[Later this
month, the sixth
and final season of my favorite current TV show (and one of my all time-favs
as well), Longmire, drops on
Netflix. So this week, after a repeat of my first post on the show, I wanted to
AmericanStudy a handful of Longmire’s
many fascinating characters. Leading up to a special weekend post on Native
American popular culture!]
On two historical
contexts for my favorite Longmire
character.
As I wrote in
Monday’s post, Lou
Diamond Phillips’ Henry Standing Bear is not only a wonderful counterpart
and complement to Walt Longmire, but an incredibly rich and compelling
character in his own right. There’s a lot that makes Henry so great,
including a wry but warm sense of humor that I’m quite sure comes from Phillips
himself. But I’m particularly interested in the complex and crucial question of
Henry’s relationship to his Cheyenne tribe and community. On the one hand,
Henry does not live on the reservation, choosing to live above the bar he
operates off of the res; he’s also lifelong best friends with a white lawman,
which as many Cheyenne characters point out is at least somewhat suspicious to
the native community. It’s perhaps for these reasons that, in the Season
2 episode “Tell It Slant,” the truthtelling clown known as the Contrary
Warrior keeps calling Henry a “shiny red apple.” Yet at the same time, Henry is
deeply committed to the reservation community and the Cheyenne people (and most
especially its most vulnerable members, such as children and abused women), a
commitment we see in storyline after storyline and that is affirmed most fully
by his friend May in this
quote about the true meaning of his name from the powerful Season
3 episode “Miss Cheyenne.”
Those distinct
yet interconnected sides to Henry’s character echo, to my mind, a couple of historical
and cultural contexts from late 19th century America. In many ways,
Henry’s in-between status makes him a cultural mediator, much like the Paiute chief Sarah Winnemucca who
worked as a translator between her tribe and the U.S. government and army (and
about whose cross-cultural memoir Life
among the Piutes [1883] I wrote at length in both my
first and second
books). Winnemucca’s efforts frequently put her at odds with both the U.S. government
and her tribe, and at times in the course of her
life and memoir it feels as if she has become entirely separate from the
Paiute community. At the same time, she could not easily assimilate into the European
American community even if she wanted to, and I don’t believe she did, although
in the course of her life she did marry two Anglo military officers and
government officials, Edward Bartlett (briefly and unhappily) and Lewis Hopkins
(far more happily). This in-between, liminal space certainly can feel unsettled
or uncomfortable, yet in her memoir Winnemucca consistently defines it instead
as a place of opportunity, a way in which she can advocate for her tribe and “their
wrongs and claims” (the book’s subtitle) while navigating her own late 19th
century society and life. To this reader, at least, Winnemucca’s cross-cultural
Native American identity is a powerful and inspiring one, much like Henry
Standing Bear’s.
Winnemucca wasn’t
the only prominent late 19th century Native American activist, however,
and another such figure bore Henry’s name: Standing
Bear, the Ponca chief whose speaking tour on behalf of his tribe’s land
claims and rights resulted in the groundbreaking legal decision Standing
Bear v. Crook (1879), which established Native American personhood
under the law. Although Henry has from Longmire’s
first season on had an ability and willingness to speak out about the
injustices and oppressions dealt to the Cheyenne (as illustrated with
particular force by a monologue in the wonderful first
season episode “Dog Soldier”), as the series has progressed he has become a
much more vocal and impassioned advocate for the tribe, pursuing both legal and
extra-legal remedies to fight those wrongs. In so doing, Henry not only has exemplified
even more fully May’s Season 3 quote about the meaning of “Standing Bear,” but
has come to embody that historical figure of the same name, and to carry on the
legacy of his and Winnemucca’s battles on behalf of their tribes and of Native
American rights and claims more broadly.
Next Longmire
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on Longmire, or other
shows, you’d share?
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