November 2005

Larry Littlebird, interviewed by Joanna Hearne
University of Arizona campus, 9/4/03 and by telephone 9/25/03

House Made of Dawn - Interview 1

HEARNE: I want to start out by inviting you to tell the story of your involvement with the 1972 film House Made of Dawn.

LITTLEBIRD: It's good that I tell you this from the beginning because of where it's brought me, the making of the film. Scott [Momaday] wrote an incredible book, and it was such a blessing that someone wanted to make a motion picture from it. I really wasn't thinking of ever getting into motion pictures. I had an idea that it would be fun to be in movies, riding a horse (laugh). That's what I thought would be the extent of my involvement.

I was living in and around Santa Fe at the time, when there were a lot of motion pictures coming into town, many of them Westerns. And my brothers were getting jobs as extras, riding horses. They were telling me how much fun it was, you know, to chase each other around all over the hills and do crazy stunts, and then they fed you so well (laugh). Plus you got paid for it. So it was exciting, and we were young and crazy.

We went to try out for the next movie that was going to come into town, because they encouraged me to do that with them. It was Warner Brothers coming in with their big production for the year, Anthony Quinn and a whole big cast of people. They were shooting—oh, this is interesting—Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian, which is a story about this area, Phoenix, and how the Indian people lost Phoenix. They were looking for extras, and so we went to the basement of the La Fonda hotel, and stood in a lineup. One of the assistant directors came up to me and he says, "Uh, do you think you can jump onto the back of a moving truck?" I said, "Yeah if it's not going too fast." (laugh). He says "Great! Oh great, we want you to do this little bit part." I think they picked me out of the lineup because, at the time, my hair was long. I tied it in a traditional manner, and young men in that period of time didn't have hair like that, like mine. It made me stand out, and I know that's what they were looking for—the visual look.

And so that's how I got into motion pictures. It was interesting and I was excited—"Wow, this is the way you make a movie." Then one of the things I noticed was—my gosh—how much money they were spending! And then I got to meet a lot of the different actors that were part of that production. One of them was Tony Bill, and he already knew about House Made of Dawn, the book, because he had tried to purchase the rights to it when it was still in galleys. He had an interest in producing it as a motion picture, but somebody else had beat him to the rights. He gave me the book, and he said, "Read this book, it's an incredible story, and you're perfect for the lead." Ok, all right. I mean, on the set everybody you meet is telling you, "Stick with me kid I'm going to make you a star." And so I just said "Oh thank you."

But I started reading the book and I was blown away by Scott's writing. This was the first time I had ever read anything where the reality of Pueblo Indian life and thought and feelings was expressed in such an incredible, beautiful manner. I went around with the book in my hands re-reading passages to people and tapping people on the shoulder and saying "Look! Look at this! Look at this!" I was reading it to everybody, not just on the set but everywhere I would go. I was just blown away by it. I liked the idea that maybe somebody might be making a movie but I just didn't see myself as having anything to do with it, especially since I was just finding out about the way motion picture got made.

It's pretty dismal being on a big set. I went to Hollywood and that clinched it for me. I saw the way people were treated, with not much respect behind the scenes, and what an ego-center it is. I left that production and just came on home. But I kept thinking about that book and how beautiful it was. And I said, you know, if it gets made into a movie, I'd like to have something to do with it, maybe just be around the edges of it—at least try to advise them as to what not to do with it, so it can stay as beautiful as it is.

When I came back it was Indian market—my brother Harold is a potter—that year he made this incredibly beautiful big pot with a lid…the photographers came around and they wanted a photograph of the pot. Harold wasn't anywhere around, so they asked me to hold it, and I just kinda held it out, hoping that they were going to take a picture of the pot. Well, the next day there was my photograph on the front page of the New Mexican, in color: "Harold Littlebird and his award-winning pot."

Scott Momaday lived in Santa Fe at the time. His wife Gail cut that photograph out, and she mailed it to the producer who was in LA, and he looked at it and said, "That's the guy. That's the guy, find him." Well, in the meantime, I went antelope hunting. And one day from antelope camp when I went to refill my gas tank, I called home, and my wife told me, "They're looking for you." I said "Who?" "These people who want to produce House Made of Dawn. The producer's in New Mexico, and they're scouting locations and they're looking for you." I said, "Well, tell 'em I'm antelope hunting, I'll be home in two weeks."

Sure enough, when I got home, there was an invitation for me to go to Scott's house. He lived just across the arroyo from where we were presently living in Santa Fe. I didn't know that's where he lived all this time. So, I met the producer, and director, Richardson Morse, and I kind of interviewed him I think—he tells me I did—because I was wondering, "If they're going to make a movie, do they know what are the good parts? How are they going to handle all this stuff?"

HEARNE: What were the good parts that you were telling Rick to film?

LITTLEBIRD: It wasn't so much about filming as much as the treatment of the total story and treatment of the people who would be cast, the Native people. If he was thinking he'd get himself a Pueblo Indian to play this lead role, but then cast from the line of people in Hollywood, Native people, or even non-Native people in Hollywood who might pass as Indian—if he was going to do that, then I already knew where it was going to go. But he had an interest in casting right from New Mexico, and he took my suggestions of relating it to people of the Pueblo communities, people who had the right sensibilities.

HEARNE: Why was it important that Native people play these roles—or people from a specific community?

LITTLEBIRD: Well from my perspective, the difference is, for example, in the Pueblo culture, there are things that are just correct in the sensibilities. It's ingrained in them, in the people. We have an unspoken understanding of presence. And that presence, if it's going to be brought onto the screen, has to play itself. You cannot duplicate it. You can bring in very good actors, and they can learn mannerisms and they can learn colloquialisms and they can learn ways of speaking that are peculiar to these people. But when they're viewed on the screen, they stand out rather than speak from the content of Pueblo people's history, thousands of years of being. And so those are the sensibilities that I think filmmakers wanting to tell stories of Native American people have to be aware of.

HEARNE: How did the character of Abel resonate for you, and how did you draw on what you knew to play the character?

LITTLEBIRD: Oh man, when I read the book, I knew everybody in that book firsthand—well, it's true, these are my people. I had so many close associations with the Abel character, on all levels, everything from his development as a child, to everything that he experienced and I'd witnessed in my own close relations and close friends. I could identify with it. I could, more importantly for an actor, become sympathetic to the person to the point of having empathy. And it was not hard to translate, for me. All I had to do—and really this was the role—all I had to do was feel it, and allow that to be seen. If I did anything in the movie, that's all I did. I felt, and the camera recorded my feeling. I did it instinctively, I didn't try to train for it.

HEARNE: You also talked [earlier] about drawing on your own dramatic idioms to play the role. Could you expand on that a little bit? Were there some dramatic traditions that you had to go on or was it a more personal and intimate kind of empathy with the character?

LITTLEBIRD: Pueblo culture has a great deal of dramatic experience. The dramas that take place in our ceremonies, you have to train for them and you have to prepare for them and you have to understand how to communicate. And that's been going on for thousands of years; it has its own language and its own forms. The people are at ease in it, and I was at ease in it. And I knew that's what I brought with me, and I was just given an opportunity to express them. My expression was very instinctive—I didn't try to analyze it, to any great degree—I think now I can coach other people, and I can use my experience and help them get in touch with things that I know that we both know.

One of the most rewarding experiences of House Made of Dawn was watching my uncle [Mesa Bird], who plays Abel's grandfather…that's my father's generation, and I watched him bring all these things I'm describing now, express that in this very contemporary form. And he was powerful.

HEARNE: This brings us to the topic of Mesa Bird learning his lines orally, right? He wasn't reading the script?

LITTLEBIRD: What was going on was [that] he was being told the gist of the story, and the gist of the scene, and then he was being allowed to improvise, to communicate what needed to get across. I think a good example of that is the scene [after] Abel has gotten home, and he and his grandpa are re-establishing their relationship after Abel being away at war, and Abel is cleaning that bridle and the old man is drilling turquoise beads.

HEARNE: I remember the scene.

LITTLEBIRD: It's so typical, because there's silence. There's silence. They're involved in their own activities, yet they're sitting side by side, and it isn't until awhile that they begin to speak to each other, and the old man speaks to Abel. This is what I mean about those sensibilities—he so understands the relationship between grandfather and grandson. He starts teasing Abel about cleaning this bridle for the horse. Abel's been gone for awhile, and the old man's got a new horse that he doesn't think this young kid is going to be able to ride, and he starts teasing him about it and it's just wonderful. There's a relational context that's so steeped in care and love for his grandson, but it's not, "Oh, grandson, I'm so proud of you!" which is what you typically see on the screen.

HEARNE: What happened when it was released in theaters? Where did it play, who saw the film?

LITTLEBIRD: I'd been watching the outtakes; I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that. Actors don't like to do that, it usually hinders them. I wasn't an actor (laugh) so I didn't know that it could affect you adversely. I liked watching outtakes. I liked seeing how a story was being built. So I saw the film a lot, during the whole process, and then when it was finally getting to the final-cut versions, I saw those with different audiences as well.

But the screening that I really remember the most was close to the last version. My relatives who were in the movie with me were all flown out to L.A. and invited to a screening, which was the largest public screening, at that time, for the film. It was in a studio, I forgot where—MGM or somewhere—where they rented the theater, and it was a big audience. I remember two things. The entire audience was blown away by the presence of my uncle on the screen—they couldn't get over it. What I had always believed came true—the Native presence, when it's allowed to express itself, is very powerful. I knew that that's what was going on, and it helped me to be encouraged. I know that movies can be made about Indians and they're going to look different, they're going to sound different, and this is the beginning of it.

And then generally the audiences were very appreciative, even though they didn't know what they were really viewing because it was a culture in the middle of America that nobody really understood or had much contact with. The story was a universal story, but told in this context of tribal America; it was not easily recognizable because general audiences had pre-conceived notions of who Indian people are, and so there was a stereotype that was immediate. There was an appreciation for the performances of the Indian people who came on the screen, but I don't believe that there was an immediate sense of "Wow, this is a new storytelling form," because people didn't recognize it.

….Language was a question in House Made of Dawn as well, because we could've gone to subtitles. It could've been in Pueblo language, Keresan, that is our language. However, it was cumbersome and more expensive to do it that way. But then, one of the ways that we handled that was for Mesa—the grandfather, Santiago—to speak using his own language, but the responses could come back in English and help the audience understand what was being spoken. And I believe it was effective.

HEARNE: I thought that was a brave move. I didn't understand what he was saying, and there's a way in which that makes some of the film unavailable to a white viewer. Hollywood films are not interested in shutting off part of the film, they're all about accessibility.

LITTLEBIRD: That's where in House Made of Dawn there are hints of the integrity of tribal communication. A lot of tribal communication is more in the unspoken than in what's actually said. And the responses come in silence. It's a mulling over, and the response doesn't have to be immediate. There will be a response.

HEARNE: There are a lot of silences in House Made of Dawn. Abel has very few lines in the book, and he doesn't speak very much in the film. That's part of this inarticulateness that is plaguing him in the book, but it's also, as you're saying, part of a relational style.

LITTLEBIRD: Well, I just want to comment on that opening scene—where Abel is sitting there in his grandpa's house and the old man is dying. The way in which that scene got shot and plays as an opening to a movie—immediately you sense that this is a whole different world. For me, that scene is a hint at what Native filmmaking is really all about. If you could start at that level, and begin to express the depths of what you're viewing in those first opening sequences—wow, you're headed in the right direction….One of the things I learned from that is that the best images are those that are silent, the transitional ones that help you get the importance of a sequence, to make the transition to the next one.

….We don't have enough examples to tell a full story using that method. When that happens then we'll have what I would call a Native American film. Now if the writer, the director, the producer, are all Native, and they can get along—I mean agree on a common vision—and the producer has raised the money to allow the director and the writer to realize the vision, then I think this thing can evolve. I think [Atanarjuat-]The Fast Runner's an example of that, where a vision gets realized. But House Made of Dawn is, in my limited knowledge of the history of motion pictures, one of the first examples of moving in that direction.

HEARNE: You're describing a real collaboration between yourself, Rick Morse, and the people who are producing the film.

LITTLEBIRD: Right, and that's what House Made of Dawn woke me up to. It was the extreme opposite of Warner Brothers. Here was this little group of people all working together, and what I saw was, "Oh, that's like at the Pueblo when we're going to clean the ditches." The whole community is involved—I mean even those people who don't go out to actually put the shovel in their hand and clean out the dirt and the weeds and trash out of the ditch. We know what our common vision is, and the common vision is the flow of water which brings life to our community, and gives us life. That's a common vision, and everybody is connected to it.

That's when I began to glimpse that, "Oh, you could make movies like that, where everybody that's part of the set is tied into the vision." And if they are, you're going to get better sound, you're going to get better lighting, it's all going to be moving toward that. Because productions try to do that, but the reality is the departments are truly departments; they don't overlap in feel or in community. They're not involved. And so I began to see that…if you could get enough Native people working together, there was a possibility that a whole new methodology for making film could become available.

And essentially, that's the project that George [Burdeau] and I later went to work on—The Real People series—it became really the first filmmaking by a core of Native people—and we were part of that. In Canada it's a different story; they've always had the Canadian Film Board which has helped Native people get films up on the screen.

….The stories are there, wonderful stories. I met a guy at the Institute of American and Arts, a writing student. He brought me a story: "Is this any good?" Man, he blew me away—see, there are people out there, they got it! They just haven't had the opportunity yet. If there was some way in my power that I could've taken that kid and said, "Let's go do this, this is what you have to do, it's going to take us awhile, might take us 5 or 6 years, maybe 10—look how long it took to make Gandhi. Are you ready? Let's go do it."

House Made of Dawn - Interview 2

HEARNE: When we first talked about the film you talked a little bit about indigenous languages as having a very precise relationship with cultural values. I wonder if you would talk a little more about that.

LITTLEBIRD: I'm always being made aware because I'm constantly going back and forth in translation. I could glean how this would be communicated in English, what is this word in my language, what is it referencing. And I know Scott Momaday is very much aware of this. I think one of the best examples of his consciousness of this concept of language and the values that are inherent in it are in his book [The Way to] Rainy Mountain, because he's dealing directly with his own ancestry there. And I know when I'm dealing with my own lineage that's when it becomes most clear. The value of a Native perspective is a spiritual context; this is so apparent in any of the songs, any of the stories that are communicated among the people. It's a different kind of a listening than just everyday conversation, and yet the everyday conversation cannot help but be influenced by that deeper consciousness.

English is not used in the same concept unless it is tied to religion, and then when it gets into religion, it becomes so specific that it begins to create theology, a category which then removes the actuality of living to a very intellectualized concept of life.

I believe that this is one of the things that is most apparent in the denominations of Christianity—it's broken into all of these different parts, which is a very Western way of categorizing the world. As Native people, we don't categorize the world—the world is one. It's a whole. Life is a whole. Our concept of a creator fits in it with us; we're not separate. Christ is available, and always has been, and always will be—it's us who have to make ourselves available to receive it. In Scott's work he deals with a lot of those concepts. I really do believe that House Made of Dawn is a perception of Cain and Abel, Abel being this Native person, and Cain the whole of American society.

This makes me think of the character of Tosamah. Momaday making this character was very prescient, because people have emerged who were a lot like Tosamah, coming out of Oklahoma and other places. I've heard my dad and my uncle speak about the Christian Indians that they met at boarding school, that these people have a very strong faith, and they'd even met some of these charismatic leaders, who are leading in their own denominations. Tosamah is just more extremely flamboyant. They were flamboyant within their own times; in the novel and in the movie, the character is flamboyant, and today there are some of those kinds of leaders. They come out of Indian country, and they're still striving for a sense of their own identity as Indian people who have accepted Christ.

This is funny—I've already told you how I came to be in that role [Abel]. Looking back, it's like, I can see that, oh my gosh, that wasn't coincidence. And it's almost as if I could be Abel, in recovery. I believe, because I've seen it, that Native people who come out of alcoholism in those extreme cases—they were just a down and out drunk one day, and the very next day, they stop drinking and never touch another drop—they become very gifted spiritual people. I've seen them again and again and again. And there's a hope in that for Native people.

Looking back historically in my life, the book come along and then the movie and my role in it, and it's all appeared to me very naturally. I've gravitated towards the spiritual, as expressed in that medium of literature and the medium of motion picture. I'm now expressing it in actuality. And it's just a natural progression of something that I see as God-sent.

I believe that one of the struggles for Native people is to get that sense of perspective in their creative lives, because they've been under such oppression that their artistic expression, whether they're aware of it in the more conscious level or not, has suffered from a lack of being free. It's still hampered by unresolved anger, all those things that come to a people where the oppression is so great that you just resolve to be like a piece of driftwood. And wherever the current is going, you'll find yourself drifting. You're out there in the current, like Abel. He comes to L.A., and he just dives into that deep water, that whole lost existence of big city life; you know, you're just swept away....I think there's still a struggle for many Native people to come to some kind of determination for self. For me, that's part of the hope of a story like House Made of Dawn, because the very title is one of restoration. In my version of what happened to Abel, I believe he moved on to restoration.

HEARNE: I haven't really heard anyone talk about the actual spiritual value of Native filmmaking in quite this way; it's interesting to me to hear the way you're addressing a spiritual and restorative aspect of the literature and the films.

LITTLEBIRD: I believe that the oral tradition, the spoken word is alive, and that it frees you to action. It's not like you have all these stories, and so they're in your memory. No, the words free you to be reminded of all the stories that you have as a resource, from which you can make choices that give you action toward freedom. For me that's what our language is all about.

Now I'm going to say something that may sound contradictory. You see, whatever language a person has, this reality is true in that language. And therefore, it's not because I have Keres as my language. That just happens to be who I am and that's helped me, but it can happen in English—if I can grasp at the words, the spoken word is alive—and that's a universal understanding and recognition.

HEARNE: What about your later film career? You went on to make one of the first all-Native-produced documentaries.

LITTLEBIRD: House Made of Dawn was a turning point for me, because what I discovered was that it's possible to make motion picture without the encumbrance of "Hollywood production." Here was an independent film, here was somebody that was spending their own money, and now a different kind of movie could be produced. And so it showed me that it was possible to use this very powerful medium and do it differently.

And then when House Made of Dawn was over, it was a pretty incredible opportunity that was opened to me....film school in Santa Fe, the Anthropology Film Center…And because the approach to filmmaking was the telling of stories, it suddenly opened my eyes—that there were many people who knew the technical side of film, but there were very few with any kind of worthwhile story to tell, or very few who could tell a story well. That's when I really became interested, and it was after my time going to school that I began to really understand that there were such a wealth of stories—well actually I always knew that—within indigenous people, but there were also these incredible storytellers within indigenous people; they just had never been given the opportunity, or shown the technology in simple terms.

....Rick has always been so generous and, one of the things that he's always said to me is that, "If there are other stories out of House Made of Dawn that you want to pursue," he goes, "just go for it." And I do. I'd love to do the story of Santiago, the grandfather. That is an incredible story. It's a whole other period of time. What does a man like that—of deep conviction and tradition—what does he do with a grandson who just wrenches his heart? There's just so many sequences that would just be spell-binding for an audience because they come out of a culture that no one has ever witnessed. He's that man, and that sets the tone for the values, and what comes against those values is being expressed by his grandson.

Image credits: Larry Littlebird - photograph by Peter Morse © 1970