WHITEFACE

Adapting the play from stage to screen came with it's fare share of challenges and rewards. By changing the medium to film we were able to enhance certain parts of the text or showcase a specific movement. This lead to the development of a different story than the stage play but stemming from the same thought and idea that the show represents as a whole. 

Whiteface was created to tackle cultural appropriation, and more specifically the representation of indigenous bodies in film and how those images have shaped our reality today, as indigenous and non-indigenous consumers of stories. Since colonization there has always been a very strong misrepresentation of indigeneity from a non-indigenous perspective. This appropriation has ranged from making us into savage and horrid monsters to fairytale-esc naked people boarding on that of elves. When young indigenous and non-indigenous people see these narratives and portrayals of our people, they assume this to be true because at a time this was the ONLY representation of nativeness that young people were exposed to. With the wake of the reserve patrols and residential schools coming out of the 50s, indigenous people were not at the helm of their narrative in North America and so the truth of these stories was far from seen. 

One of the main instigators of the mis-representation was "westerns." The western often featured Italian's painted red or severely bronzed with feathered bands around their heads designed to keep their wigs on. These stories have been told this way up until today, (Taylor Lautner - Twilight, Johnny Depp - the lone ranger) and the effects of this often leads to a non-indigenous entitlement to our stories and by extension our ways of life. There is a legacy of theft of indigenous bodies and lands in north america. The continued theft of our stories through westerns and other stories do not serve our attempts as indigneous people to reclaim our narrative in our country. By not listening to our stories they we must tell them, which is from our perspective and by indigenous people, our narrative stays locked in the ownership of the crown so to speak, or at least still without our control or consent, something we have been asking for since the beginning of colonization. 

Whiteface is the other side of that coin. An intentional misrepresentation of the colonial "white" population in north america. This is one of very very few and often intentional misrepresentations of whiteness in our media and so any comparison to the experiences of those who suffer from redface is a gross misunderstanding. We wanted to offer or share the feeling of being misrepresented or appropriated to a larger audience and explain through this work, what happens when your story is highjacked and how that affects a people. We tried to draw lines between the fetishization, criminalization, and classism that have come from people misunderstanding our ways and feeling entitled to our bodies. 

By transferring this play to film we are able to reach a broader audience and continue to resist the misrepresentation of our people. This was also a way to infiltrate the very same industry that was behind the most iconic appropriation of our bodies, film. I hope to pursue film more with stories of this kind as I find them both important and entertaining and look forward to the continued evolution of what indigenous film is becoming. 

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-Todd Houseman