Scorsese / Lemmons / Mary Kerr

By Jack Foley

Scorsese? what about stories
dealing with what Indians are
rather than with what whites
did to them — Indians as victims ?
have you seen or heard of
I Heard the Owl Call My Name
with the great actor, Tom Courtney ?
or seen or heard of Kasi Lemmons’
wonderful Eve’s Bayou ? there are
no white people in the film at all. it’s
not about black–white relations,
it’s about relations within an active
and thriving black community, and
more specifically about a family
within that community. Scorsese
bought into the ultimately racist
notion that you have to have whites
(nasty ones perhaps but whites)
in a film about Native Americans.
(and the whites he uses are very
prominent white actors, how else
can you get people to come to the
movie ? yet perhaps Scorsese’s
name might have been enough, enough
to have made a film about what it’s
like to be a Native American NOW.)
Hollywood (and the USA) did to
Indians what they did to Vaudeville:
destroy the institution and then
use the story of its destruction
as interesting subject matter.
For the Filmmaker, Mary Kerr
Dear Mary,
we are no longer
“a people of the book”
History is the movies