Book Review

Where White Men Fear to Tread:

The Autobiography of Russell Means

with Marvin J. Wolf

As a white man, I took the title of this book to be a challenge. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means is, after all, precisely calculated to draw attention to itself by needling a white person’s conscience. Beyond the title, it doesn’t take long after starting the book to feel as if I passed a simple test. It’s like Russell Means is saying “Here is a line. If you dare to cross it you will be confronted with your own ignorance. If you don’t cross it you are a coward, but if you do and you follow along with me as I tell my story to the end you will benefit immensely even though you will face some tough trials just like I did.” So by the last pages of this autobiography I felt like I had taken a few blows, That is to my benefit. Russell Means, possibly the ultimate American Indian warrior of our time, also leaves himself open to blows. He made a lot of mistakes in his life, but he was man enough to write them into these pages so he and others can evaluate them and learn from his life. Whether you are white or not, that line that Russell Means dares you to cross is well worth the risk.

Like all autobiographies, this one starts at the beginning of Means’ life. His parents grew up in the forced segregation of Indian boarding schools and he was of the first generation to grow up as an urban Indian, attending public schools. That generational shift is an important element in his story. Means was a highly intelligent boy who sometimes excelled academically and sometimes struggled to adjust. He never lost a taste for learning though, even until the end of his life. What he experienced might be typical for a lot of Indian children, meaning broken families, alcoholic parents, trouble fitting in, delinquency, and racism. By his teenage years, he was dealing drugs, drinking a lot, committing petty crimes, and turning into a drifter, moving from city to reservation and back again, mostly in search of work. From a young age, he honed his skills at fighting by getting into barroom brawls and his experiences with the Bureau of Indian Affairs were contentious and disappointing. Again, there is a lot for American Indian people to relate to here.

Russell Means’ political awakening came when he attended an Occupy Alcatraz Island demonstration in the 1960s. A band of native activists gathered on the prison island to declare it a sovereign state for indigenous people. Of course it amounted to no more than a little media publicity, but it sparked a fire, fueled by a high octane grade of testosterone, in Means’ heart that began to rage. Means later found himself in the company of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founding the Cleveland chapter of that activist organization where he took over the job of the BIA by doing the work they were set up to do but weren’t doing.

As AIM turned from being a community services oriented organizations to being a more militant revolutionary one, fighting for the sovereignty and independence of Indian people in America, Means entered the most turbulent period of his life. He organized a cross-country tour called the Trail of Broken Treaties, started the militant occupation of the Wounded Knee battlefield on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, participated in a courtroom riot, helped to destroy the Bureau of Indian Affairs office building in Washington, D.C., and got into a lot of trouble along the way. After several trials, he got exonerated from most of his charges with the help of a team of activist lawyers, though he did end up doing a three year stint in prison. You can criticize Means for embracing violence as his primary tactic and you could possibly say he did more good for his people when AIM was simply providing practical assistance to struggling Indians, but then again, all the violence did draw a lot of attention to the plight of American Indian people and all but started a renaissance in Indian cultural awareness during the 1970s. Besides, the violence goes a long way in illustrating all the pent-up fury that accumulated after so much genocide, broken treaties, stolen land, racial discrimination, and cultural destruction suffered at the hands of the white establishment. The violence is unfortunate, but when looked at in the wider historical context, it isn’t surprising. Part of what makes this book so great is the way Means always tells his story in reference to both history and the contemporary society in which he lived.

After the violent phase of his life, Means became a bit more creative in his approach to activism. He set up a commune to teach people how to live according to traditional Indian ways. He didn’t limit the community to Indians only and in fact allowed people of any race to participate as long as they were there in good faith and willing to contribute something of value to the community. Russel Means had no tolerance for white people who larp as Indians to trick themselves into thinking they are spiritual. He had no tolerance for anthropologists, sociologists, or gawking tourists either. This book makes the point that Indians have a living culture that is neither a museum piece nor entertainment for seekers of novelty.

Also of note is Means’ break with the American progressive Left. While being one of the prominent leaders of the fight for Indian civil rights, he had a contentious relationship with the activists of the post-1960s New Leftt who didn’t approve of his use of violence for political purposes. The big break up came in the 1980s when he visited the Miskito Indians on the est coast of Nicaragua, only to find that the socialist Sandinista party in power were committing genocide against them. After Sandinista militias tried to assassinate Means while conducting bombing campaign against Miskito villages, he returned to America and got shunned by Leftists who refused to believe the Sandinistas would do anything so terrible.

Russell Means turned to the radical American right from then on, making questionable alliances with Larry Flynt, the Unification Church, and the ever-so-flakey Libertarian party who asked him to run in the presidential primary against Ron Paul in 1984. Most Libertarians at that time actually hated Ron Paul and Means lost by only three votes. While Means could sound quite wise and philosophical when discussing the politics of racism and history, he comes off as naive and overly-simplistic when he explains his take on libertarianism. He isn’t any different from other libertarians in that way, but at least in his case it makes sense in the context of an Indian activist who wants freedom from the U.S. government for his people who are sitting on broken treaties that guaranteed them just that.

Unfortunately for everybody, it becomes clear that other Indians were incapable and not motivated enough to keep up with Mean’s never-ending energy and commitment to his cause. He was just one of those people with too much power, moving too fast through life for other people to keep up with.

By the end of the book, Russell Means is living in a treatment facility for people with anger management problems, a place he went to voluntarily. While acknowledging that his anger motivated him to do a lot to uplift his people, he was also courageous enough to admit that his rage also destroyed a lot of relationships in his personal life and led him to commit unnecessary acts of violence that did no one any good. After all he accomplished, he ends his story where he began: with an insatiable desire to learn and improve.

Means didn’t just live the life of a warrior; he also lived the life of an intellectual with a complex mind and a willingness to look at ideas from multiple perspectives. After reading this, it becomes clear that this autobiography is not just about Means telling his story to the world, but it is also a chance to reflect on his own life, searching for what he did right and what he did wrong with the intention of correcting the mistakes he made in the twilight years of his life. Means spent his life attacking American society while trying to rebuild the culture of Indian people and finished by looking in the mirror and confronting the most horrible things he did. Taking that kind of responsibility requires strength of character, a kind of strength that a lot of leaders in America and the world don’t have. I’m certain that Means would say this strength came from his people’s traditions and his connecation to nature.

As a book, there isn’t much here to criticize. Most of it is exciting with non-stop action, running along at a fast and smooth pace. Russell Means is such a polarizing figure though that there may be times when some readers will feel alienated from the story. His machismo might turn some weaklings off; he always did hate pacifists anyways. Otherwise, he says and does a lot of things that will be objectionable to just about anybody. But whether you agree with all of it, some of it, or none of it, he presents his ideas and life story in such a way that it never gets dull and never ceases to make you think.

And yet another great thing about this book is that it gives such a clear picture of what life for Indians, be they urban Indians or reservation Indians, are living through in our times. This is a perspective that will rarely be found in other books. It’s not about the “noble savages” you see depicted in Santa Fe tourist trap art, Walt Disney cartoons, or the junk new age shaman fantasies of Carlos Castaneda. It shows you realistically how real Indians live in the real world in the very real times we are in. This is where many people in our day will fear to tread, be they hippy Indian wannabes or conservatives and businessmen who turn a blind eye to the damage America and other countries have done to indigenous people.

So should white people fear to tread into the pages of this book? I should hope not as long as you are the kind of white person who cares about humanity and can take some constructive criticism without having an existential crisis. Russell Means can be intimidating; he is at times nasty, cruel, violent, impulsive, egotistical, condescending, and a bit of a publicity seeker, but he also has a caring side, a sly sense of humor, an ironic intellect, and an abundant love for his own people, the planet Earth, and, believe it or not, for humanity as a whole. Despite all his rage, he ends up where Malcolm X did after his pilgrimage to Mecca. No, white people and people of any other enthnicity or race, should overcome any fears they have and dive deeply into these pages. That’s what Russell Mean wants. Taking into consideration the things he says will only make you stronger, even if they do hurt. That is the approach of the warrior, even if it means merely being a literary warrior. Go ahead and read this book. I dare you. You’re a coward if you don’t.

 

Book Review

Modern Art and the Object 

by Ellen H. Johnson

Modern art radicalized the way we see and create art. That is a truism by now. By extension, it also radicalized the way we interact with the objective world, or at least it did for people who pay attention to art. Ellen H. Johnson’s Modern Art and the Object is a survey and overview of the way in which modern artists treated objects in their works and as their works, sometimes even making themselves the works of art as well. While Johnson’s writing is descriptive and analytical, it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of art criticism or theory.

Her opening chapter is probably the most useful one in the whole book. As a survey, it traces the development in how objects are related to in art starting with Cezanne and his influence on Impressionism and Cubism which also opened up the doors to Dada and Surrealism. Cubists started the trend of incorporating found objects in their paintings while the latter two, Dada and Surrealism, brought the objects out of the canvases and made them into art objects standing alone as themselves. She then moves on to unexpected territories, examining the use of human actors as objects in performance art and even making the actual artist into a work of art in the case of Andy Warhol. Some of these themes get taken up in later essays while others, particularly the objectification of humans in performance art, never get any further mention. This first chapter at initially seems to be a great introduction to the subject, but unfortunately, it turns out to be the most provocative one in the whole book.

Johnson goes on to examine Cezanne and Picasso. Most specifically, she looks at the way in which both artists related to nature, the ultimate source of objective reality. She sees both artists as using similar techniques to release and draw out the inner essence of the material world. In the case of Cezanne, he shifted his perspective, moving his viewpoint several times while working on one canvas in an attempt to fully paint three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional surface. Picasso, in his Analytc Cubist phase, operated by fracturing the surfaces of the objects he portrayed, making them incomplete and overlapping to further the sense of open space and depth in his paintings. Both techniques resulted in a visual outpouring of essences that had previously been trapped inside the surfaces of the objects. That is a great observation. The only problem is that if you have studied either artist or their theoretical writings then this nothing new. By the time Ellen Johnson wrote this book in the 1970s, this was common knowledge for anyone who had kept up with modern art. She merely states the obvious.

Those chapters on Cezanne and Picasso may not be original, but they are nicely written. Another nicely written chapter is the one on Jackson Pollock. Johnson explains how his works in Abstract Expressionism are deeply rooted in his relation to the natural world. Where Pollock differs from the two aforementioned artists is that his depiction of the “energies” of nature are shown without the objective surfaces that make them recognizable in everyday life. Cezanne and Picasso released these natural forces by fracturing surface appearances and drawing those energies out while Pollock entirely abandoned the surface appearances and painted the way in which he perceived those pure energies. . This is interesting, but again it is old information.

Another one of the better chapters is on Claes Oldenburg. In his attempt to re-integrate art into the praxis of everyday life, he created art objects representing everyday household items like typewriters, kitchen utensils, and cigarette butts. Only Oldenburg differs from those others because he neither destroys the outer surfaces of them nor does he abandon them in the Jackson Pollock way. What he does is soften those outward surfaces, making those ordinary things look cushy and pillow-like, as if the outward flow of their energy is neutralizing their outward forms, making them less rigid and more approachable. Yet again, this is not a unique observation.

The rest of the chapters are more or less just descriptive. There isn’t much explanation other than what the art objects, or the art depicting object, look like. Johnson continues on with the theme of how the artists related to nature and objectivity, but doesn’t come up with anything insightful or groundbreaking in any way that will enhance your understanding of modern art. Her writing can be awfully dull too and lacking in direction. The author spent her life as a prominent curator and gallery manager and that must have been her true calling in life because her work as an art critic doesn’t really go anywhere.

Modern Art and the Object is not essential reading. It appears to be Ellen Johnson’s attempt at leaving her mark on the world rather than offering some useful theories for the interpretation and understanding of modern art. The critic and Artforum editor Rosalind Krauss did a much better job of this in contrast. Johnson is preoccupied with the inner nature of objects, whereas Krauss wrote extensively about the surfaces of objects in modern art. Modernism was always about style more than substance and postmodern artists mostly sought to do away with substance entirely, making art about surface and nothing else. Rosalind Krauss demonstrates this successfully in her criticism. Ellen Johnson, on the other hand, leaves the reader feeling like she doesn’t have much to say. Perhaps that is because she is looking in the wrong places when she interprets modern art.

 

Book Review

Love Canal:

A Toxic History from Colonial Times To the Present

by Richard S. Newman

In the late 1970s, there were two places in America that evoked a sense of dread anytime they were mentioned. One was Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania that leaked radiation into the atmosphere and could potentially have caused a meltdown. The other was Love Canal, a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York where an entire neighborhood had been built. Richard S. Newman’s Love Canal tells the story of the latter, covering the business practices of the man who gave the site its name, the chemical company that dumped their waste there, and the grassroots protest movement that grew around the discovery of the deadly deposits under the soil.

Newman begins his account with the American Indians’ reverence for the famous Niagara Falls and the coming of colonialists who saw the potential for using Lake Ontario and the Niagara River for the transport of commercial goods. Later, when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the falls became important for generating electricity, Niagara Falls became a boom town for manufacturers. Out of this economically expanding community came a man named William T. Love. He had a vision of building a canal running off the Niagara River that could be used for generating power in order to expand the growth of the small city southwards where more factories could be built. Love’s enthusiasm was infectious enough to raise investments and his employees went to work building the canal which they named after him, dubbing it the Love Canal. But William Love was more of a dreamer than a doer; he ran out of funds and he abandoned the canal project after its being only partially built.

Years later, Elon Hooker founded the Hooker Chemical company. It was a successful company, especially in the World War II era when they began manufacturing chemicals to be used in various ways for military equipment. Hooker Chemical also took off because they produced important chemicals used in making plastic. Like any other industrial companies, they produced tons of waste. The city of Niagara Falls allocated the Love Canal as a dumping ground, so Hooker Chemical poured all their toxic sludge into flimsy metal barrels and dropped them into the ground, covering them with a topping made of clay.

A couple decades later, the city government allowed housing developers to build a low-income subdivision with a school and a housing project tower block for African-American renters all on top of the Love Canal toxic waste dump. The houses were cheap and a lot of blue collar workers thought they had bought into the American Dream. But then things started to go wrong. Rates of cancer and other diseases became disproportionately prevalent in the area, the rate of miscarriages skyrocketed, birth defects were common, and everybody in the neighborhood smelled a sickening stench in the air. Strange things were happening too like when children threw rocks they found, the rocks would explode and dogs that played in the grass would lose their hair. As it turned out, the barrels underground that were meant to contain the industrial waste had corroded and toxic chemicals were leaking into the soil and air, depositing in people’s basements, and getting into their drinking water. The locals got together and started a protest movement that got national attention. They added more fuel to the fire of the exploding environmentalist movement of the time. The author goes into all the fine details of what they did, how successful they were, the government’s reaction, and the long range impact of the political movement.

Throughout the telling of the Love Canal story, the author writes in a subtext, giving details about the ecological and environmental attitudes in America going back to the founding of the nation. Really that part of the history is taken up with the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After that there were various movements in favor of conservation and the preservation of nature. It wasn’t until the 1960s though that environmentalism intensified and a Return to Nature and Save the Planet ethic took over. People began seeing the natural world as not just a place to escape to for recreation or relaxation, but something we need to be part of in order to survive. All of this eventually merged with the activism of the Love Canal community and furthered the cause of environmental protection.

There is a lot to admire in this book. The chapters on the industrial and commercial history of Niagara Falls are fascinating, especially for those inclined towards an interest in modern history. The story of the Love Canal neighborhood and the activist movement that grew out of it are well-presented and sufficiently detailed too. The author also rightly make a point of explaining how toxic waste is a problem that can be effectively managed with technology when giving the proper funding and attention. The darker side of the story is the reminder that the Republican party and big corporations are working together to roll back all the progress that environmentalists have made, making future ecological disasters a probability. Sadly, people have short memories and living in a country where history is rarely ever taught, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Love Canal is a good book and especially the kind of thing the younger generations should be reading. Until recently, the environmental movement was growing and people of my generation were expecting to pass that torch onto the next generation. Unfortunately, when they picked uo the cell phone they dropped the torch and now pollution levels are rising exponentially, our water is filled with microplastics that kill wildlife and find their way into our food supply, more fossil fuels are burned then ever before, and global warming is accelerating rather than slowing down. Caring for the planet has become less important than staring at a screen all day watching reels of dogs on skateboards, people eating themselves to death in mukbang videos, and the latest, dumbest dance trends. People became so hypnotized by the internet that they forgot about everything that matters. Pay attention, kids...the next Love Canal disaster could be happening under your feet right now. If your phone is more important than the survival of the planet we depend on for life, then maybe we don’t even deserve to survive.

 

Book Review

Documentary Film

by Paul Rotha

with Sinclair Road & Richard Griffith

The first edition of Paul Rotha’s Documentary Film got published in the 1930s and has gone through several revisions since then. At first its readers may be shocked at how narrow the author’s range is, but the historical context needs to be kept in mind for anyone who even bothers to pick this one up.

Rotha starts with a simple and precise definition of documentary film. He contrasts it with what he calls “entertainment film”, meaning movies that tell a fictional story with no other purpose outside of entertainment. Documentaries, on the other hand, are meant to depict reality and intended to transmit information that may be necessary in order to inform the general population. Rotha points out that schools in Western culture do not properly educate the majority of the populace which means that most people do not know how to gather information or evaluate its merits on their own. Rotha was certainly right about that and I would say not much has changed over the last one hundred years. In any case, documentaries are necessary to inform the public and by this Roth clearly states that “inform” means persuading people to make the right choices. By “the right choices” he means whatever the government and the corporation say is right. This book is written from the perspective of a technocrat. His interest is in films that educate, instruct, or function as propaganda.

Also of importance when contrasting fiction with non-fiction films is the setting and the people who star in the production. Entertainment films are an extension of the theater and utilize created stage sets and professional actors, whereas documentaries use already existing settings and ordinary people who do not act but speak naturally as they would when off-camera.

Obviously, the two sides of this dichotomy do not hold up. Fictional and entertainment films can be used for educational purposes. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or the 1982 film Ghandi could be used as examples of non-documentaries that teach, or even Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound which was produced to explain the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis. Then there is the absolutely amazing film Black Orpheus directed by Marcel Camus in 1959 using non-actors and the already -existing favelas of Rio de Janeiro as settings to tell an entirely fictional story based on Greek mythology. It may be unfair to cite these as examples that disprove Rotha’s framework because they were all made after he wrote this book and you would be correct in your objection. But I do want to point out the limited range of the author’s argument. That limited range is also not his fault as he could not see the future and had no idea where the art of film would eventually go. That is just the limitations of our consciousness.

Then again, it is also important to understand that Rotha is uncritical in his analysis of documentary film. He never addresses the ethical issue of who is to decide what is right or wrong for documentary film making. There are documentaries that give misleading or false information, sometimes deliberately so. This is especially true in the era of the internet. He does briefly address the problem briefly in his analysis of the Nazi propaganda films made by Leni Riefenstahl, but he doesn’t take the issue beyond that point. He never looks inward at his own country, England, to examine whther or not the government there is entirely truthful in their presentation of propaganda or the news reels that were shown in cinemas during that time. Then there is also the question of what is real. A documentary about religion might be considered either fiction or non-fiction depending on who you ask. Finally there are also documentaries like Jonestown: Paradise Lost where actors and studio sets are used to recreate the story of the Peoples Temple in Guyana documentaty-style. Dismantling Rotha’s framework shouldn’t mean anything against the man who wrote this book; he obviously wasn’t stupid and his shortsightedness is simply a typical human trait. If anything, it should serve to remind us that future generations will look at us with shock and dismay, wondering how we could have been so ignorant. Keep that thought in mind when you pass judgment on the generations that came before you.

Rotha proceeds to analyze the elements and techniques used in the production of documentary films. He explains the roles of producer and director, the use of sound, the process of editing, the method of camera work, and so on and so forth. The discussion gets slightly technical and may be a little boring for those not inclined to care about these matters. I did find the passage about how sound is used to influence an audience’s mood to be interesting, especially because he is writing about non-musical, atmospheric and environemtnal sound. Also the chapter on how the physical movement of objects can be used to arouse an emotional reaction in the audience was provocative too. Most of what is written in this section could just as easily apply to non-documentary films though as it could to documentaries so I wouldn’t say it fulfilled its real purpose.

Rotha relies heavily on Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin to illustrate his points. Those are the kinds of films that film historians discuss passionately while ordinary people tend to dismiss them as horribly boring; you might want to consider that serious film geeks may be on the spectrum when they make the mistake of thinking they are on the level. Normies don’t really appreciate Citizen Kane much either. I mean A Touch of Evil was a far better Orson Welles film anyways. Nanook Of the North and Battleship Potemkin also further illustrate what I previously said because many critics do not actually consider them to be documentaries for reasons I won’t go into here.

The rest of the book is filled with essays by Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith. They list and briefly describe documentary film production internationally. Judging from the time in which this book came out, it should be no surprise that the concentration is heavily in favor of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. The Global South gets some mention, but not much. The chapters on Latin America and Africa get about one and a half pages each respectively. These chapters merely list the titles of documentaries that are no longer on anybody’s radars with some brief commentary. They really aren’t worth reading.

Documentary Film is not a book that will appeal to most people in our times. It was written when the art of film production was just past its infancy and the scope is narrow as a result. The art of cinema has expanded in an infinite number of directions since Paul Rotha wrote this book. Reading this makes me think that future generations, supposing the human race survives global warming and environmental destruction, will look back on the internet in the 200s the way we now look back at silent movies and think similar thoughts. This book might be of historical value because it was a foundational text in film theory and provides us with a reference point regarding how far we have come in almost one hundred years. Other than that, it isn’t a terribly interesting or useful book to read.