The viral video that seemed to show a white teenager [Nick Sandmann] in a MAGA ["Make America Great Again"] hat harassing a Native American elder [Nathan Phillips] near the Lincoln Memorial turns out to have captured a more complicated conflict. The clip, which drew widespread condemnation over the holiday weekend, appeared to depict a then-unidentified teenager silently leering in the face of a Native American man who was beating a traditional drum. The teenager was surrounded by dozens of rowdy peers from the all-male Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, who were in town to attend the anti-abortion March for Life; the man was participating in the annual Indigenous People’s March the same day.
. . . [W]hat everyone saw so clearly in the initial clip, and what hasn’t changed with the additional information [is] Sandmann’s smirk, and his failure to get out of Phillips’s face. I [previously] described Sandmann’s expression . . . as “The face that sneers, ‘What? I’m just standing here,’ if you flinch or cry or lash out.” Or, as Sandmann put it in his statement, “I never interacted with this protester. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves.”
. . . The new facts about this small encounter this weekend in Washington are important, and worth clarifying. But they don’t change the larger story, the one that caused so many people to react so viscerally to the narrative’s first, and simpler draft. We shouldn’t make the same mistake the president does when he confuses climate and weather. The weather is the encounter between Sandmann and Phillips, and it’s the media’s responsibility to describe it accurately (once we’ve decided to describe it at all). The climate includes a president whose name is used as a taunt by school bullies and racist harassers, who wields the rhetoric of domestic violence to cause pain and then blame those who are suffering, who delights in teasing and threatening his enemies, and who just last week made a joke about a government massacre of Native Americans. It would be a mistake to let our preexisting views persuade us to see something in this particular video that isn’t there. But it would also be misguided to let the complexities of the scene at the Lincoln Memorial dissuade us from telling the truth about who Trump is and exactly what he stands for.
A major reason for my interest in this film is that it features an artist I greatly admire and respect: indigenous actor and dancer Michael Greyeyes (right). Michael has a prominent role in Woman Walk Ahead, playing Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (also known as Sitting Bull), the HunkpapaLakota leader who in the late 1800s led his people during years of resistance to United States government policies.
Interestingly, in the years that Woman Walks Ahead is set, much of this resistance took place on and around the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the same location where, at the time of Woman Walks Ahead's filming, a groundswell of protest over the building of a new pipeline carrying “fracked” oil from the massive Bakken oil field was making international news.
Left: Protesters being tear-gassed by police – Standing Rock, November 2, 2016. (Photo: Johnny Dangers)
Woman Walks Ahead is based on the true story of Catherine Weldon, the widowed Brooklyn artist who in June 1889 traveled to the Dakota Territory to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull. She soon became embroiled in the Lakota peoples’ struggle over the rights to their land. Jessica Chastain plays Weldon. The film also features Sam Rockwell, Ciarán Hinds, Chaske Spencer, and Bill Camp.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2017. Shortly after, A24 and DirecTV Cinema acquired distribution rights to the film. Its U.S. premiere was at the Tribeca Film Festival last April, followed by a limited release on June 29, 2018
Since then, it has garnered what you could call average reviews. On Metacritic, for instance, which assigns a rating to reviews, Woman Walks Ahead has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 19 critics. A common critique is that it is yet another film about Native Americans from the point of view of a white protagonist.
Despite the film's mixed reviews, Michael Greyeyes received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Sitting Bull. The New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis calls his performance "a miracle of intelligence and dignity". RogerEbert.com contributor Susan Wloszczyna also offers praise, noting the Greyeyes portrayal is "the most subtle, soulful, and believable." Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times acknowledges that "[i]nhabiting the role of an icon of Native American resistance is no small feat, but Greyeyes, a Canadian actor of Plains Cree descent, draws you in with his wry wit and quiet gravity."
Above: Michael Greyeyes and Jessica Chastain
on the set of Woman Walks Ahead.
Michael Greyeyes is not unfamiliar with portraying famous historical figures. In 2009 he played Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the award-winning PBS series We Shall Remain, while in 1996 he played the title role in John Irvin's TV movie Crazy Horse (left). (For more about this film and the Oglala Lakota warrior and mystic Crazy Horse, click here, here, and here.) The events of Woman Walks Ahead take place around twelve years after the murder of Crazy Horse.
Back in November 2016, Greyeyes, in the CBC Newsstory below, shared his hopes that in watching Woman Walks Ahead, audiences will learn about indigenous rights and the power of those who resist.
Michael Greyeyes says his role as Sitting Bull in the upcoming film Woman Walks Ahead is the most significant and important artistic endeavour he has undertaken.
"The humanity of Sitting Bull and how he represents a community in crisis is really gripping and I think people can't help but come in to a new understanding of how history works, how history repeats," said Greyeyes.
Greyeyes, an associate professor of performance and devised theatre at York University, will play in the film as Sitting Bull opposite Academy Award-nominated actress Jessica Chastain as Catherine Weldon.
He said he hopes the story find its audience and that people really appreciates what the story is about.
"I think they'll learn something really significant about Indigenous rights, about empowerment and the power of people who resist," Greyeyes said.
The film's screenplay was written by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) and is directed by Susanna White (Generation Kill). The film, currently in post-production, will be released in 2017.
"There was violence around each corner and I look at the United States right now and it's not dissimilar," Greyeyes said.
Greyeyes mentions an instance where he was reciting his lines, lines he says which were about not giving up ownership to the land. While he was saying his lines, he said he was very aware of the events unfolding around him such as the U.S. election and the protests in Standing Rock.
"For a movie that's been in the making for over a decade, it's timely beyond anything I could have imagined," he said.
Greyeyes thinks the movie has the potential to have a huge impact because of the way media is consumed now. He said people might read a book about what happened but actually seeing it will be a different experience.
"When you see it unfold in human terms, it grabs you in a different way," he said.
I found Woman Walks Ahead to be a very powerful and moving film.
It's no masterpiece but it's far from "average." I give it a solid 8 out of 10 and lament the fact that it didn't get a wider theatrical release. Related to this point, I find myself wondering to what extent, if any, the political implications of the film's story in light of the ongoing struggle at Standing Rock and elsewhere, may have played in decisions about the film's release and promotion. I'll guess we'll never really know.
What we do know is that Woman Walks Ahead director Susanna White and actors Jessica Chastain, Michael Greyeyes and Sam Rockwell believe that their work does indeed relate to events at Standing Rock, and thus the phenomenon of history repeating.
Michael, for instance, shared the following in a Los Angeles Timesinterview last June.
When we were making the film, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were unfolding to the north of us. It’s really actually quite powerful to come to set every day and recognize that some hundred plus years have passed, but the underlying political landscape remains exactly the same. The state wants our land either for access or to mine it of its resources. And here we were making a film about one man and his community’s struggle to resist the state taking everything. To me, that was quite sad, to recognize that truth – but also as an artist, I was so passionate about the work and the political message that the film gives. Literally, time has passed and nothing changed. We are still in the way of the conquest.
Also, in the video below, Michael and co-star Jessica Chastain talk about how the protests at Standing Rock affected the filming of Woman Walks Ahead.
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Following is something of a retrospective of Michael Greyeyes' acting career. Enjoy!
Above: An early publicity shot of Michael Greyeyes (circa 1994).
In an August 2016 interview with CBC's Candy Palmater, Michael reflected on his breakthrough film role.
The filmmakers, when they met me . . . you know, I'm Cree, I have kinda a smooth vibe when you meet me, and they were concerned that I couldn't play [Gooch] hard enough. So for me his experience, his toughness, what he went through, that was the layer I put on top of me.
It's a question of finding just the right balance because, for me, playing someone hard or thuggish is really interesting because there's really no one like that. Everyone has something. There's something sophisticated about every person. So I'm delighted that people actually connected with this guy who's a loner, who's really had difficult experiences but [within whom] there's something; there's a heart there.
Above: A meme that humorously contrasts the character of nerdy Thomas Builds-the-Fire in the film Smoke Signals with Gooch in Dance Me Outside.
Later in the same interview with Palmater, Michael talked about his evolving film career.
Change is something that we can make happen. And you can look at history, you can look at an industry [like the film industry] and go, argh, they won't move, they won't budge. But we just keep pushing; like, just put your finger on the door and keep pushing because we're dealing with a lot of history . . . a lot of stereotypes. But every actor from our community out there is trying to make it happen.
. . . So even when I started [with Dance Me Outside] I was allowed to see how sophisticated our characterizations could be. . . . So I took that going forward so that when I started doing period films, the historical films [like Crazy Horse and Stolen Women, Captured Hearts (right)] I understood how they wrote us was just only one part of how they could understand us. And it was my job to make sure that there were other elements that I would bring as an indigenous person, as someone who understood our culture or was learning about it.I can make that role different. I can change it. And I've been doing it, I think, in all the roles that I've done.
Left: Michael in the 1993 made-for-television movie Geronimo. He played Juh in this film while Joseph Runningfox (pictured with Michael above) played Geronimo.
The film also stars Kimberly Norris as Geronimo's second wife. In a December 5, 1993 Los Angeles Timesarticle, Norris, a descendant of Chief Seattle, shared the following.
I'm sure that for all involved, this is more than just a job, it's a spiritual endeavor. It's an effort to reach back into our history, and to understand what happened, why it happened, to regain some of the humanity that history – at least history in the form that it's taught – has taken away from us. That's what we're trying to do here with this story. We want to show people that we fell in love; we were heartbroken; we loved and lost; we whined and complained every once in a while – and that there are eternal truths that exist in all societies. Indian people are just human beings. So we're here setting some falsehoods straight.
Above: Michael as the Comanche warrior Tarantula in the 1997 CBS miniseries True Women.
In her profile of Michael in the February/March 1996 issue of Cowboys and Indians magazine, Wolf Schneider writes the following.
[I]n True Women [Greyeyes] developed a speech pattern for his threatening yet proud Tarantula that gave new meaning to the term "broken English." He seems to have the chops for that expansion of self and heightened awareness that Stanislavski considered so key to believable acting. . . . [Indeed, Greyeyes] proved [so] popular in True Women . . . that crew members began mimicking the halting speech of his Comanche character, like how he told Dana Delaney, "You . . . will walk . . . again . . . but not good. You . . . will not . . . ride horse with wings . . . again." Today, Greyeyes chuckles, recalling, "Everyone was imitating the way Tarantula spoke. They'd say, 'You . . . come to my bed . . . hey, Michael.' The cameramen, the grips, everyone was imitating me. What do they say – it's the highest form of flattery?"
Above and right: Michael with Jennifer Jason Leigh in the 2001 coming-of-age film, Skipped Parts. Michael plays the character of Hank Elkrunner.
[The] story is set in 1963, when Sam Callahan (Bug Hall) and his singularly bad-behavin’ mom, Lydia (Jennifer Jason Leigh), are exiled from South Carolina to faraway Wyoming. This gives [director] Tamra Davis a chance to toss in the Kennedy assassination, bad haircuts and other period symbols, but the pic never reads as if it’s really the ’60s; languid body language and frank, casually profane dialogue all convey a ’90s feel.
Conflict, in a nutshell, has sexually naive but good-natured Sam falling in love with his new schoolmate, a pretty girl called Maurey (Mischa Barton). She doesn’t love him back, exactly, but his slatternly mom encourages them to experiment, with predictable results. Her subsequent visit to the local abortion clinic — presumably a challenge to find in 1963 Wyoming — is further complicated by a surprise encounter with her Betty Crocker-like mom (Peggy Lipton, in a dark Jackie Kennedy do). Meanwhile, Lydia has hooked up with Hank (Michael Greyeyes), seemingly the only Indian in town, thus putting at risk the trust fund her Southern-fried dad (R. Lee Ermey, doing a spot-on Broderick Crawford) cruelly dangles before her.
Above: Michael with Skipped Parts co-star Bug Hall.
Above and left: The most powerful scenes in Skipped Parts involve Michael and actress Peggy Lipton, who plays a woman experiencing a psychological breakdown.
Apart from these scenes (and a number of others featuring Michael), I agree with critic Ken Eisner's contention that Skipped Parts is a "clunker," one that "hits wrong notes from the start and only gets more sour as it goes along."
Above and below: Whether hanging out with his rodeo clown buddy, drinking coffee, or displaying his physique while wearing only a pair of boxers, Michael's character, Hank Elkrunner, very much provides the heart – including the moral heart – of a movie which critic David Nusair declares "comes off as one long attempt to shock."
In 1998 writer Wolf Scheider wrote the following about Michael's physical attributes.
At 6'2" and 200 pounds, his got a dancer's grace (he spent a decade on the ballet circuit) and an athlete's muscles. Full-lipped, with shoulder-length dark hair and wide-set, steady eyes, 30-year-old Greyeyes, who's full-blooded Cree, more than fits the romanticized ideal of a people that once thrived free and in harmony with nature.
. . . While Greyeyes is physically so consummate so as to be idealized, he is in his personal life hardly stereotypical. Although he rides a horse bare-back and deep-seated on-screen, real life finds him allergic to animals. He's never lived on a reservation, but mostly in Toronto, Mew York, and now Cleveland, and admits, "I'm really a city boy." To get out in nature he neither hikes nor tracks nor hunts, but bicycles with his Polish-American dancer wife, Nancy Leroszewski, who performs with the Cleveland Ballet.
Above and right: Michael in the title role of director John Irvins' 1996 made-for-television movie, Crazy Horse.
Filmed on location in South Dakota and Nebraska, Crazy Horse has been described as a "gripping story with a fine cast." It's also been praised for its attention to detail. In The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History, historian and author Joseph M. Marshall III is critical of movie portrayals of Crazy Horse. Yet he concedes that Irvins' film "came the closest" in credibly portraying the life and story of the "strange man of the Oglalas."
Made by the National Geographic Channel, Saints & Strangers tells the story of the Mayflower voyage and chronicles the Pilgrims' first year in America and the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Critics give the miniseries mixed reviews, with Keith Uhlich of The Hollywood Reporterwriting, "Nat Geo's two-night miniseries about the first Thanksgiving is admirable in parts, though bland overall"; and Maureen Ryan of Varietyopining, "The serious intent [of Saints & Strangers] trips it up at times; many characters remain one-dimensional, and some sequences are plodding or repetitive. That said, the miniseries features nuanced work in a number of the Native Americans portrayals – often the best-developed characters on the screen."
Above: About his role in the TV series Fear the Walking Dead, Greyeyes said that he was honored to be representing Indian Country through his role as the tribal leader Qelataqa Walker, a Native man leading tribal members, who face ranchers over land disputes and more.
Above: Michael as Brett Woodard in the third (and current) season of the HBO drama, True Detective.
Writes Vincent Schilling about Michael's "stellar performance":
Michael Greyeyes shook me to the core. His hidden rage, his sadness and his frustration at being ridiculed by a town that automatically assumes he is responsible for the crimes being investigated.
Above (from left):Stephen Dorff as Roland West, Mahershala Ali as Wayne Hays, and Michael Greyeyes as Brett Woodard in True Detective (2019).
Above: Michael in the forthcoming film, Blood Quantum. Writes Joe Leydon:
In [Blood Quantum], Greyeyes explains, “I’m playing the sheriff in a fictional reserve community called Red Crow. It’s 1982 – and it’s the zombie apocalypse.”
But this particular apocalypse scenario has a major twist.
“Native people are immune. So, as the sheriff, I’m holding back the horde of white zombies to protect the community. It’s actually a very astute political commentary, really, on colonialism and the rapacious nature of colonialism. It’s funny, it’s scary, it’s exciting – and it also is quite politically astute.”
Above and right: Michael, his wife Nancy Latoszewski, and the couple's two daughters, Eva and Lilia, at the Woman Walks Ahead premiere during the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival – September 2017.
Above: A 2018 portrait of Michael Greyeyes by Michael and Shelle Neese.
When [Sitting Bull in Woman Walks Ahead] says, “We will give no more of our land away. Not even this much,” he’s just standing there, defiant and angry and powerful. For me, I was so gratified that we could, again, show this side of him. He’s legendary, he was a charismatic leader, he was a leader in every sense of the word. He lived the truth that he spoke. For me, that was also my responsibility as a performer: just to summon my own charisma, my own sense of power, and play him as I know he must have been.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, "Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective." As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words "progressive," "gay," and "Catholic" seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
"I believe your blog to be of utmost importance for all people regardless of their orientation. . . . Thank you for your blog and the care and dedication that you give in bringing the TRUTH to everyone."– William
"Michael, if there is ever a moment in your day or in your life when you feel low and despondent and wonder whether what you are doing is anything worthwhile, think of this: thanks to your writing on the internet, a young man miles away is now willing to embrace life completely and use his talents and passions unashamedly to celebrate God and his creation. Any success I face in the future and any lives I touch would have been made possible thanks to you and your honesty and wisdom."– AB
"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
"Your posts about Catholic issues are always informative and well researched, and I especially appreciate your photography and the personal posts about your own experience. I'm very glad I found your blog and that I've had the chance to get to know you."– Crystal
"Thank you for taking the time to create this fantastic blog. It is so inspiring!"– George
"I cannot claim to be an expert on Catholic blogs, but from what I've seen, The Wild Reed ranks among the very best."– Kevin
"Reading your blog leaves me with the consolation of knowing that the words Catholic, gay and progressive are not mutually exclusive.."– Patrick
"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
"I ran across your blog the other day looking for something else. I stopped to look at it and then bookmarked it because you have written some excellent articles that I want to read. I find your writing to be insightful and interesting and I'm looking forward to reading more of it. Keep up the good work. We really, really need sane people with a voice these days."– Jane Gael
"Michael, your site is like water in the desert."– Jayden
