Resisting Spiritual Appropriation:
A Review of the Trailer for the Upcoming Film "Dreamcatcher"

By Theryn Kigvamasud'Vashti, Community Organizer, The Black People's Project

Recently, for a second time I saw the movie Signs" with a girlfriend. She noted that she knew that the film was going to be a horror film after seeing that all of the movie promos for upcoming films included mostly horror movies due out this fall. One of the trailers we discussed was the advertisement for the picture "Dreamcatcher" a new movie based on the novel by Stephen King and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Dreamcatcher is the story of "four young friends who perform a heroic act ‹ and are changed forever by the uncanny powers they gain in return. Years later the friends, now men, are on a hunting trip in the Maine woods when they are overtaken by a blizzard, a vicious storm in which something much more ominous moves ..." (dreamcatchermovie.warnerbros.com/")

The Dreamcatcher trailer begins with cuts between a bird's eye view of a single car traveling along a road in a winter forest and a extreme close-up of a "dream catcher" while the voiceover announces the premise of the film:

"There are those who believe your dreams have great power and to remain safe you must sleep underneath a dream catcher. The legend says pleasant dreams pass through the center while nightmares become entangled in its web. This time something evil slips through ..."

This is then followed by cuts of different scenes that build suspense while audio text of various scenes are laid on top of the visual text. One sound bite that stands out is when Morgan Freeman, one of this picture's stars, says "The thought of killing Americans turns my stomach." And I'm thinking "really ... that's funny because the dream catcher is reminding me of all of the Americans killed by European settlers." The sound bits seems so arrogant and blatantly absence of a consciousness about the use of the dream catcher which is billed as the pentacle of the storyline.

The whole trailer is about a minute and a half to two minutes long. The thoughts that come to my mind in this brief space of time and multiple visual images and audio texts are less about the movie and more about the cultural appropriation of Native spirituality.

Last summer I was attending a work-related training in Portland, OR at a fancy mountain resort. In the kitchen of the dinning room was a dream catcher. Two of the Indigenous people who were also attending the training were incensed by the presence of a dream catcher especially when it was apparent that no Native people were even working at the resort. My two friends complained the kitchen staff that the dream catcher had to come down and used the moment as a teaching opportunity to enlighten the white staff about the cultural appropriation of Native Spirituality.

In the book "Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods" Andrea Smith writes that "activist/scholar Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway) notes, intolerance toward Indian religions cannot be addressed by educating White people about our spiritual beliefs, because our religious oppression is not based on ignorance but on the seizure of Indian lands upon which Indian spiritualities are based. It is not an accident that Congress allows the use of peyote by the Native American Church but will not pass a law protecting Indian sacred sites, since the latter would entail a threat to U.S. government corporate control over Native lands. Writing defenses of Indian spirituality outside of a discussion of land claims not only leaves us open to cultural appropriation, but diverts attention from the central issues of sovereignty over our lands and resources."

A local example of the lack of protection of sacred sites in Washington State is the treatment of Snoqualmie Falls, which is a sacred site for the Snoqualmie people. Leah Henry-Tanner, Executive Director of the Puget Sound Monitoring Project says, "Currently the Snoqualmie tribe is battling an electric company that owns and runs the hydroelectric dame, which regulates the river flow and adversely affects the falls. Another example of Indigenous sovereignty violations is the contamination of the Columbia River. The fish in the Columbia River are contaminated with PCB's, pesticides, and heavy metals among other nasty contaminants. This is directly impacting the health of not only Indigenous people but anyone who eats the fish. Further, the Indigenous fishermen are unable to sell their fish and are therefore unable to provide for their family. The salmon is not just food for Indigenous people who fish along the Columbia River but in fact an integral part of religious ceremonies."