Star Trek and History (23 page)

Using a generically “Indian” people to substitute for real peoples still reflects on the real peoples themselves, however, and it contributes to
Star Trek
's future history for Native Americans as a whole. In flashbacks during the second-season episode “Tattoo,” for example, viewers relive young Chakotay's trip with his father to the Central American rain forest in the year 2344. Chakotay complains, “Our tribes live in the past. A past of fantasy and myth. . . . Other tribes have learned to accept the twenty-fourth century. Why can't ours?” Although the implication is that the cultures of some other Native nations have adapted and evolved, Chakotay's people, at least, embody the stereotype of the savage, willfully primitive and stubbornly unchanging over generations.

This rain forest trip and its insinuations that the Anurabi were related to Mayan or pre-Mayan civilization presented an opportunity for
Star Trek
to allow Chakotay (through Beltran) to represent not only Native Americans but also the Chicano movement in the United States. Since the 1960s, some members of the Chicano movement have invoked Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Nahua people in Mesoamerica, as a symbol for Hispanic unity, pride, and identity. Chakotay as a character and Beltran as an actor might have served as an inspirational role model for both communities, emphasizing their common ground quite literally.

Instead, “Tattoo” paints Chakotay's people—and thus Native Americans—as irrevocably Other. The sacred “Sky Spirits” venerated by Chakotay's father are the same beings Chakotay finds on an uninhabited moon in the Delta Quadrant. They explain that they had visited Earth forty-five thousand years previously and found ancient nomads who, despite being ignorant of communication or civilization, deeply loved and respected the land. The aliens admired these people and gave them a genetic bond, marking them as “Inheritors” of the aliens. Chakotay is descended from these early Natives/Inheritors.

This story plays on classic stereotypes of Indigenous Americans as mystically tied to the land and mysteriously set apart from other peoples. Scholars Darcee L. McLaren and Jennifer E. Porter see this episode as more indicative of New Age spirituality than Native American tradition, pointing out that it underscores the “New Age link between Indians, Aliens, and environmentalism.”
16

The revelation about the Sky Spirits also suggests that even in the twenty-fourth century, some Natives such as Chakotay's father will be naive enough to mistake aliens for gods (not unlike the Native Americans in the
Star Trek
episode “The Paradise Syndrome”). As one First Nations viewer notes in Sierra S. Adare's study, “Tattoo” effectively “says Natives would have remained primitive children of nature who respected the land but couldn't communicate with it or each other or show the land their respect because they had no language or culture until a more civilized, advanced race came across the vast ocean of space to help Natives progress.”
17

The homogenized “Indianness” of Chakotay's character also tells us other things about the future history of Native Americans. Chakotay observes a mismatched assortment of practices. Although “Tattoo” suggests a Mesoamerican lineage for Chakotay's people, the first-season episode “The Cloud” shows him using a medicine bundle to summon a spirit guide and using a word from the Lakota language to describe the creature, both of which indicate a Great Plains origin, not a Mesoamerican one.

More to the point, he shares his rituals—handling the medicine bundle (
VOY
, “The Cloud”), using a medicine wheel (
VOY
, “Cathexis”), and undertaking a vision quest (
VOY
, “The Cloud”;
VOY
, “Mortal Coil”), for instance—with his shipmates. Without being educated or prepared for sacred (and often very private and personal) ceremonies, these other characters use Chakotay's spiritual practices as they might use a tricorder: as a tool to be picked up, used, and then put down once again, rather than as a lifestyle or faith requiring commitment and conviction. As one First Nations viewer puts it, in the future, “Everybody can be Indian!”
18
For that matter, any Indian can be every Indian.

To be fair, Chakotay does provide a middle ground visually between the fully assimilated Ensign Walking Bear of
The Animated Series
and the abundant jewelry of the crewmembers in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
by donning a Starfleet uniform to reflect his membership and having a subtle tattoo to reflect his individual ethnicity. His use of the futuristic high-tech “akoonah” device to substitute for psychoactive herbs in achieving his vision quests also points to a way in which traditional beliefs might evolve over time and incorporate new technologies (
VOY
, “The Cloud”;
VOY
, “Basics, Part 1”;
VOY
, “Mortal Coil”;
VOY
, “The Fight”).

Nevertheless, as the scholar Lincoln Geraghty says of Chakotay, “Ultimately, the character replicates previous stereotypical versions of the Indian that have permeated American film and television.”
19
Chakotay as a symbol of Native American people obscures more than he illuminates, and in troubling ways this hearkens back to the villagers of Amerind in “The Paradise Syndrome.”

No episode of
Enterprise
(2001–2005) spotlights specifically Native American topics, although its first episode, “Broken Bow,” takes its name from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a town located on lands once owned by the Choctaw Nation and located in what was formerly “Indian Territory.” (According to
Trek
's future history, Broken Bow is the site of the first human contact with Klingons in 2151.) Of course, as a prequel,
Enterprise
feeds into the
Trek
timeline already established. Similarly, the 2009
Star Trek
film does not overtly address Native themes. Thus far it remains unclear how, if at all, the movie's “reboot” of the
Trek
universe alters the future history it projects for American Indians.

Taken as a whole,
Star Trek
earns a mixed grade in its treatment of Indigenous America. While the franchise has become increasingly sophisticated in dealing with some aspects of American Indian history such as the Removal Era, it remains unwilling to engage with current events or contemporary political issues in Native America in the same way it responds to present-day concerns of other groups. Moreover, the future history
Trek
creates for Natives often builds on tired stereotypes, creating an artificial, homogenous “Indianness” by appealing to mythic history with an added dash of New Age sensibilities. American Indians in the
Trek
universe, it seems, are creatures either of history or of fantasy. For Natives, the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries often look like the past—and not necessarily the “real” one, either.

Notes

1.
Michael Shermer,
Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown
(New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2005), 229.

2.
Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry,
The Making of
Star Trek (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 22.

3.
Gene Roddenberry memo to Fred Freiberger (March 31, 1968), quoted in Daniel Leonard Bernardi, Star Trek
and History: Raceing toward a White Future
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 46.

4.
Quoted in Sierra S. Adare,
“Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations' Voices Speak Out
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 52.

5.
Bernardi, Star Trek
and History
, 48–49.

6.
Russell Bates, “Bio-introductory Notes,” in Star Trek:
The New Voyages 2
, eds. Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), 56–57.

7.
Vonda McIntyre,
The Entropy Effect
(New York: Pocket Books, 1981), 45.

8.
Ibid., 44.

9.
Adare,
“Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction
, 79–80, 86–87.

10.
Roger Ebert, “
Star Trek: Insurrection
,”
Chicago Sun-Times
, December 11, 1998,
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19981211/REVIEWS/812110304/1023
.

11.
“USA: Appeal for the Release of Leonard Peltier,”
Amnesty International
, July 14, 1999,
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/160/1999
.

12.
Desmond Tutu, letter of July 8, 2009, to the Parole Commission. Online at
http://electricbrave.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/archbishop-desmond-tutu-support-leonard-peltier/
.

13.
Amy H. Sturgis, “Tale of Tears,”
Reason
(March 1999): 46–52.

14.
Robert Beltran, transcript of online chat (March 1999), quoted in Adare,
“Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction
, 45.

15.
Al Carroll,
Medicine Bags and Dog Tags: American Indian Veterans from Colonial Times to the Second Iraq War
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 24.

16.
Darcee L. McLaren and Jennifer E. Porter, “(Re)Covering Sacred Ground: New Age Spirituality in
Star Trek: Voyager
,” in Star Trek
and Sacred Ground: Explorations of
Star Trek,
Religion, and American Culture
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 106.

17.
Quoted in Adare,
“Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction
, 95.

18.
Ibid., 89.

19.
Lincoln Geraghty, “‘Neutralising the Indian': Native American Stereotypes in
Star Trek: Voyager
,”
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
4 (Autumn 2004),
http://www.baas.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=127%3Aissue-4-autumn-2004-article-1&catid=15&Itemid=11
.

John Putman

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airplanes piloted by al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center, bringing down the Twin Tower icons that dominated the downtown New York City skyline. In total, the hijacking of four planes by al-Qaeda led to the deaths of more than three thousand people, ushering in a “war on terror” that two months later began with American troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Two years later, viewers of
Star Trek: Enterprise
watched a probe launched by an alien group called the Xindi cut a swath of devastation from Florida to Venezuela. For the next year fans watched Captain Archer and the
Enterprise
crew hunt down the alien force and thwart another planned attack.

These two events—one real and the other fiction—have more in common than one might think. Just as
Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry used
Star Trek
to comment on issues of race, religion, and war in the 1960s,
Enterprise
writers drew inspiration from the 9/11 attacks to explore American reactions to terrorism. Beginning with
The Next Generation
through
Enterprise, Star Trek
's handling of terrorism in many ways similarly reflected American reactions and attitudes to very real episodes of foreign and domestic terrorism.

When
Next Generation
premiered in 1987, the United States was much more aware of international terrorism compared to the late 1960s when the original series was canceled. By the mid-1980s, the nation had firsthand experience with Islamic extremist terrorism, including the 1979 to 1980 Iran hostage crisis and the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon.
Star Trek
creators saw an opportunity to address this important political issue, and it soon became a topic of numerous
Next Generation
episodes and the backstory to much of
Deep Space Nine
. Perhaps mirroring American perceptions that terrorist activities occurred outside the United States,
Next Generation
and early
Deep Space Nine
episodes tended to depict terrorism as something that predominately affected others and involved the Federation only tangentially. By the mid-1990s this changed both for the Federation and the American people.

One of
Next Generation
's first efforts to address terrorism in a meaningful way was the 1990 episode “The High Ground.” While delivering humanitarian aid to the Rutians, Dr. Crusher is taken hostage by a charismatic terrorist named Kyril Finn. As leader of the Ansata, Finn detains Crusher in order to pressure the Federation to intervene in his people's independence movement against the ruling Rutians. Finn believes that by capturing Dr. Crusher, Picard and the Federation will intercede in order to get her back. Deliberately drawing upon real events in Northern Ireland,
Star Trek
creators attempted to explore the complicated nature of terrorism by making Finn a sympathetic figure. While an unrepentant terrorist, Finn is also an artist who is attracted to Crusher, thus adding depth to his character. Rutia, in contrast, is portrayed as an oppressive, rigid society with leaders willing to engage in widespread arrests of Ansatans, sometimes subjecting them to torture, in order to crush the rebellion.

As the story proceeds, viewers learn that the Rutian leader's hardened attitude toward the Ansata comes from witnessing terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a shuttle bus that killed sixty children. What makes this episode more effective is the struggle of the
Enterprise
crew to understand the use of terrorism to achieve political ends. When questioned by Crusher, Finn suggests that American revolutionary leader George Washington could be viewed as a terrorist: