Trudell

Review #58 of 365
Film: Trudell [NR] 80 minutes
WIP: $13.50
When 1st Seen: 9 March 2006
Where Viewed: Starz FilmCenter, Denver, CO
Time: 5:10 p.m.
Review Dedicated to: Danielle C. of Duluth, MN via Philadelphia, PA


At times, this bio-documentary on John Trudell borders on the surreal, ethereal, and entrancing. Director, Heather Rae, elected to intersperse the film with actual interviews with John, interviews with really famous people that know him, some of his concert footage, and newsreel and other footage from some of his activities. She blends these together in a very coherent fashion that ultimately reveals how John evolved to be the person he became, the events in his life that caused the greatest impact on him, and the effect he has had on those who think of him as a modern-day Socrates/Confucius and his many followers. The essence of his very soul comes forth. It is clear, when seeing him speak, that he is in tune with a deeper, ecologically principled vibe from the earth than most euro-westerners. Nonetheless, he espouses a common principle of life and origin that is shared by the indigenous peoples of North America and that is that no life lives separate from its connections to all other life and the life of the planet itself. Therefore, living without consideration of all life, the impact of one’s life on the planet, and, more profoundly, the consequences of one’s life on the next seven generations of descendents are omnipresent philosophies of his. When you listen to John, in specific, talk and other indigenous people of North America, in general, you will notice a difference in the frequency of their references to ancestors and descendants. It is really quite compelling. They are truly tied to and respectful of this flow of human life in ways that are nearly, utterly invisible in Western thought. It is so rare that thinking in Western Civilization extends beyond tomorrow or next week or the next P&L statement let alone a few years down the road or a few generations. I recall learning about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in high school Biology class and the connection of DDT to the endangerment of the Bald Eagle. I remember thinking, how could people not have realized that there would be a danger to spraying massive quantities of a chemical into the environment. Later, I worked with a chemistry teacher that used to jokingly preach that the “solution to pollution is dilution”. This notion used to permeate conventional wisdom when it came to justifying the release of chemicals from chemical and industrial plants. “Hey, it’s okay to pour that down the drain because it will get diluted in the river.” Of course, if you live down river, you don’t want to hear that. So, we locate all the chemical plants near the ocean instead—where there is a lot more water to handle the dilution. Accepting the connection of humans to the earth, the web of interactions between each one of us and every other organism on the earth, and the chain of many generations of ancestors to many generations of descendants is paramount, it would seem that the indigenous philosophy holds, to the survival of the planet in general. John speaks of Western doctrine as being a virus—which you can imagine does not make him too popular with Western governments to the extent of the FBI creating one of its longest files every on a single individual—that, if allowed to take hold world-wide, will ultimately cause the earth to retaliate to restore the balance. He says if this means opening up the ozone layer and letting in the harmful rays then the earth will do it. Whether you like this notion or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is that everyone take some time to consider certain things. Consider that it took nearly half a billion years to create the fossil fuel that is being burned in the ‘civilized’ world at a rate as to exhaust the supply in 200 years. What happens if carbon dioxide that took hundreds of millions of years to trap is suddenly released in a 200-year span? Did you think that Water World was just a sci-fi flick? It could actually be a window on what the world could look like in 2100. Westerners don’t want to take this seriously. We don’t want to think of San Francisco and London and Hong Kong all underwater. We want to say this is an alarmist view. Maybe it is. Especially if we can only think 20 minutes into the future. Well, whatever you want to think, you cannot think exactly the same way if you open your mind to listening, even just a little, to John Trudell.

Mind you, that John is not, first and foremost and eco-nut. In fact, he spent the majority of his life seeking resolution to the injustice of the treatment of the indigenous people of North America. Years ago, I had a conversation with a very well educated, very experienced, high school principal from Toledo, OH. She had just returned from a sabbatical in Africa. As a history teacher herself, she had spent a lot of time working on such things as the rights of the African people, ending Apartheid, etc. Her work, in my view, was noble, and she taught and empowered her students to become activists in this realm as well—also a good thing. In one of my conversations with her I said, “I think you are doing good work, but what about the indigenous people of North America? What are you doing for them? You don’t even teach about them at all in your history curriculum?” To which she replied, “Oh, I cannot even bring myself to think about that.” And, to a very large degree, I think most American descendents of immigrants feel the same way. The idea that the early US government forcibly relocated the indigenous peoples to worthless reservation land and basically ostracized them from the power structure is truly ugly and hard to stomach. There was a time, I imagine, when it seemed like the necessary thing to do and the people were able to justify it to themselves using a host of what would now be viewed as arrogant rationalization. In the film, John makes reference to this idea of Manifest Destiny being a Christian God-given mandate for the newly immigrated Europeans to take over all the land from sea to shining sea. With a certain irony being that the Christian missionaries did a great job of teaching all of the indigenous people about their god and their religion. The indigenous people, of course, had never heard of their god and previously had been quite satisfied and living just fine with their own religious mythology etc. Yet, they found some things about this Christian God intriguing and learned a lot. Unfortunately, one of the things they learned, in John’s mind, was that many of the Christian people themselves were nothing like the god they worshipped. In fact, quite the opposite. It was a powerful and thought-provoking segment that really forces soul-searching. Obviously, there is no way to turn back the clock and make things right. Obviously, reparations or other such things which simply give to descendants to ease the guilt of other descendants are not the answer. The solution has to be about much more than relieving guilt, and there are sufficiently many European American descendants with guilty complexes as to continue to approve the building of gigantic casinos on reservation lands. At what cost? At want moral cost does a people become entirely dependent on the addictive vices of others as their only source of income? No, the solution has to be greater than this. It has to be about changing the status and interaction and function of the reservations themselves. There has to be an embracing of the philosophy of the indigenous peoples when it comes to living as people who are connected to each other in this grander experience. Only by so doing, will everyone in North America be truly free of this guilt and the guilt that we are not living truly meaningful and purposeful lives, and the guilt that we are not leaving the world a better place for our children, and the guilt that we are taking and using more than we need, and the guilt that we have allowed ourselves to become so preoccupied with a shallow and purposeless existence that we really at our core cannot even answer the question “what is the meaning of life?”. Should that really be a very hard question?

As you can probably tell, this is a profound film focused on the life of a profound person. John Trudell has worked his entire life, after serving in the US Navy, to shake as many people back into reality as possible. He has been motivated by hoping to make the world better for his own descendants, yet because he and his culture draw no distinction between the needs of his people and the needs of all people, really his work has been about us all. For that, we should be thankful. And for that, we should all work hard to first link ourselves physically back up to the web of life and then seek ways to work to ensure the planet we leave behind for the next 7 generations will be in far better shape than the one we inherited.