#21: Notes from The Relocation: The Exiles

(This was originally posted November 2008)

(OMAHA, Nebraska) — “The suspension of disbelief” is impossible, sometimes. This phrase, familiar to students of literary and visual theory, is a simple explanation of audience engagement with the performing arts, including film. Yet, there are times when film is meant to be experienced, not as an escape from belief, but as a historical record deliberately crafted for a specific demographic audience. Consider The Exiles, a documentary that had its original premier in 1961 and then sat in the bin for the next 46 years until it was meticulously restored by Ross Lipman and released by Milestone Films into the independent film circuit this year.

The Exiles, a project of USC film graduate student Kent Mackenzie, was shot and edited from 1958 – 1961 and largely funded by friends, family, acquaintances, and a student scholarship. After its 1961 premiers at the Venice and San Francisco Film Festivals, Mackenzie was unable to secure a major distributor. And so The Exiles became one of those cinematic gems remembered only by a handful of historians, film-makers, and the participants involved in its production.

The events in the documentary are ostensibly straightforward: beginning on Friday, at 4:00 pm, in a crowded market and ending 14 hours later in an alley, The Exiles chronicles the gatherings and musings of a small group of Native peoples living in LA. Mackenzie, who passed away in 1980, pieced the storyline together by interviewing Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tommy Reynolds, and other individuals from mostly southwestern reservations who relocated to the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. The film has been lauded, rightly so, for its images of Bunker Hill’s neighborhoods which have since been razed to make room for the current cluster of skyscrapers in downtown LA. In fact, it is because of the cinematic depictions of the 1950s-era Bunker Hill, including the original “Angels Flight” train whose transit regularly appears throughout the film, that The Exiles found its way back to audiences.

Thom Anderson’s 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, began the chain of events that led to the release of The Exiles. Anderson gained permission from Mackenzie’s daughters to use portions of The Exiles in his film-essay on the history of LA. His request would lead both to the film’s restoration and to the securing of funding for its release (Sherman Alexie was instrumental in the funding process). Since its 2008 U.S. premier in New York City, the film has earned favorable reviews in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and numerous other publications.

I happened to learn about the film when I made an impulse-purchase of the Fall 2008 issue of Bomb, and came across a brief blurb about the existence of a contemporary film with and about Native Peoples. Within a few seconds, I immediately became obsessed with viewing The Exiles as soon as possible. After all, The Exiles was produced amid the era of John Huston’s The Searchers and innumerable other films and TV westerns. Was it really possible that there were cinematic contemporary representations of Natives besides the conventional western images during that time period?

That is not to say that I am dismissive of the western; the genre is, of course, mainly a non-Native engagement with (or the use of culture in an attempt to justify) the U.S.’s genocidal project and its ongoing sociopolitical concerns about their “Indian problem” imposed upon a mythical past (and their matrix-present). Perhaps at some level, The Exiles can be loosely viewed as an updated western using the 1950s Bunker Hill—a post-apocalyptic setting in which the west has been “cleared” or “tamed” or resettled and justified by anti-Native Manifest Destiny ideology.

And so what happens for Indigenous Peoples who re-enter this particular setting, one that has been “civilized” and baptized as the city of angels?

The Exiles does not explain the U.S. government’s Relocation program to the audience and most of the film’s reviewers seem unaware of this federal program which lasted for several decades (and Republican and Democratic administrations). After WWII, the U.S. turned its attention back to Native Peoples and sought to further its objective to destabilize tribal communities by developing an employment program that would entice Indigenous Peoples to participate in a “brain-drain” from their tribes through relocating them to major cities, including Los Angeles. (Relocation explains why cities such as Los Angeles began to have a sizable Native community, especially as children and grandchildren began to be born and raised in The Relocation) The Relocation program occurred in tandem with the U.S.’s notorious Termination program. As its name clearly states, Termination attempted to do away with tribes by legislating us out of existence.

Certainly most Native people, upon learning when this film was produced, will immediately make the connection to the Relocation program. As the film does state, however, Indigenous Peoples ended up in LA for other reasons including moving there after they are discharged from the nearby military sites (as in the case of Homer). And as Margery, an Oneida friend, reminded me when I was describing the film to her and others over coffee and dessert, Natives moved to the cities to join friends and family already living there. Marge, who was in LA during a portion of The Exiles filming and is familiar with the Hill X (where Dodges Stadium now resides) and Main Street, both of which are featured in the documentary. She said that when people moved to LA they were told that one could always meet others at Main Street; she remember this area as being just a cut above skid row at that time.

Marge’s memories of the cityscape would be of great interest to the historians and cinephiles who helped propel the current release of The Exiles. The documentary is a stunning black and white visual treat; its cinematography alone is worth a viewing of the film. But it is the footage that lingers on what Marge remembers: a store-front window, a stop-light, a tunnel, a gas station, and other such sites that serve to emphasize the no-longer existing Bunker Hill “canyons”; a setting where buildings form the canyon walls and where new constellations have been created by the electric signs and lights. Working on a shoestring budget, Mackenzie and his team masterfully turn the district into a starring character, one who interacts with each of the Natives; fueled by history, their respective relationships are characterized by disappointment and hope, angry outbursts and carousing, longing and passivity.

The soundtrack for these relationships showcases the Revels, one of my favorite guitar groups from that era, and Eddie Sunrise, an affable man whose songs provide the background to the concluding activities in the film. Interestingly, the Revels wrote original music for use in the documentary, including “Comanche.” Unfortunately, “Comanche” was dropped from The Exiles, but gained popularity in the 1990s when Quentin Tarantino used it in Pulp Fiction. But other Revel songs remain in the film, including “Revellion.” Eddie Sunrise, who is described in The Exiles press-kit as a singer employed at times by Disneyland, leads the songs heard on Hill X during the 49.

Since The Exiles is a 1961 documentary, it does not follow today’s conventions of the genre. After Mackenzie interviewed Yvonne, Homer, Tommy, and other transplants to Bunker Hill—and made adjustments for artistic license—the participants then re-enacted the described incidents and experiences in front of the camera. Homer and Tommy have most of the screen-time, however I was struck most by the women’s stories, especially that of Yvonne who had felt unneeded in her home community; the film does not disclose to the audience that her mother had died when Yvonne was five years old and she was abandoned shortly after by her father. The Exiles begins only with Yvonne describing that she wanted to feel loved, that she wanted to live in LA, and that she wanted a family of her own.

During the film, Yvonne is pregnant with her first baby. Her tale is the most poignant of the re-enactors, and the one most deliberately expressive of the 1950s-air of existentialism and malaise (emphasized in two wonderfully shot scenes, one in which she waits for the late-night traffic-light to change and in another scene that shows her walking up the steep hill as the Angels Flight passes her by). Ignored by her partner for the bars and its dramas as well as for the late-night singing and the dramas at Hill X, Yvonne is depicted as spending her time observing others and window shopping, and in finding comfort and a bit of laugher with her friend, Marilyn, who likewise is ignored by her partner for the vacuous excitement of the bars. One cannot help but notice that The Exiles, perhaps inadvertently, documents the interference of colonization into Indigenous Peoples’ gender roles and expectations, including in family-systems and love-partnerships. This 1950s-era colonization makes the juxtaposition between pregnant Yvonne and the bar-denizen Claudine, and their respective social activities and relationships with men, even more moving and emotional.

The bars are the primary backdrops for The Exiles which means that alcohol is the siren’s call or coyote’s medicine featured throughout film. As the narrator of The Exiles points out, the people documented in the film are not representative of all Native Peoples in LA. But listening to his caveat, I know that one does not have control over non-Natives tendency to fixate on one-dimensional or stereotypical ideas about us, no matter how many reminders you give them to not do this. I also believe that it is important to see the film with a knowledge of its context in mind. This includes not only knowing about Relocation, Termination, and the history of Bunker Hill, but also in remember that the documentary was made before the existence of Indian community centers—which began to emerge en masse during the 1960s and 70s—and so bars served as the most convenient Indian-friendly social gathering sites for Native Peoples. Regardless, it will be up to Native viewers to decide how exploitative are the documentary’s images.

My friend, Diane, and I drove up to the Field Streams Ruth Sokolof Theater in Omaha to see the film. (I love this theatre; if you are near Omaha, please support their work.) As soon as Diane and I entered the lobby, we saw other Natives (Cheyenne-Arapaho and Omaha, respectively) and we quickly exchanged biographies and contact information with each other. After the film, we all very briefly discussed its technical aspects and material artifacts, including the automobiles. We agreed that the re-enactors reminded us of people we knew—including their activities; this made it impossible to watch The Exiles as removed from our experiences, with the gaze of disbelief. As we walked to our cars, our new Omaha friend pointed out a section of the neighborhood which used to serve as the gathering places, similar to what was shown in The Exiles, for the Natives in that Nebraska city.

Afterwards, when we were alone, Diane discussed her experiences with and thoughts on the children, the adult children, in The Relocation (the ones cinematically represented by Yvonne’s pregnancy). Listening to her thoughts, I wondered if Homer, Tommy, Rico, Claudine and Mary would have wanted their children and the others who would be born into the Relocation and/or who live in the mainstream to utilize the bars in the ways that they did and to engage in anti-Native behaviors; certainly these actions are understandable and ought to be seen with compassion during the short years of youth but they seem to become less tolerable as we grow into our late 20s and beyond. Yet we all know that living in anti-Indigenous colonization is such an unending raw experience and, as Margery reminded us, immediate “fixes” can be a stronger calling than that of working for our people, our communities, and our self-determination.

Sherman Alexie is quoted in LA Weekly as doubting that “most Indians will pay much attention” to the film. Who knows if he is correct to feel cynical. I would like to thank him, though, for his part in getting The Exiles back to the public. I also want to thank Yvonne and the other re-enactors for creating this record that they have left us. Perhaps, fifty years later after the cameras first began to roll, they would not want us to emulate them and certainly they would not argue for assimilation or colonization. It seems to me that they simply wanted to let us know what they initially experienced as they entered into the cities created by Manifest Destiny (and their reasons for living in the cities). Away from their homelands, they did the best they knew how with what they did not have.

(November 2008)

Notes: All film stills are available on The Exiles official publicity page.

Return to homepage.

Resources

The Exiles (official page)

PBS: Indian Country Diaries – “The Urban Relocation Program“

Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950-59 by Edward Valandra (recommended book on one response to U.S. Termination attempts)

“Exiles on Main Street: Searching for the Ghosts of Bunker Hill’s Native American Past” (article from LA Weekly)

Bunker Hill (1947 Project’s history of the early Bunker Hill neighborhood)