American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The path-breaking documentary video, The Spirit of Crazy Horse, opens with a scene of Milo Yellow Hair walking on the prairie and singing. After offering tobacco, he narrates in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, “My people have not adapted well to the white man’s world.” As he speaks, the camera pans to an upturned car marooned in the middle of a field. Despite waving grass and other natural integration, the car remains alien to this setting. Turned on its head and abandoned, the car is useful now only as a den for enterprising animals. The car’s original function has been thwarted. Even its value as scrap metal is disregarded. Yet it does offer a metaphor for how acculturation and adaptation have always been key issues in Indian-white conflicts in the United States. The car is a valuable site of analysis because it has such vastly different significance for each culture. Its difficult fit within Indian cultures provides one entry point for understanding those differences and for better understanding the work of contemporary American Indian writers and filmmakers. Automobiles serve, in much Native literature and film, as expressions of characters’ differences from and relationships to the larger culture. The automobile has assumed near mythic proportions in mainstream American life. The federal government has actively supported the car industry in a variety of ways ranging from a subsidized highway system to deductible interest on car loans. Indeed, so much of US culture has developed as a result of and in response to the automobile that it would be difficult to determine the extent of its effects. These car-induced cultural developments include suburban living and the loss of small, tightly knit neighborhoods; interstate trucking that expands markets and delivers goods from all over the country; drive-through services at banks, restaurants, liquor stores, dry cleaners, chapels, funeral parlors, movie theaters, and video rental stores; chains of motor inns; the development of tourism; and, on the more negative side, the limitless air pollution and diminishment of fossil fuels.