Return to Article Details Warrior Scientist: Star Trek: Voyager's Chakotay and American Indian Television Representation

 

During the twentieth century, in Hollywood feature films and television programs, American Indians traditionally appeared in Westerns, symbolically relegated to the past. This essay analyzes portrayals of intergalactic Indians, focusing on a warrior scientist dashing through a twenty fourth-century utopian future: the Native American character, Chakotay, played by Mexican American actor Robert Beltran, from the diverse ensemble cast of the television series Star Trek: Voyager, which originally aired from 1995 to 2001.

 


Figure 1: Robert Beltran as Commander Chakotay. www.cnet.com


 

By examining the cultural politics of American Indian representation in this problematic futuristic role, and in its televisual predecessors, I argue that supposedly positive Native American characters created by non-native writers, producers, directors, and actors repackage stereotypes supporting Eurocentric ideological binaries, racial hierarchies, and assimilationist values, just as the utopian Star Trek mythos markets its brand of color-blind colonialism.

In Star Trek’s post-nuclear World War III timeline, a United Earth has eradicated hunger, poverty, and money; instituted a world government with a President; helped found the United Federation of Planets and embody its pluralist ethos; and dominated the ranks of Starfleet, the Federation navy that promotes galactic good will. In the Star Trek: Voyager pilot episode, Chakotay is the renegade leader commanding a starship crew of Maquis, outlaw Federation colonists and ex-Starfleet personnel who continue fighting their Cardassian enemies after a peace treaty is signed. However, Chakotay soon abandons the insurrectionist values of the Maquis and rejoins Starfleet, which pursues peaceful exploration and spreads the nonviolent cooperation values of the Federation.

Chakotay’s indigeneity is manufactured, with the trappings of tribalism, for the hokum of Hollywood, where, as illustrated in director Neil Diamond’s documentary, Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian, rather than well-rounded characters, “Native men are reduced to a mere caricature” (Diamond 2009). Jacquelyn Kilpatrick contends, “The stereotypes of Native Americans in film” depict mentally inferior or “intensely sexual” “celluloid Indians” as “lustful savages attacking the white woman,” or spiritual Noble Savages (xvii). According to Brian Klopotek, whether spiritually noble or violently savage, “in the non-Native psyche … Indians are usually imagined only in the past” (252-523). Referencing Robert Berkhofer’s 1979 book, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, which details the dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Indians, Katja Kanzler claims that “mainstream American culture nostalgically yearns for” its romanticized, culturally inferior yet spiritually connected nineteenth-century American Indians (Kanzler).

As Liza Black notes, recent scholarship places “representations of Indians” in the context of “twentieth-century American Indian history and struggles for sovereignty … to show the relationship between the two and the ways Native people have used the image industry to their own ends” (35-36). Since the 1990s, in Native American independent cinema and, less frequently, mainstream fare, Indian characters have increasingly appeared in contemporary dramas or action movies. Although absent from standard speculative fiction, Indians are central to Ernest Hogan’s 1992 Chicano science fiction novel, High Aztech, and to the work of indigenous sci fi writers such as Gerald Vizenor, William Sanders, and Stephen Graham Jones. Grace Dillon argues that science fiction has “the capacity to envision Native futures” (2) and that “Indigenous science is not just complementary to perceived Western enlightenment” (3). Indeed, Native American science fiction filmmakers visually imagine an “indigenous futurism” in which “indigenous peoples have as much of a complex cultural and political future as any Western society” (Lempert 173). Postwar television, long a bastion of Western series presenting trite Indian images, also broadcast ostensibly positive native characters, from New Mexican lawmen to a New York detective, and even an animated science fiction law enforcer in outer space.

In Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the “Good Indian,” Michael FitzGerald applies the “Evolutionary Stages of Minorities in the Mass Media” schema from communications scholar Cedric C. Clark’s touchstone 1969 article, “Television and Social Control: Some Observations on the Portrayals of Ethnic Minorities,” which “analyzes the ways minority characters move from nonrecognition (symbolic annihilation) to ridicule to finally gaining respect.” In Clark’s model, the “Regulator” stereotype represents “members of subordinate groups or ‘second-class citizens’” who “become enforcers of the dominant group’s norms,” and “who astutely recognize the purported superiority of European culture (and technology).” In other words, “good Indian” characters are as old as Pocahontas (xv). FitzGerald “found that the more prominent the Indian character is in any given program, the more likely” they will “be depicted as a Regulator or enforcer … only the ones who were featured in central or ‘starring’ roles” (xvi). Contextualized within network television history, the Chakotay character’s precursors date back to Tonto, the loyal sidekick on The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). FitzGerald calls Tonto, played by Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels, “an apprentice white man, a Regulator doing the dirty work for,” and “nearly always dependent on instructions from the white savior,” “like Defoe’s Friday, assisting in the imposition of Anglo-American rule” (45). FitzGerald points out “the tension created by the suspicion—or outright expectation—that the native enforcer will one day come to his senses” and turn on his vigilante “master.” The Lone Ranger series, he concludes, was “progressive in its day,” but is “racist in that natives are seen as unable to survive without assistance from Euro-American protectors” (46, 47).

Law of the Plainsman (1959-1960) was the first U.S. network series to feature an American Indian with a badge: Sam Buckhart, an “Apache warrior” who “leaves his group” to receive an elite education back East. As a young boy called Buck Heart, he tried to save a U.S. Cavalry officer’s life after an Apache ambush. The dying officer left the boy money to pay for private school. After eventually earning a Harvard law degree, and becoming “sufficiently Europeanized,” Sam Buckhart returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico to work as a Deputy “U.S. marshal, an enforcer of the dominant group’s law and order” (77, 78). Buckhart is played by Michael Ansara, “an Arab American born in Syria” who had previously played Chiracahua Apache leader Cochise on the television show Broken Arrow (1956-1958), based on the eponymous 1950 feature film. Sam Buckhart’s indigeneity is signified by a bandana around his forehead, and by his natural “Injun skills” of extraordinary “sensory perception.” He never mentions any family, and he is never shown practicing native spiritual ways, but he “occasionally spouts nebulous Christian platitudes” (77, 81, 80). As a civilized, good Indian, he becomes the right-hand man to federal Marshal Andy Morrison. I argue that the assimilated regulator/enforcer epitomizes what Russell Means calls “a mental European … an American Indian” who shares “European values, a European worldview” (Means 1995). Indeed, FitzGerald argues that Sam Buckhart “embodies Native American physicality and spirituality combined with Euro-American intellect and education,” and that his training “in Enlightenment science and philosophy,” and in hegemonic “jurisprudence,” merges with his “Indian qualities” of “physical prowess and instinct” (79). This hybrid suturing of Eurocentric ideological binaries, I claim, evolves into the Chakotay warrior scientist ideal. Michael Ray FitzGerald posits that Sam Buckhart is potentially a “model minority” and a “wanna-be white man” who proves his loyalty to the dominant culture (91, 92).

According to FitzGerald, in 1959 “an American Indian U.S. Treasury agent” character appeared on The Untouchables, and from 1964 to 1968 “a half-Cherokee, Oxford-educated sidekick” character, Mingo, appeared on Daniel Boone (112-113). In 1966, Burt Reynolds, who had already played a TV American Indian warrior on Branded (1965) and a half-Indian blacksmith on Gunsmoke (1962-1965), starred as New York City police detective John Hawk, who describes himself as a “full-blooded Iroquois,” but who, in FitzGerald’s words, has “largely jettisoned his identity,” his indigeneity “submerged” (111, 113). As FitzGerald states, “The urbane Hawk had been so thoroughly assimilated into mainstream society that his Indianness was scarcely noticeable unless Hawk himself pointed it out in dialogue,” such as when he joked about being an Indian scout (119). In 1974, Robert Forster starred as a Navajo police officer in a made-for-TV movie, Nakia, and in an eponymous one-season television show. His character, Nakia Parker, “a uniformed officer in” a fictional New Mexican “county sheriff’s department,” works “alongside white patrolmen.” In the beginning, Parker “is deeply concerned with maintaining his Navajo identity,” but after initially “questioning Anglo-American values” he ends up embracing an assimilationist, melting pot ideology, and articulating a conservative message. Although the show contained few direct references “to Parker’s Indianness except for an occasional, good-natured joke,” it did depict a Navajo physician, Dr. Howard Gray Hawk, “a man of science” who “still believes in the Navajo traditions” (120, 123-125, 140-141).

To fully round out the genealogy of the regulator/enforcer stereotype, consider a space-age antecedent of the Chakotay role—the native “mystic man,” “champion of justice” title character in the animated television program, Bravestarr (1987-1988), set on a deep space mining colony planet, New Texas. Bravestarr is a brown “lawman” hero, with his black hair in a braid, under his white cowboy hat, a graduate of Marshal’s Academy, who rides Thirty-Thirty, a sentient, belligerent cybernetic horse that transforms from a mount to a rifle-blasting partner. Planetary Marshal Bravestarr uses supernatural animal powers when summoning the strength of the bear, the speed of the puma, the eye of the hawk, and the ears of the wolf, as well as a magic tomahawk, starshield, and lasso to keep the peace against a powerful sorcerer adversary and his evil apprentice—the leader of an outlaw gang riding flying turbo mules and bearing technologically advanced weapons. The marshal lives in the town of Fort Kerium, named after the desert world’s energy-producing “precious ore,” interacting with droids, aliens, and talking bipedal feline-, serpentine-, porcine-, canine-, ovine-, and avian-headed humanoids. This space Western series with badlands, claim jumping, and “plains wars” addressed issues such as vigilantism, heroism, cowardice, violence, self-defense, disability, drug addiction, child abuse, criminality, and justice. After each episode, the characters explain the moral of the story; for example, respecting and obeying the law, even if you do not agree with it.

The planet’s original native inhabitants are barefoot, dwarf-like, civilized Prairie People, who live in underground burrows and chambers interconnected by tunnels, like prairie dog towns. In one episode, hard-luck miners, driven mad by greed for the crystalline Kerium, which is worth ten times more than gold, call the Prairie People “critters” as a racial slur. Even Marshal Bravestarr, in anger, uses the epithet “critters” to describe some kidnappers, then immediately apologizes to his Prairie People deputy (Bravestarr, Episode 5, “Kerium Fever”). In three other episodes, the Prairie People are enslaved, and when the Galaxy Council orders a force field fenced around their valley, they become prisoners on their own land, treated “like Indians … on reservations” (Bravestarr, Episode 45, “Revolt of the Prairie People”). Shaman, a wise medicine man who arrived in a spaceship, wields a magic staff, and lives in an animal totem-like mountain tower, raised Bravestarr and continues to mentor him. When the good wizard, Shaman, appears, his long white hair down past the shoulders of his red cape, he wears a metallic headband with three alloy feathers on each side, and a matching necklace and belt, which cinches the waist of his long, fringed-hemline shirt; he is accompanied by pan flute music. In the show’s final episode, Bravestarr must renew his bond with his animal spirits to regain his suddenly lost powers. To follow “the code of the tribe” from which he comes, the marshal journeys within himself on a vision quest (Bravestarr, Episode 65, “Strength of the Bear”).

Before this lineage of Native lawmen evolved into the warrior scientist aboard the starship Voyager, a parallel historical plotline had been developing that drew from, and eventually merged with, the Indian stereotypes story. In 1964, an Air Force combat veteran and second-generation Los Angeles Police Department officer named Gene Roddenberry, who had previously written scripts for television crime dramas and Westerns, pitched a new series, Star Trek, as “Wagon Train in space,” with episodes in which the U.S.S. Enterprise crew policed claim-jumping miners, like the marshal in Gunsmoke (Gross and Altman 11). The Star Trek premise is indicated by its famous opening sequence voice over, which begins, “Space, the final frontier.” The “mission … to seek out new life and new civilizations” implies a secular moral obligation to export progress-as-technology and free trade to the dark corners of the galaxy, like Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” but with pluralistic values, or what Alice George calls “The Federation’s Manifest Destiny” (16). As Peter Claus argues, Star Trek “expresses fundamental values of American society,” and depicts them persisting “victoriously” to “confront” an “unknown” future, thus turning fantasy into myth (18). Federation law protects individual rights, for “once only men of a certain race and class had any rights at all, but gradually those rights were extended to all people and, as [Starfleet] explored new galaxies, to other species” (Star Trek: Voyager [STV], Season 7, Episode 19, “Author, Author”).

But where do indigenous peoples fit in this ever-inclusive, interstellar brave new future? In one 1968 original series episode, after discovering a planet where a vague mixture of preindustrial, “peaceful” American Indians had long ago been rescued from extinction and transplanted by advanced aliens, an amnesiac Captain Kirk is worshiped as a god and given a “medicine badge,” then marries the chief’s daughter in an indigenous arcadia (Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Paradise Syndrome”). As Sierra Adare notes in “Indian” Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction: First Nations’ Voices Speak Out, Captain Kirk teaches the locals how to irrigate fields, preserve food, and resuscitate a drowned boy. Adare convened structured survey focus groups composed of “a diverse Indigenous population representing several highly differentiated nations, each with distinct spiritual beliefs,” from across the continental United States. One of Adare’s respondents, a “trekkie,” argued that this episode depicted civilized whites “while Indians remained primitive,” and another “First Nations ‘trekkie’” observed how “these Indians, now in the 23rd century, still looked and lived like those from the 18th.” While other respondents criticized logical Spock, himself called “a half-breed” in a different episode, for matter-of-factly stating that the easily confused and frightened Indians “are too primitive to grasp the concept of space flight,” even though their ancestors traveled to the planet in a spaceship, many lamented how the native inhabitants all wore the same buckskin clothes and feather headbands, and spoke slowly and simply, with tom-tom music in the background. Finally, this episode was criticized for portraying “the white man … always saving the poor little Indian,” and for ignoring native traditions by suggesting that “anyone can use medicine” (39, 12, 52, 53, 54). Star Trek scholars argue that this episode fetishizes Native American culture, promotes the noble savage stereotype, employs “a logic derivative of the social Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest,” and implies that “the White male is inherently superior and therefore more ‘human’ than the savage,” “backward Native Americans” (Bernardi 45, 47; Kwan 62). According to Amy Sturgis, it “presented a generically bland and internally inconsistent ‘Indian’ identity for the villagers,” who were “incapable of progress” (127).

The original Star Trek series established its own futuristic folklore, yet scholars have ignored the fact that Starfleet Headquarters, also known as Starfleet Command, was originally located at the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County on the former grounds of Fort Baker, established in 1862 to gather nearby Indians for removal to reservations. “Considered the most important pivot of operations against the Indians in its district,” where “many citizens “made a living” by killing native men “and selling the women and children into slavery,” this site represents California’s official state-sanctioned genocide campaign (http://www.militarymuseum.org/FtBakerl.html). The campus of Starfleet Academy, an officer training facility with a four-year educational requirement, is also located on the Fort Baker site, although Starfleet Headquarters later moved to San Francisco on the former grounds of the Spanish Presidio, the farthest northwestern garrison of Spain’s New World empire. Starfleet charts new regions and surveys the undiscovered country of new planets so that adventurous pioneers can develop colonies, exploit natural resources, and expand the friendly, color-blind colonialism of the United Federation of Planets. Settler colonies include New Manhattan, New Brooklyn, New Providence, New Seattle, New Sydney, New France, New Gaul, and Nehru Colony. Since the Federation only colonizes uninhabited planets, its enlightened exploration follows the logic of the 1862 Homestead Act, while Starfleet, with universal white human subjects at its center, builds remote outposts, establishes star bases, maintains mining operations, protects shipping routes, enforces contested treaties, and resolves border disputes along neutral zones and demilitarized zones.

When Native American cadets join Starfleet, they are trained amid a colonial legacy, but they also follow a long tradition of serving with honor and distinction, as represented by Ensign Dawson Walking Bear, a Comanche character who appeared in a 1974 television episode of the animated version of the original series (Star Trek: The Animated Series, Season 2, Episode 5, “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth.”). Enlistees like the three unnamed American Indian men and women serving under Captain Kirk, shown for a few seconds wearing their uniforms with native necklaces, braid adornments, and of course, a headband, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (dir. Wise 1979), join “a peacekeeping humanitarian armada” obligated “to offer aid” whenever possible (dir. Abrams 2009), like an American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, just as the United Federation of Planets is like the United Nations. Starfleet’s ships, including the U.S.S. Crazy Horse, the Lakota, the Malinche, the Tecumseh and the Pueblo, also conduct security missions as the Federation’s colonial Navy. Scouting unspoiled worlds as terra nullis (no-man’s land), or unclaimed territories, some of which are disputed by rival super-powers, “like the United States and Great Britain before it, the Federation” practices “benevolent imperialism” (Inayatullah 58).

In 1994, its final season, Star Trek: The Next Generation portrayed the descendants of “North American Indians” who “were forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands.” They “originally left Earth to preserve their cultural identity,” and after two hundred years of searching, they resettled on a remote planet. They “established a village,” but twenty years later, they resist an attempted forced removal, asserting their sovereignty by refusing to recognize the authority of a Federation treaty with the Nazi-like Cardassians. Starfleet Command considers these Indians “a nomadic group,” but after an alien—in Indian form—facilitates a vision “ritual,” the consciousness-raised white cadet argues, “They’re not some random group of colonists, they’re a unique culture with a history that predates the Federation and Starfleet” (Star Trek: The Next Generation [TNG], Season 7, Episode 20, “Journey’s End”). The Indians were initially supposed to be Hopis, then “another tribe,” then “a mythical tribe,” but ultimately it was decided to “just not say who they are.” As one producer stated, “We intended to treat the Native American culture with the utmost respect and show the value of some of their metaphysical ways of approaching life” (Gross and Altman 302).

Sierra Adare’s survey participants registered a range of reactions to this episode, with those who follow traditional spiritual beliefs finding it realistic in depicting “the belief in the sacredness of all things,” especially “how sacred the land is to Indians.” Yet other respondents disliked the stoic Indians never using contractions, with one asking, “How come all aliens in Star Trek are fluent in English, but the Native Americans are stilted?” Finally, others disapproved of the Indian “spiritual guide who wasn’t even Native—he was an alien instead” (86, 87). At the end of the episode, Captain Jean-Luc Picard heals his bloodline by absolving a Spanish ancestor who had murdered Pueblo Revolt participants, while the Indian “settlers” stay on their adopted spiritual home world by signing their own treaty with the Cardassians and revoking their “status as Federation citizens” (TNG, Season 7, Episode 20, “Journey’s End”).

According to the original character concept, Chakotay is “a member of that Indian nation, but he had … an individualistic rather than communal way of thinking,” so “he broke from his people” (Voyager Bible ). He attended Starfleet Academy at fifteen, then, after graduation, rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, becoming an Advanced Tactical Training instructor. After his father was killed protecting their home colony—where their tribe had relocated from Earth three hundred years ago—Chakotay resigned his commission and joined the Maquis, but he serves as U.S.S. Voyager’s First Officer under Captain Katherine Janeway when his crew merges with hers, stranded on the far side of the galaxy but intrepidly trekking back to Earth. He is “proud of his heritage,” preserving “his practice of traditional rituals” aboard Voyager; admired and respected as a “steady, fearless,” inspirational leader. As an adolescent, during a vision quest, Chakotay “obtained a ‘spirit guide’” that still “appears to him” “in dreams and visions,” helping “him in his decision-making process” (Voyager Bible).

During the show’s first season, Chakotay facilitates a vision quest for Captain Janeway in order to find her animal spirit guide. Chakotay unties his “medicine bundle,” wrapped in an animal hide with fur, revealing a black bird wing, a river stone inscribed with an ancient healing symbol, and the Akuna, a handheld technological device that has replaced the “psychoactive herbs” his “ancestors used … to assist their vision quests.” As he tells Captain Janeway, “Now they’re no longer necessary. Our scientists have found more modern ways.” He activates the Akuna’s flashing lights, saying, “Akuchimoya. We are far from the sacred places of our grandfathers; we are far from the bones of our people” (STV, Season 1, Episode 6, “The Cloud”). Sierra Adare’s research survey “participants found this episode offensive for its ‘superficial view of Indian spirituality,’” for the way that Chakotay just showed up at his commanding officer’s office even though “a medicine bundle is sacred and is never opened or shared with anyone,” as it contains “sacred ceremonial objects that must be handled in an appropriate manner at all times.” Many respondents lamented the New Age influence on Chakotay’s spirituality, with one proclaiming, “Everybody can be Indian! Just get an animal guide!” (88, 89).

 


Figure 2: Medicine Bundle Objects, screenshot from “The Cloud” episode, DVD box set, Paramount Pictures, 2004


 

In another first season episode, when an injured Chakotay is rendered unconscious after an alien attack, he becomes the good Indian with mysterious magical powers when he shares the consciousness of a crewmate to rescue the endangered ship. To accomplish this, his comrade performs “a healing ritual” that he had taught her by using what the writers call a “Mayan-descended medicine wheel” (“Federation Biographical Database File;” Kanzler). However, “the mountains of the antelope women” pictograph and the “coyote stone” on stretched buckskin reference two non-Central American animals as part of an imprecise Indian pan-ethnicity (STV, Season 1, Episode 12, “Cathexis”). Regarding particular indigenous traditions, John Moore emphasizes the diversity of Native American “cosmologies and epistemologies” (272), while Margaret Kovach notes the importance of “specific tribal knowledge” (38). The Chakotay character was originally supposed to be Sioux, with a timber wolf spirit guide, then Hopi, then without any tribal affiliation, and, reportedly at Robert Beltran’s suggestion, Maya. Producer Jeri Taylor stated, “Because Robert is in fact Mexican Indian,” they chose “Mayan ancestry for him as opposed to the Indian nations north of the Mexican border” (Kutzera 104).

To help define the Chakotay character, the producers hired a cultural consultant, Jamake Highwater, a “host of PBS documentaries on Indian heritage” considered an “award-winning American Indian writer” (Poe 199; Associated Press). The Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying, “I would not presume to be a spokesperson for Indians, but … I represent … what Indian-ness means to me” (Oliver). Nevertheless, in 1984 activist Hank Adams accused Highwater of fraudulently claiming Native American ancestry, and in 2015 Alex Jacobs, writing for Indian Country Today, called him a “con man” and an “inauthentic Indian expert” (Vizenor 191; Jacobs).

In a second season episode, Chakotay meets members of an alien race whose forebears had visited Earth 45,000 years ago, when they created a “genetic bonding” with a small band of culture-less stone-age nomadic hunters lacking spoken language or intergenerational memory. This first contact “brought about a spirit of curiosity and adventure,” and “impelled” the hunters to cross the Bering Strait and populate a new, “unpeopled land.” After nearly one thousand generations they flourished in the jungles of Central America, where they called themselves the “Rubber Tree People” and wore tattoos across the left side of their foreheads to emulate the blue-eyed, white extra-terrestrials they called “Sky Spirits” (STV, Season 2, Episode 9, “Tattoo”). As Kim TallBear comments, “‘traditional’ creation stories … set out values for living, narrate our common history, cohere us as a people with a common moral framework, and tie us to an ancestral land-base” (TallBear 2016). In contrast, the Bering Strait creation story denies the Indians their peoplehood, and the white alien savior origin story denies them agency in their own evolved humanity.

Flashbacks reveal that Chakotay’s father was disappointed in him because he was not interested in learning about their ancestors, and because he “never fully embraced the traditions of [their] tribe.” The teenage Chakotay tells his father that “other tribes have learned to accept the twenty-fourth century,” then asks, “Why can’t ours?” To the news that Chakotay will be attending Starfleet Academy, his father replies, “You will never belong to that other life, and if you leave, you’ll never belong to this one. You’ll be caught between worlds” (STV, Season 2, Episode 9, “Tattoo”). Chakotay’s left-forehead tattoo, which was intentionally designed by the show’s creators to not resemble any specific tribal tradition, honors his ancestors, and his similarly tattooed father. Sierra Adare’s First Nations viewer responses critiqued this episode for showing “that the will to keep alive the traditions was dead or dying and it took aliens to revive it,” and for stereotypically depicting “a wayward Indian child in denial of self,” and primitive “children of the forest,” “simple and wary of others,” shy yet “all too soon trusting of another group of people”—“lesser people” whose saving grace is “love and oneness with nature” (54, 55). Finally, as Adare points out, rubber trees are native to the Amazon jungle, not Central America (57), thus highlighting Star Trek’s irresponsible cultural geography.

In another second season episode, Chakotay also speaks a blessing “from the spirits” of his “people,” in their language, then repeats it in English: “Peace in your heart, fortune in your steps” (STV, Season 2, Episode 22, “Innocence”). By the fourth season, Chakotay’s indigeneity/spirituality was once more signified by a vision quest when an alien humanoid shipmate states, “Your people have a technology that can induce a deep meditation, an altered state of consciousness.” Chakotay unties his medicine bundle, this time explaining that its talismans are “items that define you, that will ground you, allow you to take the journey into yourself.” He activates his Akuna “device” to help his shipmate “look inside” himself. Once more he says: “Akuchimoya. We are far from the sacred places of our grandfathers, far from the bones of our people” (STV, Season 4, Episode 12, “Mortal Coil”). Adopting new technology does not necessarily render traditions inauthentic, for American Indians long ago began incorporating Western elements, such as horses and firearms, to ensure their survival, and they have created new traditions, such as modern intertribal powwow ceremonies. However, by using a gadget as a shortcut, Chakotay has adapted mechanical means to spiritual ends, but he is not really practicing the old ways or following the sacred procedural process. It is now a rote ritual, not a ceremony. In essence, the writers psychologize what they call “traditional rituals” (Voyager Bible).

The Chakotay character is meant to balance the European binary between tradition and modernity. In one episode, a shipmate reminds him: “You are a scientist, an explorer” (STV, Season 4, Episode 4, “Nemesis”). In another, Chakotay states that his “grandfather used to think he could transform himself into a wolf, so that he could venture out and explore the spirit realm,” and he also declares, “I accept there are things in the universe that can’t be scanned with a tricorder” (STV, Season 6, Episode 3, “Barge of the Dead”). Captain Janeway calls him “a philosopher and a scientist,” and he is certainly a man of his times (STV, Season 7, Episode 11, “Shattered”). His indigeneity can be realistically self-deprecating—he even jokes about being “the only Indian in the universe who can’t start a fire by rubbing two sticks together,” and about being an Indian scout, and he volunteers “to hold down the fort” (STV, Season 3, Episode 1, “Basics, Part I;” STV, Season 4, Episode 24, “Demon”, STV, Season 7, Episode 1, “Unimatrix Zero, Part 1”). His innate instincts allow him to easily communicate, mostly via sign language, body language, and, as his father did in the Central American rainforest, by drawing images in the dirt, during a rare cross-cultural encounter absent the aid of the Universal Translator. This occurred in the final season, when Chakotay accidentally opens up a primitive “indigenous society” in an isolated, protected habitat to “anthropological research, resource development,” modern “medicine, infrastructure, [and] education” (STV, Season 7, Episode 22, “Natural Law”). Ironically, a human Indian causes this sequestered tribe’s way of life to change dramatically, somehow soothing white guilt over violating native territorial rights.

Chakotay is not a science or engineering officer, but he tells an alien paleontologist, “I’m a scientist too” (STV, Season 3, Episode 23, “Distant Origin”). He considers pursuing archeology full-time by teaching at a university or working on a dig in Central America (STV, Season 3, Episode 9, “Future’s End, Part. II”). Moreover, he desires a Professorship in Anthropology at Starfleet Academy, and he studies an unsuspecting alien civilization from orbit as an impromptu anthropological research project (STV, Season 5, Episode 14, “Bliss;” STV, Season 6, Episode 12, “Blink of an Eye”). Indeed, as he says about observing an alien “cultural phenomenon” in a subsequent episode, “I’m an anthropologist” (STV, Season 6, Episode 15, “Tsunkatse”). As Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman argue, “anthropologists have directly served in the colonial apparatus (for good or bad) or otherwise been part of the construction of colonial discourses (wittingly or unwittingly)” (13). Chakotay is an amateur social scientist, but his academic career interests say more about white American liberal notions of progress than the methodologies of a twenty fourth-century Indian anthropologist carrying on the tradition of early twentieth-century trailblazers like Carlos Montezuma and Ella Deloria.

As a warrior scientist, Chakotay is a mixed-martial arts fan, and a former boxer who fought under the nickname, “The Tattooed Terror” (STV, Season 6, Episode 15, “Tsunkatse”). For contrarian complexity, he is also a vegetarian who always refused to hunt deer with his father (STV, Season 4, Episode 22, “Unforgettable;” STV, Season 7, Episode 15, “Workforce, Part I;” STV, Season 4, Episode 13, “Waking Moments”). Executive Producer Jeri Taylor, Rick Berman, and Michael Piller felt “that Native Americans needed” the “same kind of role model” as the original series character Lt. Uhura provided for African Americans, to send the same message: “The future looks good, you have purpose … worth … value … you will be leaders … you will be powerful” (Poe 174). As Sierra Adare contends, “Considering that Chakotay is the only First Nations role model … in a futuristic setting, it’s unfortunate that the Hollywood producers decided that the role should be played by a non-First Nations actor” (45). Despite their best intentions, the show’s creators fabricated an indigenous cosmonaut with varied interests and aspirational accomplishments, but essentially re-inscribed a detribalized, exoticized character.

Chakotay is idealized, defined by non-Indians who created a complicated, professional, educated Native character, a benign Indian who adopts the American way, rather than seeks vengeance, not connected to his ancestral land, but to his “home colony.” In the Star Trek canon, indigenous peoples from Earth’s western hemisphere are present and accounted for 300 years from now; however, their survival and persistence depends on becoming law-abiding citizens of the tolerant Federation, which allows them the freedom to practice their pagan religions and to settle new colonies. This future vision seems a far cry from the late nineteenth-century American notion that progress equals the triumph of technology and civilization over savagery and barbarism, yet a similar superior-inferior racial logic guided progressive multiculturalists. Carrying the torch of the original show’s 1960s liberalism, their hopeful worldview continues to circulate throughout our contemporary global village in endless broadcast/streaming syndication, as does the Star Trek utopianism in new films and new television series. Coining instantly recognizable catch phrases, presaging mini-computer pads, flip cell phones, and 3-D printers, and inspiring fan fiction and cosplay, “Star Trek has become common cultural currency in its almost five decades of existence … a well-known reference point that permeates popular culture.” Star Trek represents “an entire galaxy … with very specific laws governing behavior, manners, customs as well as science and technology,” a “storyworld” that privileges “‘techno-babble,’ and rationalist explanations” (Pearson and Davies 1, 127, 137).

In the book, Tribal Television, Dustin Tahmahkera asserts that “Native Peoples have long engaged in resistance to alter the mainstream television industry,” and that “decolonized viewing presupposes” them “as longstanding integral TV audiences with” the critical media literacy skills to creatively challenge “TV producers’ visions of the indigenous” (11, 8). For example, two First Nations trekkies called Chakotay a “quintessential Tonto in outer space,” criticized him for once dismissing his friend’s “visions as hallucinations” and telling her to ignore her “religious beliefs,” lamented that he “is such a poor representation of Native culture and spiritual practices,” and observed, “To me he is just another assimilated Star Trek officer.” A third Indian trekkie felt “it would have been more in the spirit of Star Trek to actually cast a Native American to play a Native American. After all, any other racial group plays characters of their race, Black, White, Asian, etc.” As a different Native American viewer argued, the Star Trek: Voyager producers assumed that traditions “would change over” hundreds of years, “but perhaps it would have been better if they had [made it all up] rather than piece him together from several different cultures” (Adare 95, 96, 90). Purportedly realistic pop culture depictions are not harmless, Sierra Adare posits, because “careless and universally accepted … Negative ‘Indian’ stereotypes do physical, mental, emotional, and financial harm to First Nations individuals.” Because Hollywood depicts the life of “supposed ‘real Indians’” as a jumbled “hodgepodge of authentic items” and content producers’ “fantasy,” but is considered factual by most Americans, Sierra Adare argues, “centuries-old stereotypes continue to reinforce racial prejudices that persist to this day” (2, 9).

 


Figure 3: Chakotay Vision Quest, screenshot from “The Cloud” episode, DVD box set, Paramount Pictures, 2004


 

According to Adare, Star Trek: Voyager “featured a ‘Native American’ crew member with mysterious spiritual powers,” allowing ‘Indians’ to “enter the TV science fiction mainstream.” Nonetheless, as Adare asserts, “Hollywood has transposed” guru/swami East “Indian mysticism onto First Nations socioreligious cultures in creating … ‘Indian mysticism’” (28, xiii ). Lending some credence to this assertion, regarding Chakotay’s vision quests, Beltran remarks, “He can do … transcendental kind of … Eastern mysticism” (Voyager Time Capsule: Chakotay). When helping novice, non-native practitioners of spiritual “rituals,” Chakotay, a supposedly evolved televisual type, tacitly acknowledges the intrinsic value of esoteric indigenous insights, which can now be taught, and learned, by anyone, thus incorporating aspects of what Adare calls the Hollywood Medicine Man/Shaman generalization (xvi-xvii). Al Carroll describes Chakotay as “a Frankenstein-like patchwork of New Age fantasies and misconceptions … without any regard for accuracy or believability,” as “far more stereotypical than Tonto.” To Carroll, the Chakotay character is “not an elder or medicine man but an alienated member of his tribe far from his fictive people,” yet he is “trusted with the intricate details of ceremonies,” which he eagerly performs for his crewmates, sharing his native knowledge for their benefit (24).

Although “there is more richness in detail than in any generalization,” David Treuer suggests the way “Indianness” “functions” “in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the desire for a connection is far more important than the actual means or logic of that connection” (202, 74). Chakotay’s Indian-ness was neither depicted consistently nor taken seriously enough, such as the times his tattoo was flippantly expanded, Maori-like, to cover one side of his face—first for laughs, then for menacing affect (STV, Season 3, Episode 11, “The Q and the Grey;” STV, Season 4, Episode 23, “Living Witness”). Conceived as “a mystical, mysterious,” “complex” man, the Chakotay role was originally named after Herman Melville’s 1851 character, Queequeg, a noble South Pacific Islander covered in intricate tattoos from head to toe (Poe 175, 176, 189). By the series finale, Chakotay remained a similarly generic fictional native character. As Tahmahkera contends, “from one era to another … producers of the recognizably Indian are heirs of previous representations and shared (mis)understandings of the indigenous” (16).

Whether consciously or not, the Voyager series writers and producers drew on the regulator trope, inserting the logical progression of the Harvard-educated Apache U.S. Marshal Sam Buckhart and the morally righteous outer space Marshal Bravestarr into the Star Trek universe. I call their techno-savvy reiteration of the regulator/enforcer character the warrior scientist type because it represents a liberal attempt to defy what Philip Deloria describes as lingering “expectations” of “Native technological incapacity, natural proclivities toward violence and warfare” (230). The warrior scientist is not the savage villain of postwar B-movie westerns, but he still retains an inherent warrior spirit. As Deloria argues, “modern Native-centered assertions of sovereignty,” meaning “political autonomy,” have been “in tension with” inclusion, “a colonial ideal … that aimed to assimilate Indians while still assuming them to be inferior peoples” (235, 234). According to James Cox, by transmitting “the oppressive noise of white mass-produced culture, the loud demand to abandon all that is Indian and conform to the dictates of the invader’s cultural belief system or be destroyed, television is an instrument of late-twentieth-century colonialism” (155).

Chakotay’s assimilationist, reconciliatory narrative function aboard Voyager promotes European American values, in clear contrast with the “indigenous futurist framework” expressed in “Native science fiction films” (Lempert 164). Instead, non-native producers, consultants, and writers projected their fanciful notions of how an over-achieving model minority acts, how they would be if they were Indian. Unlike the dehumanized, caricatured American Indians in the Western genre’s allegorical versions of a usable past, Chakotay symbolizes Star Trek: Voyager’s science fiction vision of an inclusive, post-racial, guilt-free future in which Western civilization has united Earth into a multicultural meritocracy based on equal opportunity, rid of “poverty, hopelessness, despair, and cruelty” (TNG, Season 6, Episode 1, “Time’s Arrow, Part II”). Nevertheless, even though the progressive Star Trek franchise attempted to wipe “clean a very old stain of blood,” negative and supposedly positive stereotypes perform ideological work legitimizing racial hierarchy and justifying structural stratification (TNG, Season 7, Episode 20, “Journey’s End”). Ultimately, with his indistinct indigeneity, Commander Chakotay’s layers of Enlightenment renaissance-man complexity mask an ungrounded core, a liberal simulacrum of a sexy, educated Indian ethnic who works within Starfleet’s system to protect and serve the Federation’s color-blind colonialism.

 

Thanks to Robert Perez and Charles Sepulveda for providing invaluable insights that analytically sharpened earlier versions of this essay, and to Michelle Raheja for recommending a key secondary source.

 

Works Cited


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