as a shaman leading his clients on vision quests, a tradition that he, like the white tourists, has never participated in himself and only knows by way of movies. Instead of his true visage of a man made soft by modern living, trying to make his next commission, the electronic simulacrum of the great American plains shows him as a virile and muscular noble savage content to provide sage spiritual guidance to whatever white person wanders his way. The region and tribe he presents to the tourists aren’t even his own; he grew up in a completely different part of the country. Yet even he feels comforted by the sights and smells of the kitschy vistas, and empowered by playing one of the cool Native Americans of the national subconscious. Yes, he considers it regrettable that his female co-workers often get pigeonholed into playing the fetishized “Indian Squaw,” but he rationalizes that they could all use the money and at least it’s Native Americans profiting on Native American stereotypes instead of someone else. Like Johnny Depp, whose lines Jesse memorizes. Or Iron Eyes Cody, whose picture he posted in his workplace.

No doubt my readers are familiar with Depp’s controversial role as Tonto in 2013’s The Lone Ranger, doing a lot of Jack Sparrow shtick, but with a bird on his head, inciting outrage that the part didn’t go to a Native American actor such as Zahn McClarnon (more about him later).

But perhaps it is necessary to step out of the story for a moment for some back story about Iron Eyes Cody. Iron Eyes was a Hollywood actor who played Native Americans in Westerns, his most iconic role being the non-speaking part of “Crying Indian” in a famous 1971 PSA about litter and pollution. Cody as the stoic Indian navigates his canoe through polluted streams and looks on as a once beautiful land is defiled by its new inhabitants. To many Americans, the tall and stoic Iron Eyes Cody, with his fringed buckskins, long black hair, and feathers blowing in the breeze is the very image of a Native American.

There’s just one problem.

Iron Eyes Cody was not Native American.

Well, he was, in that he was born in Louisiana, but to two fresh-off-the-boat Italians. Christened Espera Oscar De Corta, he moved to Tinseltown in the 1920’s and began making a living as an Indian in the movies, and living as an Indian from the movies. Citing memberships to various tribes, Iron Eyes always presented himself as a Native American and took to wearing his costumes and props outside the studio. He married a Native American woman, adopted two Native American children, and when asked would always deny that he was Italian.

Iron Eyes Cody was by no stretch of the imagination an authentic Native American. But “Kiksuya,” a recent episode of Westworld that may very well find its way to the Hugos next year, demonstrates that questions of authenticity and identity aren't always so cut and dry. Westworld is a sprawling Western-themed theme park staffed by incredibly lifelike robots, so lifelike they don’t know they exist only to amuse the super-rich tourists of the distant future. In “Kiksuya,” the focus is on Akecheta, a non-player character programmed to be a member of the fictional Ghost Nation tribe. Most of the dialogue in the episode is spoken in the Lakota Sioux language, including long monologues by Akecheta. He is played by Native American actor Zahn McClarnon, who is Sioux on both sides of his family (Lakota and Standing Rock respectively). McClarnon did not speak Sioux fluently enough to carry the dialogue and needed extensive training with language and dialect coaches. Which I as an audience member, not fluent in Sioux either, was completely unaware of as I was enthralled by the show playing out before me. To the producers, it was important that they not repeat the red face mistakes of the past and that they have Native Americans play Native Americans, even robotic ones.

But I have to wonder, as a naive consumer, could they have entertained me just as well if Akecheta had been speaking not Sioux but Navajo, or Esperanto, or Vulcan? [No one is entertained by Esperanto -ed.] If an actual Lakota speaker then spoke to me in Lakota and not Vulcan, would I question its authenticity, because it didn’t sound like what I heard on TV?

Which brings in the question of the role consumers play in the quest for “the authentic.” To what degree is that actually a quest for truth and to what degree is it a quest for affirmation and permission to keep believing in myths and stereotypes we hold dear?

To the fictional Jesse Turnblatt, Iron Eyes Cody represents a man who faked it 'til he could make it. But Iron Eyes's legacy as a European eclipsing actual natives in portraying natives still looms large over native actors, and perhaps Jesse is inviting calamity by thinking those days are over. They clearly aren't, as the casting of Depp in The Lone Ranger shows. If Iron Eyes and Depp were presumably taking parts from actual Native Americans, perhaps there is somebody out there who can be a better VR Indian than an IRL Indian. More authentic in their adherence to a myth than Jesse with his truths. If Jesse and McLarnon are not Indian enough to play Indians, what are they and who gets to decide that? And if they could still be brushed aside by a white actor for Indian roles, but considered too Indian to take parts created for whites, where does that leave them?

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” is a treasure trove of questions about experience, real and virtual, about identity, innate and borrowed, and about culture, genuine and imitation. I wish Rebecca Roanhorse luck in getting a Hugo award to put next to her Nebula award.

Please join us next week here at Nerds who Read, when we’ll look at the outcome of the Hugos and review some of the winners.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.