Turning Visual Sovereignty Into Political Agency: Reclaiming Sovereignty and Modernity in Skins

Chris Eyre's film Skins characterizes a heartfelt relationship between Rudy and Mogie Yellow Lodge, two brothers who live on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. Set in modern-day America, the two brothers discuss a variety of issues that plague their community, ranging from alcoholism to rampant poverty, with Mogie being a victim of many of these issues. In fact, when Rudy turns into a vigilante for justice, Mogie requests that he blow the nose off of Mount Rushmore as a way to claim revenge for all of the suffering settler colonialism has created for indigenous communities.

The two protagonists straddle between violent events and spiritual connections, showcasing a modern representation of indigenous communities and their experience living on reservations crafted by the American government. However, more important than a mere representation of indigenous culture is what the existence of a film like Skins means for indigenous people. Knowing that Skins was produced by Eyre, an indigenous filmmaker, Eyre was able to employ visual sovereignty, creating media that allows indigenous people to shape and mold their own stories while also creating characters that are multidimensional and emotionally developing. More importantly, the film itself discusses other elements of sovereignty, both social and political, giving light to the fact that indigenous communities are relevant, seen, alive, and deserving of reclaiming autonomy that was taken away by colonizers who have created these unequal conditions.

Therefore, I will argue that Chris Eyre’s film Skins gracefully depicts an important modern representation of indigenous communities and gives visual sovereignty to the indigenous film creators themselves, and that this visual sovereignty as defined by Michelle H. Raheja’s “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)” allows the protagonist characters in the film to show that in addition to achieving visual sovereignty, indigenous communities can also potentially achieve social and political sovereignty. Raheja specifically refers to this visual sovereignty as a way to confront the demeaning assumptions that may come about the visual representations of Native Americans produced by colonized media while simultaneously challenging stereotypes that disempower these communities. By utilizing this terminology and analyzing how Skins’s Native American characters embrace historical heritage while enduring current colonial oppression, we can see how the film creates a crucial visual experience for non-indigenous viewers (that is produced by a Native American filmmaker himself) that suggests that Native American sovereignty is ongoing, continuous, and present. Furthermore, even with the presence of a film like Skins that is produced by an indigenous creator, this is just one of the many forms of complex indigenous representations in film media that showcases the struggles to achieve visual, political, and social agency in today’s modern world.

Refusing to Give Up: Skins Portrayal of Continuous Perseverance

When looking at Raheja’s idea of visual sovereignty, we see that there is opposition to visual sovereignty, and one where media, without the involvement of indigenous creators to tell their own stories, may disempower and create ideas that indigenous individuals do not deserve sovereignty in general. However, Skins shows that when there is involvement from indigenous voices, the depictions of indigenous people in film shift toward a more holistic and modern representation of resistance that honors their complex humanity. Looking back to Raheja’s research report “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),” she describes a scene from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North where an indigenous Inuit actor interacts with a white trader to understand the gramophone device. Raheja writes that the scene where the Inuit actor smiles is interpreted differently than in a non-Inuit context, where “while a non-Inuit audience might register Nanook’s smile as a marker of his alerity and childlike nature, Fatimah Tobin Rony asserts, ‘Recent research has shown that the Inuit found Flaherty and the filmmaking a source of great amusement…from the Inuit point of view he may be seen as laughing at the camera’” (Raheja 191) and that “when he is compared with the world of the trader he is depicted as awkward and lacking intelligence” (Raheja 192). These forms of media where indigenous individuals lack visual sovereignty are dangerous because they imply that if indigenous people are “animal-like” or “barbaric” as shown in the world of the trader, then it reaffirms the belief that they don’t deserve sovereignty across social and political realms due to this demonstrated inferiority.

In addition, other visual forms such as Edward S. Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans are also just as dangerous; Curtis’s photographic representations have no involvement or sovereignty from the indigenous individuals themselves. In fact, his intention, as written in Mishuana Goeman’s “Introduction to Indigenous Performances: Upsetting the Terrains of Settler Colonialism,” was to imprint Native Americans in history through the photographs due to “his self-stated belief that ‘they’ve crumbled from their pride and power into pitifully small numbers’” (Goeman 6). However, these pictures, while having the intention to preserve, also imply that Native Americans are disappearing forever and that these pictures “of vanishing Indians accompanied times marked by the brutal repression of tribal peoples across the globe as nation-states clamored for fixed boundaries and fixed populations in order to exploit land and labor easily and systematically” (Goeman 4). It could also imply that indigenous communities are “giving up” and aren’t taking initiative over their social and political autonomy, which could include their land. Goeman later writes that Ryan Red Corn’s short video Smiling Indians sought to challenge Curtis’s photographs, showing Native Americans as happy and joyful, all of which is produced from the lens of a Native American creator.

This is what the film Skins does with its production—showcasing characters who identify with their cultural heritage while living in the constraints of modern American society and its issues, all of which are written into a story by Eyre, an indigenous filmmaker. Furthermore in the film, Rudy as the vigilante attempts to topple colonized infrastructure that is negatively affecting indigenous people, such as the alcohol shop built by white owners to profit off of the high alcoholism rates, along with colonial monuments such as Mount Rushmore, and much more. By creating this film, Eyre is able to not only represent a contemporary characterization of indigenous people living in the present time, but who are also fighting to restore their social and political sovereignty regardless of how many years it has been since they have been formally colonized. This also strikes a stark difference between Skins versus Nanook of the North and Edward S. Curtis’s photographs—where the film Skins gives visual sovereignty to filmmaker Eyre to create representations of indigenous communities that are accurate and modern, showing that indigenous people are like any other human being and that they have not disappeared, and are in fact, still fighting harder than ever.

Pointing to the True Loss of Sovereignty: White Colonization

To examine the use and importance of visual sovereignty in Skins to challenge “disappearing” indigenous communities, it’s also important to discuss how white colonization led to the loss of the sovereignty for indigenous communities, and how media/theories developed by non-indigenous creators blame the loss of indigenous sovereignty on other causes such as inevitability or diseases. In Stephanie Nohelani Teves's chapter “The Afterlife of Princess Ka‘iulani,” in her book Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance, she gives a critical analysis of the film Princess Ka’iulani, specifically the final scene, where it “culminates with a slow-motion close-up of Ka’iulani horseback riding…explaining that many believe that Ka’iulani died of a broken heart. This constant focus on the heart, on the affective, emotive valences of ‘dying of a broken heart’ juxtaposed with the focus on Ka’iulani, indicates a kind of mourning for what could have been” (Teves 128). This scene is dangerous to the political and social sovereignty of indigenous communities, as it implies an inevitable outcome of Kanaka Maoli and subverts Ka’iulani as a weak figure and leader. This also further justifies the current U.S. occupation of the kingdom by showing that the land underneath Ka’iulani’s rule was destined for modernization through white colonizers because of its “less developed” nature, all while simultaneously glorifying the feminine representation and life of Ka’iulani. By leaving Ka’iulani’s legacy in the past, we as viewers of this media never have to truly think about our current involvement in Hawaii’s occupation and what we might owe to this indigenous community, and that any restoration of sovereignty is not possible.

Beyond the media, common stereotypes about indigenous weakness are also taught and spread through institutions of knowledge. In Nick Estes’s article “The Empire of All Maladies,” he writes that it’s common for the public to attribute the mass killings of indigenous communities to the “invisible, chances forces—above all, the diseases colonizers unwittingly carried with them—rather than to calculated warfare and theft” (Estes). Furthermore, research conducted by Estes suggests that “in what is now New Mexico, recent archaeological evidence suggests that a population decline among the Pueblo nations of the Southwest didn’t occur until a century after Spanish invasion in the mid-sixteenth century” (Estes). This disease theory is the main representation and idea that is taught in institutions to explain why indigenous communities are smaller. It ties this idea with the death and absence of these communities, and that their biological presence could not withstand colonization. However, there are clearly other factors that Estes cites such as European invasion and colonization that displaced indigenous people, not simply because of just inherent weakness.

Eyre’s film Skins, however, challenges the ideas above by showing that occupation, mass killing, and stolen land are not based on predetermined fate and disease, but rather, on the occupiers themselves. In the film’s modern representation of the indigenous community, it’s noted that white occupiers on native land sell the alcohol specifically to the reservation communities in order to capitalize and profit off of their addiction, putting them into continuous cycles of poverty. These media representations of the inevitability to lose land or weakness within indigenous communities are falsified and romanticized, and Skins provides a different perspective on these issues by focusing on the root cause: the colonizers who took away indigenous sovereignty. It is a film that gives filmmaker Eyres the visual sovereignty discussed, proving that the impoverished conditions of the reservations are not because of inherent cultural or racialized factors, but is in fact because of white oppression, such as the inducing cycles of alcoholism and poverty created by the white shop owners. Furthermore, Rudy’s burning of the liquor store is an act of reclaiming sovereignty by destroying structures that harm his community, showing that restoration of sovereignty is possible and is desired by today’s indigenous communities. Therefore, visual sovereignty claimed by Eyre in making Skins helps to create a narrative over not only the struggles, but also the hope for a future where indigenous communities can restore sovereignty over all aspects of their lives.

Examining How Films by Indigenous Directors Promote Sovereignty

To further highlight the power that Skins has in creating visual sovereignty and translating it into political and social ones, viewers can also look toward other films produced by indigenous creators such as Sydney Freeland’s film Drunktown’s Finest and Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Both films not only demonstrate the modern-day indigenous experience from different perspectives but also make connections to modern-day (and continuous) colonization, giving room for the possibility for indigenous individuals to gain social and political agency. For instance, in Drunktown’s Finest, we see a discussion between Felixia and her relative about her gender identity. Her relative notes that although it is difficult that the society she currently lives in does not fully embrace who she is, he cites that prior to colonization by white settlers, indigenous communities had a “third gender” that was celebrated and respected, and Felixia will always have a place in her indigenous heritage despite all the discrimination she faces.

This scene is important to note in the context of the film because Freeland herself is transgender, and this shows another aspect of the indigenous experience disrupted by white settler society, specifically in regards to identity. Felixia, going out into society in pursuit of her modeling dreams, isn’t just overthrowing a white societal expectation, but also allows her to represent her cultural heritage and social sovereignty. Therefore, Drunktown’s Finest, similar to what Skins represents, is a visually sovereign film that shows its protagonists capable of achieving social sovereignty, and that the process to restore this sovereignty is possible.

Hepburn and Tailfeathers’s film communicates a different but just as influential message: Colonization has not disappeared, and it is still affecting indigenous people today. In this film, we see indigenous women like Rosie struggle to trust systemized institutions (such as the police) to give her aid despite the abuse she experiences. Even though it would be easier as a survivor to seek help and resources, Rosie as an indigenous woman feels scared to confront these predominantly white spaces, noting that the police make her feel “uncomfortable.” The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is another example that visualizes indigenous people living in modernity, similar to what Skins is portraying. However, just as indigenous people exist, so does colonial power. White institutions such as shelters and the police are places where Rosie cannot find proper safety, and as a result, place indigenous women in cycles of continuous danger, similar to the alcoholism exhibited in Skins. Therefore, this film depicts how colonial forces are still affecting today’s indigenous communities, and that the fight for social sovereignty (in addition to the visual sovereignty that these films achieve) is still ongoing.

Taking Back Control

Indigenous communities have long been here, and despite all of the colonial structures put in place, the fight to reclaim sovereignty—both visual, political, and social—is far from over. The film Skins demonstrates that visual sovereignty specifically allows indigenous creators to create narratives and representations of their own communities that are grounded in multifaceted complexities, something that non-indigenous creators cannot capture the full breadth of. Furthermore, these representations are influential in communicating to non-indigenous audiences aspects of indigenous struggles and livelihood that are misconstructed by white representations. Forms of white media such as Nanook of the North and Edward S. Curtis’s photographs imply that indigenous communities are disappearing. Films such as Princess Ka’iulani and the disease theory suggest that indigenous sovereignty was bound to naturally crumble from interactions with European powers, and that this sovereignty can never be reclaimed. However, indigenous-produced films such as Drunktown’s Finest, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and Skins challenge these narratives, demonstrating the modern existence of indigenous protagonists along with the hope that these people could someday reclaim the sovereignty that they once had.

Works Cited

Estes, Nick. “The Empire of All Maladies.” The Baffler, 6 July 2020, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-empire-of-all-maladies-estes. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Eyre, Chris, director. Skins. 2002.

Freeland, Sydney, director. Drunktown's Finest. 2014.

Goeman, Mishuana. “Introduction to Indigenous Performances: Upsetting the Terrains of Settler Colonialism.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 35, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1-18.

Raheja, Michelle H. “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).” American Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 4, 2007, pp. 190-220.

Tailfeathers, Elle-Máijá, and Kathleen Hepburn, directors. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. 2019.

Teves, Stephanie Nohelani. “The Afterlife of Princess Ka‘iulani.” Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018, pp. 113–144.