Warrior Scientist: Star Trek: Voyager's Chakotay and American Indian Television Representation

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Anthony Macías

Abstract

The essay analyzes the Native American character, Chakotay, played by Mexican American actor Robert Beltran, from the multicultural ensemble television series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). After acknowledging “indigenous futurism” in speculative fiction and film, I trace this exoticized Indigenous cosmonaut character’s televisual regulator/enforcer “good Indian” antecedents. Although American Indians in feature films and TV programs traditionally appeared in Westerns, symbolically relegated to the margins of America’s allegorical usable past, in Gene Roddenberry’s future utopian meritocracy, Indigenous peoples have not vanished. I therefore situate such rare characters in the Star Trek pop culture canon, then examine in depth Commander Chakotay, a former outlaw resistance fighter, who serves Starfleet, which tolerates diversity while exporting the colorblind colonialism of the United Federation of Planets. In addition to incorporating secondary research on First Nations viewer responses, I advance an original argument about how Voyager’s non-Native creators signified Chakotay’s Indianness with the pan-ethnic trappings of tribalism, for the hokum of Hollywood in an inclusive, post-racial deep space “final frontier.” With his indistinct indigeneity, Commander Chakotay is complex but ungrounded; an officer and a gentleman; a twenty fourth-century amateur Anthropologist; a liberal fantasy; a warrior scientist. I conclude that negative and supposedly positive stereotypes perform ideological work legitimizing racial hierarchy and justifying structural stratification.

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How to Cite
Macías, Anthony. 2022. “Warrior Scientist: Star Trek: Voyager’s Chakotay and American Indian Television Representation”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 18 (1). https://iskolakultura.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45475.
Section
Essays
Author Biography

Anthony Macías, Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside

Anthony Macías is a scholar of twentieth-century cultural history with a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. A Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, he is the author of the book Chicano-Chicana Americana: Pop Culture Pluralism Starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros (University of Arizona Press, 2023), and Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Duke University Press, 2008). He has also published on bebop, hip hop, punk rock, Latin music, bandleader Gerald Wilson, Jewish Americans, U.S. historiography, Hollywood westerns, gay rights and Dog Day Afternoon, and the pan-American hemispheric imaginary. Macías has served as a peer reviewer for academic presses, including Liverpool University Press, and for academic journals, including Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas. In addition to working with museums and universities on public exhibitions, he has collaborated with curators, artists, and choreographers on public presentations. Email: anthonym@ucr.edu