Cherokee film as Cherokee storytelling: Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) as filmic Deer Woman story

Abstract

Rather than the stereotypical nineteenth-century leathers-and-feathers warriors familiar from countless Hollywood Westerns, many Native filmmakers focus their films on contemporary Native communities. In contrast, Native filmmakers create very different representations of Native life and especially Native masculinity. Along with the foundational Smoke Signals (Eyre 1998), Randy Redroad’s The Doe Boy (2001) was one of the first Native-created films that helped initiate a cluster of Native American films that centre on masculinity and male‐male relationships. Indigenous masculinity is often a site of struggle of rejecting colonialist impositions and finding one’s own identity, and it is in part such a journey that propels Redroad’s film. The Doe Boy responds to not only Hollywood misrepresentations but also Eyre’s earlier film that established masculinity and father‐son relationships as a crucial topic. The Doe Boy focuses on Hunter (James Duval), a mixed-blood Cherokee youth, who must navigate between his White father and Cherokee grandfather and their differing practices of masculinity despite his bodily vulnerability from haemophilia, a strained and sometimes violent relationship with his father and a devastating mistake during an early deer hunt. Not only is Redroad’s film a Cherokee coming-of-age film and period piece (it is set during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), but it can also be read as a Deer Woman story, albeit a filmic and non-traditional one. Unlike Smoke Signals, which takes the road movie as its genre, The Doe Boy has its foundations in a specific tribal culture. A crucial task in undoing to previous filmic misrepresentations of Hollywood, which lacked any specificity about Native characters, is to take Native filmmakers’ cultural context into careful consideration. Redroad’s film can be seen as a Deer Woman story that depicts Hunter’s struggles as he navigates his way to a mixed-blood manhood.