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Red Hill; Samson and Delilah
Purely by coincidence publicists sent me screeners for two different Australian movies opening soon in New York that feature aboriginal main characters who say nothing throughout. In “Red Hill”, a film...
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2010 African Diaspora Film Festival
I first began covering the Annual African Diaspora Film Festival in New York in 2000 and looked forward once again to this year’s event with the highest expectations. After having seen six different...
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True Grit? Humbug.
Although most of this article is concerned with political issues that would lead me to award “True Grit” with the rotten it deserved, I want to start off by highlighting its major flaw that has not...
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The Destiny of Lesser Animals; Meek’s Cutoff
Last night, after a few minutes into “The Destiny of Lesser Animals”, a movie showing at the always bountiful New Directors/New Films Festival at Lincoln Center on Friday and Saturday night, I had a...
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Mann V. Ford
If someone asked you what came to mind when a huge multinational corporations was dumping toxic waste on indigenous peoples’ land, you are likely to think of far-off places like Ecuador where Chevron...
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What Ford did to the Ramapough Mountain Indians
(Some idiot just wrote a defense of Ford under my review of “Mann V. Ford” because it was “legal” to dump toxic waste in the 1960s using Mafia haulers. This article that appeared in the Bergen Record...
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Ikland
Watch Trailer here When documentary filmmaker Cevin Soling was in seventh grade, his social studies teacher passed out a copy of an essay by Lewis Thomas titled “The Iks“. It referred to a small tribe...
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The Blackfoot Indian versus fracking
Today’s NY Times has an article on the divisions among the Blackfoot people in Browning, Montana over fracking. It is an increasingly common sight for tribes across the West and Plains: Tourist...
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The political economy of Comanche horse-stealing raids
A Comanche named Bow and Quiver. Painted by George Catlin in 1832 In early 2008, not long after seeing the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men”, a film that I found perversely at odds with...
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The Comanches and the Yanomami
Napoleon Chagnon Almost five years ago to the day, I resolved to begin researching the Comanche Indians of the southern Plains after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, a novel that was...
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Nunavut
I mm working on a piece for Counterpunch on Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” that was made in 1921 and generally considered the first documentary ever. I saw it for the first time at the...
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Thinking about the Aztecs
Back in the late 90s, when I first began to research indigenous societies with an eye toward applying Mariategui’s writings to the contemporary world, I received stiff resistance from...
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The Political Economy of Comanche Violence
Comanche man, photo taken in 1892 I just got a copy of the latest Capitalism Nature Socialism journal (Volume 24, Number 3, September 2013) that should be available on JSTOR before long. I was somewhat...
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People of a Feather
While nothing could surpass “Nanook of the North” in its place in film history, Joel Heath’s “People of a Feather” that opens at the Quad Theater in New York on Friday, November 8th is certainly more...
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Musicwood
While most of my readers understand that the environmental crisis threatens humanity’s survival, that understanding revolves generally around issues that effect us as a species. This is typified by...
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T.R. Fehrenbach dead at 88; wrote history of the Comanches from a white...
T.R. Fehrenbach Today’s N.Y. Times reports on the death of T.R. Fehrenbach at the age of 88. Fehrenbach was a historian and journalist specializing on Texas, his native state. He is the author of...
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John Ford and the origins of the Hollywood Western
John Ford From Glenn Frankel’s “The Searchers: the Making of an American Legend”: As John Ford liked to point out, movies and Westerns grew up together, a natural marriage of medium and genre. The...
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Thoughts on a Counterpunch article paying tribute to Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy In today’s Counterpunch—my favorite online and print publication—there’s a tribute to Cormac McCarthy, my least favorite novelist, by a Texas attorney named Carl E. Kandutsch who holds...
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Apocalypto
CounterPunch WEEKEND EDITION JULY 18-20, 2014 Conquistadors as Liberators? The Mad, Mad Mayan World of Mel Gibson by LOUIS PROYECT Since I doubt that any CounterPuncher would be inclined to watch Mel...
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Chief Illiniwek
Chief Illiniwek performing at a football game “As a university community, we also are committed to creating a welcoming environment for faculty and students alike to explore the most difficult,...
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