Doe Boy

The film Doe Boy presented me with a unique perspective on the modern experience of being Indian in Oklahoma. In particular, I was really interested in the father-son dynamic portrayed in the movie, especially in relation to ideas of masculinity. The son's inability to live up to the somewhat macho, culturally conservative expectations of his father shed light on the issue, but more importantly, I feel like it's used as a vehicle to portray a certain racial tension between Hunter's white father and the Indian side of the family. The conflict in the beginning of the movie, particularly between Hunter's father and maternal grandfather, was interesting in comparison to Harjo's depiction of white-Indian race relations in Oklahoma, which are rarely portrayed as openly hostile, if also rarely fully enlightened or understanding.

In Doe Boy, this more open racial/cultural conflict is consistently presented using blood and hunting as symbols. In one scene, Hunter even describes his hemophilia as a "white disease" and blames his father's blood for his condition. Hunter's condition is also largely responsible for his inability to please his father by hunting with a rifle. (The fact that his father is later killed in a hunting accident seems to bear real significance, as well). Hunter's Cherokee grandfather, on the other hand, provides a cultural counterpoint through his stories of bow hunting. The two symbolic strains come together toward the end of the film when Hunter begins to bleed profusely while stalking a buck with the bow his grandfather helped him make.

My interpretation is that Redroad's film attempts to shed some light on racial/cultural identity struggles among modern Indians in Oklahoma, which is definitely something I can identify with on a certain level. A recent conversation I had with Eric really screwed with my racial self-identification, which I had previously thought to be pretty settled. The long and short of it is that, after trading some family stories, Eric recognized some of my family names from his research, and he seemed reasonably certain that they were Pee Dee and/or Lumbee. Not until yesterday did I have any kind of name to stick on my somewhat mysterious Indian relatives. What I'd been wondering for a good fifteen years was given to me (preliminarily) in about fifteen minutes, which was pretty mind-blowing. In one evening, I went from being "a little bit Indian of some kind or another" to "having some mixture of Pee Dee and Lumbee ancestry," which really changes things for me. And of course, I'm not sure whether I should feel Lumbee or not, especially given that Lumbee is, almost by definition, difficult/damn near impossible to define racially. I mean, I theoretically have a blood degree of about 1/16, but what the hell does that mean in the Lumbee context, if anything? If Lumbee is culturally defined, what does that look like, and do I qualify? There just don't seem to be any clear-cut answers, and to be honest, I'm really wrestling with it right now.