Ugh! Kill'em de white man. Pass the salt.

Canada's Native population lives in lucky times. Today's film and television glows with fairly accurate Aboriginal representation. Some days it's like you can't turn on the television without seeing Gordon Tootoosis, Adam Beach, Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene or Gary Farmer staring back at you.
Not that many decades ago, almost all the Indian faces on screen were not in fact Indigenous people... at least not to this country. They were... colour-enhanced.
I, like many Native people of my generation and older, spent a lot of my youth looking for images of real Native people on the big screen. Instead, what did we get: Rock Hudson as a square-jawed Chiricahua warrior. There was also Jeff Chandler as a Jewish Cochise in Broken Arrow. Chuck Connors gained fame in his role as Geronimo. What was doubly ironic was that a lot of these cinematic savages, including Connors, sported blue eyes. They say the camera adds 10 pounds. It also anglicizes.
What became even more bizarre was how art didn't imitate life. It redesigned it. And then life began to imitate the redesigned art.
I have memories of middle school, where us Native students would get a special hour of Native arts and crafts. We would sit in the classroom, sewing cheap leather into headbands, with vaguely Aboriginal designs beaded on the front. Any excuse to get out of algebra.
It should be noted that, essentially, most Native people never wore headbands. At least not the kind Western civilization associates with Native culture. It was a creation of Hollywood.
It seems that when the wardrobe department dressed up Rock Hudson and Jeff Chandler as Indians, they gave them those ridiculously thick wigs with braided pigtails that represented so many Native cultures.
The wigs were uncomfortable and tended to slip under the sweaty hot lights. So some guy whose name is lost to fashion history came up with the cool idea of using headbands to keep the wigs on tight, even when the actors were riding their horses. Thus a legend was created.
Jay Silverheels, better known as the Lone Ranger's sidekick Tonto, is perhaps the best known Canadian Native actor to have existed. Though he died on March 5, 1980, his appeal has spanned more generations than Chief Dan George, and had more of an affect on the dominant culture's perception of Native people (rightly or wrongly) than all other actors combined.
What is less known is that his real name was Harry Smith and he was from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ont.
That's why Jay/Harry made an appearance a few weeks ago at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, part of an exhibit at the Trinity Square Video called HOW: Engagements with the "Hollywood Indian."
An icon of pop culture, Jay/Harry appears, voice only, in the more modern form of a video installation piece, directed by artist Greg Staats. It is titled Harold J. Smith, Jay Silverheels, Tonto.
Essentially, the short film is an unedited home video of a slow drive along the 7th line river road on the Six Nations Reserve, metaphorically the path taking Jay/Harry home. In the background is the soundtrack of an interview the actor did on The Jack Paar Show back in 1960.
There is a popular Rez story about Jay/Harry that I once heard. After he became practically the only working Indian actor in the 1940s, before he hit it big as Tonto, he would always find himself playing the generic Indian warrior or chief in a series of Westerns.
The story has the director placing him on a hill or bluff overlooking a vulnerable wagon train, directing him to address his brave warriors in his own Native tongue, urging them to attack and kill.
Even though he was Mohawk, Jay/Harry's grasp of the language was somewhat tenuous. There he would sit, on his magnificent steed, urging on his band of dangerous and lethal Indian warriors.
As the story continues, all his family and friends from Six Nations would go to Brantford to see his movies when they were released. They would sit in the audience enjoying Jay's success. And then, when this big scene came on, the theatre would erupt in laughter. There would be Indians killing themselves, literally, laughing in the aisles.
Like many of us who are not very proficient in our ancestors' tongue, most of us learn common words or short phrases first, rather than the whole lexicon of the language. So there was Crazy Horse/Sitting Bull/Geronimo, speaking in stilted Mohawk, encouraging his savage warriors to "pass the salt. What time is it? It's raining. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Dog. Cat. I love you. Hello. Goodbye." And so on.
I don't know if this story is true, but if it isn't, it should be.