The 1993 Film Drama Grandfather Sky, Essay Example

Summary

The 1993 film drama Grandfather Sky depicts the spiritual journey of Charlie Lone Wolf, who, confronting the contemporary problems of urban life from the unique perspective of a Native American perspective, leaves the city to see family at a Navajo reservation. The return to his culture provides a cure to the spiritual and existential alienation he experiences in the modern American city. The Navajo rituals which Charlie Lone World experiences in the film serve as a type of initiation and re-birth into his ancestral heritage.

Reaction Paper

The film Grandfather Sky is a moving account of the spiritual and existential crisis which contemporary Native American young people experience, living within a landscape that was once their own, but has now become something alien to them. This is arguably the paradox at the center of the film and the Native American experience as a whole: from the perspective of territory and geography, Native Americans understand on a deep spiritual level that the lands of the Americas are their home. Accordingly, I will be addressing the extent to which the treatment of Native Americans historically has never been addressed. It is this failure to address the problem which Grandfather Sky so vividly portrays.

Above all, the film caused me to think about the social injustices which Native Americans have experienced. Even though they remain on the physical territory of North America, which is their ancestral home, they have become marginalized within this same space, clearly not through geographical displacement, but through the destruction of their culture by the hegemonic historical force of European colonization. In the film, Charlie Lone Wolf is an archetypical representative of this spiritual displacement that the Native Americans have undergone through violence. The effects of this displacement are a spiritual malaise, which having destroyed the Native American on a spiritual level, now physically and materially destroys this populace, as Charlie Lone Wolf’s social struggles clearly indicate.

Nevertheless, the film at the same time offers a way out for the Native American population. There are still isolated pockets, which remain spaces of freedom from the oppression of colonization. When Charlie Lone Wolf journeys to the Navajo reservation to meet his uncle, he encounters his own culture once again. This is a type of spiritual re-birth for him, as the film’s detailed rendering of Navajo ceremonies demonstrate. These ceremonies serve to re-initiate Charlie Lone Wolf into the culture he has lost.

Yet the film nevertheless remains disturbing to the contemporary viewer, to the extent that it confronts the viewer with the unacknowledged tragedy which has befallen Native American culture. Charlie Lone Wolf is a clear symbol for his people in the film: his suffering in the film and troubles repeat what amounts to the genocide of the Native American people that is at the foundation of United States history. Certainly, the film to an extent does offer a possibility to Native Americans, through escape to reservations away from a culture that has physically and spiritually marginalized and murdered this people. Charlie Lone Wolf’s future and by extension the future of his people are tied to withdrawing to these spaces, such as the reservation, where the possibility of a re-connection with culture exists.

Yet this does not answer the clear issues of social injustice which remain extant in American history. The underlying thread of the film is that U.S. internal politics has never come to terms with what amounts to genocide of the Native American population. But neither has the general U.S. public come to terms with this same genocide. Whereas Charlie Lone Wolf’s journey in Grandfather Sky does offer hope for the Native American people, the re-birth of the Native American appears to be stillborn until a greater closure is reached regarding how the Native Americans have been treated historically. The film namely provoked me to think more clearly about how historical injustice is tied to issues of greater social injustice: in other words, in order to properly address social injustice, one must acknowledge and understand its roots in historical injustice.