Smoke Signals Essay

Cultural traditions, stereotypes, and history can have a big impact on who we are as people. Among other things, these elements can change our personalities, physical appearances, and relationships. In the film Smoke Signals, the characters struggle with their own identities because of their perceptions of the identities of their ancestors. However, these characters also find power and meaning through their culture and history, which ultimately brings them together and causes them to realize that their history is not completely as it seems. In this essay, we’ll be taking a look at the challenges of the characters in Smoke Signals, as well as the triumphs.

There are two main characters in this film: Victor and Thomas. Victor is stoic and generally unkind as a person, especially towards Thomas, who is a more cheerful, though much more annoying character. In one particular scene, Victor tells Thomas that he needs to loosen his braided hair, stop smiling, and be more hunter-like as a person. Victor believes that this is the way of their people, although the viewer realizes that most of this can be attributed to Victor’s father, who left him at a young age. Thomas reminds Victor that their specific tribe, the Coeur d’Alene, were fishermen. Victor doesn’t take well to this, and refuses to back down from his unfriendly ways. In the same scene of the movie, our protagonists are faced with two men who have taken their seats on the bus and are refusing to give them back. Despite both of our characters now “looking Native American,” the men harshly tell them to go back to their reservation. This is just one example of facing harsh stereotypes in this film. Although living on a reservation isn’t a stereotype in and of itself, the fact that it was automatically assumed that Victor and Thomas live on one is a stereotype.

While Victor is beat down by the aforementioned scuffle, Thomas finds power through it. He tells Victor something along the lines of, ‘I guess the hunter look doesn’t always work.’ Thomas is a pivotal character when looking at finding power through stereotypes and culture/history in this film. Throughout Smoke Signals, Thomas is asked by various people to tell a story. Each time he happily obliges. Through a bit of research, I discovered that Native American traditions, culture, myths, and much more are passed down through generations by storytelling. In telling his stories, Thomas allows his memories and ideologies to be passed to other people, who will likely pass them to even more people. In fact, just by watching Smoke Signals, those stories have been passed to us! 

As I mentioned before, Victor believed that he needed to be stoic, which is not only an example of his harsh father, but it also serves as an example of him succumbing to a stereotype. Through advertising and media, Native Americans are often perceived as such stoic characters, though this is not always true of the people themselves. In living this way, Victor is only hurting himself. He causes other people to not like him because of his mannerisms, thus furthering the stereotype. In doing this, he also holds on to the pieces of his father that he no longer needs. All he finds through his stoic ways is misery and pain.

A big theme throughout this film is family. The best example of this comes through one of Thomas’ stories. He begins telling Suzy Song about the frybread that Victor’s mother makes. He says that she once fed one-hundred Native Americans with only fifty pieces of bread. Of course, it is quite anti-climatic to realize that all she did was rip the bread in half, but that actually makes the story more powerful. The amazing parts to Thomas were the bread and the people around him, not the number of people she fed. If Smoke Signals teaches us anything, it’s that the frybread tastes best when someone loves you enough to make it for you.

This is the Redskins logo, which is just another form of advertising that could persuade somebody like Thomas to act in the way that he did.