There are hundreds of Westerns, but virtually none which center Native American stories or perspectives. Some movies, like John Fords The Searchers (1956) or the Kevin Costner vehicle Dances With Wolves (1990), acknowledge the history of violence against Indigenous people, and include native characters or storylines. But these films still feature white stars, and view native people primarily through white eyes. This is so consistent, and so ubiquitous, that the Western as a genre could even be defined as narratives about the American West presented from the point of view of colonizers.
Space westerns have a more abstract relationship to the actual American West, but the tropes are much the same. The Mandalorian and Star Trek ask viewers to identify with explorers and pioneers, not with the explored and pioneered. Movies like Outland are as white as their Western predecessors, set in a landscape pre-emptied of Indigenous people. There are only white people in spacejust as, in Westerns, there are often, counter-historically, only white people in America.
The 2016-2017 Australian independent television series Clevermanisnt an exception to the colonial perspective of space Westerns, primarily because it isnt a Western. Instead, it can be seen as a kind of anti-Western. By focusing on the stories of Indigenous people, it turns Western genre pleasures inside-outand shows why those pleasures are only possible when you strap on the colonizers gunbelt.
Cleverman is a quasi-superhero narrative set in a future dystopia in which an Aboriginal race, the fur-covered, superstrong Hairypeople, live in uneasy coexistence with humans. Most Hairypeople are confined to a ghettoized neighborhood called the Zone, which is heavily policed by patrols and high-tech surveillance equipment. The hero of the series is a half-Gumbaynggirr man named Koen West (Hunter Page-Lockhard) who discovers that he has the invulnerability and powers of the Cleverman. He tries to use his abilities to protect the Hairypeople from their human oppressors and to thwart his ambitious, envious brother Waruu (Rob Collins.)
Its not surprising that Cleverman never became a hit series. Creator Ryan Griffin used Aboriginal legends and stories as inspiration, and while the mythology is fascinating, it strikes less of a chord with international audiences than more instantly familiar, corporate superheroes or the ubiquitous iconography of Westerns. Its determination to be true to Indigenous experience made it virtually impossible for the series to reach a truly mass audience.
Cleverman is also just a bleak, downbeat show. The Hairypeople lived on the land before humans came, but now they are hemmed in, pinned down, imprisoned and hounded to death. Like actual Indigenous people, the Hairypeople are penned into squalid reservations, thrown into prisons, and trafficked into brothels. The humans demand they abandon their culture and their powers; one of the only ways out of the Zone for the Hairypeople is for them to agree to be injected with a formula that robs them of their fur and their strength. The Zone is crowded and miserable, but if the Hairypeople try to move into property outside the Zone, they are arrested.
Watching Cleverman can be an intense, difficult, and claustrophobic experience. The Hairypeople are penned in both by walls and by history. The show is science fiction, but reality clutches at the narrative like fingers around a throat. The humiliations and the violence that the Hairypeople suffer all have real-life precedents. Colonizers kill children; they put people in prison and beat them; they rape. The experience of colonization is an experience of restriction: The Hairypeoples lives are a shrinking circle. They are being crushed out of existence.
Colonization means constriction for the Hairypeople. But for their tormentors, it means freedom, and more room to expand. This is most obvious in the storyline of Jarrod Slade (Iain Glen), a wealthy white Australian who is studying the Hairypeople in order to appropriate their powers for himself. He manages to create a serum which gives him Hairypeople strength, endurance, and speed, allowing him to leap across the Sydney cityscape with exuberant glee.
Again, this isnt a Western. But Slade stepping on Indigenous people to boost his way into his own freedom and self-actualization is nonetheless an instructive dynamic. The allure of the Western, and the space western, is a sense of freedom and powerof breaking out of the dreary, normal, everyday grind of mundane business and lighting out for the territories. The Starship Enterprise or Millennium Falcon zipping across the screen has the same allure as Clint Eastwood riding off into the sunset. The joy is in the feeling that youre headed somewhere new and big and empty, where rules do not apply. Like the tourists in Michael Crichtons Westworld, fans of the Western get to take pleasure in a fantasy of shooting and screwing and swaggering with no consequences and no restrictions.
Cleverman is a valuable reminder, though, that opening up the frontier for one person often means closing it down for someone else. You can ride where you will in that vast and empty landscape only because someone forcibly emptied it out, and tossed its original inhabitants into the Zone. John Wayne and Han Solo and Captain Kirk are indomitable and larger than life for the same reason that Slade is: Theyve stolen someone elses spirit, and injected it into their own veins.
This isnt to say that Westerns arent fun. Its to say the opposite. Westerns, and space westerns, are really fun! Freedom, empowerment, discovery, shooting the bad guys down: those are enjoyable fantasies. People like them, and for good reason. But its sometimes worth considering whats left out of a genre as well as whats in it, and to think about what truths we clear away when we make room to enjoy ourselves. A space western that really centered and gave weight to Indigenous experiences wouldnt be a space western anymore. Instead, like Cleverman, it might be a dystopia.
Noah Berlatsky is the author ofWonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics(Rutgers University Press).
Read more:
The Costs of Colonization: Cleverman as an Anti-Western - tor.com
- A Murder At The End Of The World's Retreat Guests Explained: Who ... - Screen Rant - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- The Moon People: Assimilation and the Jewish Literary Transvestite - Tablet Magazine - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- Will two generations of Moon walkers shake hands? - OnlySky Media - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- SpaceX Prepares for Second Starship Launch as it Eyes Moon and ... - OPP.Today - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- Invincible Season 2 Episode 3 Review - But Why Tho? - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- TV Recap: "A Murder at the End of the World" - Chapter 1: Homme ... - Laughing Place - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- Thursday: Hili dialogue Why Evolution Is True - Why Evolution Is True - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- Space Habitat Market to grow by USD 169.38 million from 2023 to ... - PR Newswire - November 18th, 2023 [November 18th, 2023]
- Cosmic conservation: Why experts argue portions of the solar ... - Salon - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- We havent even set foot on Mars and we are already setting up a ... - Softonic EN - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- NASA's MOXIE Experiment Triumphs in Generating Oxygen ... - The Weather Channel - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- ECOVIEWS: Thermal vents produce bizarre life forms | Features ... - Charleston Post Courier - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- Elon Musk's 'most powerful rocket ever made' is finally ready for launch - Technext - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- What's the Bare Minimum Number of People for a Mars Habitat? - Universe Today - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- India may be moving to change its name to ancient Sanskrit term ... - FOX Bangor/ABC 7 News and Stories - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- My Nuclear Family - The Good Men Project - September 11th, 2023 [September 11th, 2023]
- The MCU Multiverse Is Continuing A Great Marvel Trend - Screen Rant - April 30th, 2023 [April 30th, 2023]
- How Starship Will Change Humanity Soon - by Tomas Pueyo - Uncharted Territories - April 30th, 2023 [April 30th, 2023]
- China is taking 3D printers to the moon - TechRadar - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Mae Martins SAP showcases affirming, optimistic humor - The Wellesley News - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Of Moths and Marsupials - bioGraphic - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Teachers Rejoice! OpenAI Released Tool to Catch ChatGPT Writing - January 31st, 2023 [January 31st, 2023]
- Are You Smarter Than ChatGPT? OpenAI Tool Aims to Detect AI-Generated ... - January 31st, 2023 [January 31st, 2023]
- What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) ? | IBM - January 31st, 2023 [January 31st, 2023]
- Overview | Earth's Moon NASA Solar System Exploration - January 27th, 2023 [January 27th, 2023]
- Moon Phases | Moon in Motion Moon: NASA Science - January 27th, 2023 [January 27th, 2023]
- All About the Moon | NASA Space Place NASA Science for Kids - January 27th, 2023 [January 27th, 2023]
- January 21, 2023: Closest New Moon Since the Middle Ages - January 27th, 2023 [January 27th, 2023]
- Colonization of Europa - Wikipedia - January 4th, 2023 [January 4th, 2023]
- American Colonization Society | abolitionist organization - January 4th, 2023 [January 4th, 2023]
- Deimos (moon) - Wikipedia - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- Everything NASA is taking to the moon before colonizing Mars - December 21st, 2022 [December 21st, 2022]
- Chinese Lunar Exploration Program - Wikipedia - December 21st, 2022 [December 21st, 2022]
- Moon - Wikipedia - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- Artemis is our first step toward space colonization - Big Think - November 21st, 2022 [November 21st, 2022]
- Supermoon - Wikipedia - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Captain Kirk Went to Space and Saw Absolutely Nothing - TheStranger.com - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- We'koqma'q First Nation helps keep tradition alive with ribbon skirt bank - CBC.ca - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Review: Andor Episode 6 gives a heartbreaking victory to the rebels of Aldhani - Winter is Coming - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- National Indigenous Peoples Day 2022: Everything to Know - Newsweek - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Who's the enemy here? - The Korea JoongAng Daily - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Avatar: Where We Were and Where We're at The Minnesota Republic - Kent Kaiser - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- Glitching Time and Time-Based Media The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail - October 6th, 2022 [October 6th, 2022]
- New Artwork on the Toronto Sign Pays Tribute to the Rights of Indigenous Language Speakers Worldwide - Storeys - September 29th, 2022 [September 29th, 2022]
- Is it finally time for a permanent base on the moon? - Popular Science - September 22nd, 2022 [September 22nd, 2022]
- Venice Review: In Viaggio is a Fascinating Rorschach Test of the Pope - The Film Stage - September 22nd, 2022 [September 22nd, 2022]
- Bon Apptit's 2022 Heads of the Table Awards - Bon Appetit - September 22nd, 2022 [September 22nd, 2022]
- Coast Salish sweat-lodge keeper welcomes all to share in healing - Broadview Magazine - September 22nd, 2022 [September 22nd, 2022]
- In Guam, even the dead are dying: the US military is building on the graves of our ancestors - The Guardian - September 22nd, 2022 [September 22nd, 2022]
- Living Underground on the Moon: How Lava Tubes Could Aid Lunar Colonization - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- Colonization of the Solar System - Wikipedia - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- Under Capitalism, the Colonization of Space Means the ... - Jacobin - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- A New World of Heavenly Art - The Epoch Times - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week - Book Riot - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- Diving into student research at the Summer 2022 SEA Fellows Symposium - UMaine News - University of Maine - University of Maine - August 25th, 2022 [August 25th, 2022]
- Skywatch for the week of August 22, 2022 - WQCS - August 23rd, 2022 [August 23rd, 2022]
- Law alum's career heads into orbit with unexpected passion for space law - University of Calgary - August 23rd, 2022 [August 23rd, 2022]
- Heres where we might really be able to set up a colony on the Moon - BGR - August 10th, 2022 [August 10th, 2022]
- Elon Musk's Flawed Vision and the Dangers of Trusting Billionaires - TIME - August 10th, 2022 [August 10th, 2022]
- Travel Bug: You don't have to be a diver to enjoy Palau - Pacific Daily News - August 10th, 2022 [August 10th, 2022]
- Avatar Was James Cameron's Tribute To A Legend Of VFX Filmmaking - /Film - July 31st, 2022 [July 31st, 2022]
- Sonic Youth : Sister, EVOL, Bad Moon Rising - The trilogy | Treble - Treble - July 31st, 2022 [July 31st, 2022]
- NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon - The Register - July 27th, 2022 [July 27th, 2022]
- Will 3D Printing Be Used for the First Commercial Mission to Mars? - 3Dnatives - July 27th, 2022 [July 27th, 2022]
- Abe Leaves Behind Complex Legacy in Japan's Neighborhood - The Diplomat - July 27th, 2022 [July 27th, 2022]
- Moon Off-Roading In The Wild GM Electric Car That Makes Hummer EV Look Normal - SlashGear - June 30th, 2022 [June 30th, 2022]
- A conversation with a poet whose home burned to the ground - Yale Climate Connections - June 30th, 2022 [June 30th, 2022]
- Before Langley Air Force Base: The muddy history of Shellbanks, Sherwood and other plantations of Elizabeth City County - Daily Press - June 30th, 2022 [June 30th, 2022]
- colonization of Australia | Britannica - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- NASA Reveals Three Design Concepts For Nuclear Power On The Moon - SlashGear - June 24th, 2022 [June 24th, 2022]
- Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Of Wazhazhe Land and Language: The Ongoing Project of Ancestral Work - Literary Hub - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- The Oddest of Organs: A Brief History of the Tongue - Literary Hub - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- 'For All Mankind' Season 3: Episode 2 - Recap And Ending, Explained - Who Was Chosen To Head The Mars Mission? | DMT - DMT - June 20th, 2022 [June 20th, 2022]
- New moon - Wikipedia - June 11th, 2022 [June 11th, 2022]
- Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Skeptical About Mars Colonization - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Bitcoin And The Great Filter - Bitcoin Magazine - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Art Attack: Where to Find Art on First Friday Weekend in Denver - Westword - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Scramble Campbell on His Two Decades as Red Rocks' Artist-in-Residence - Westword - June 3rd, 2022 [June 3rd, 2022]
- Pro and Con: Space Colonization | Britannica - May 31st, 2022 [May 31st, 2022]