"Smoke Signals" the movie

Smoke Signals had many elements that folklorists would be captivated by, including story-telling, transformation, a vision quest, a mourning ritual, life on the reservation, and the competitive playing of basketball. Thomas told stories about everything and everyone he could think of, and if he couldn’t think of one, he’d make one up. He told them in a grandiose way, trying to paint the picture in the listeners’ minds for them to understand. Victor lost his father to alcoholism, but, for many years his father had left and didn’t bother to come and see him. Victor was bitter and discounted Thomas’s stories and tried to break his spirit, trying to make him see how he denied his own heritage by dressing like the white man. Victor’s father had also told stories about how he could make himself disappear, which later proved to be true.

Transformation elements exist on different levels in this movie. The one I do remember most is the story that Victor’s father told about the basketball game against the Jesuits. He said that Victor had turned into an angel to fly over the Jesuits and score the final basket. The other level of transformation was psychological. Thomas and Victor were going on a journey of self-discovery. They were very different people in temperament and did not understand each other at the beginning. Neither of them had been off of the reservation before, so each other was all they had. Slowly, they started understanding that their shared native heritage would muffle any temperament difference. They learned to stick together and help each other out. Victor became more tolerant of the outside world and the native traditions because of Thomas’s curiosity and excitement..
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Thomas had a reason for wanting to go with Victor on the trip to get Victor’s father’s things. Arnold, Victor’s father, had saved Thomas’s life by bringing him out of a burning house when he was a small child. Although Thomas later learned that Arnold had started that fire by drunken carelessness, that didn’t make Thomas’s vision quest any less significant to him. He had went to Spokane Falls, and Arnold would appear to him, as if in a dream. When Arnold was alive, he would go to Thomas sitting on the bridge near the falls, and they would both go out and get something to eat. Arnold and Thomas were like father and son, bonded by the heroic act of Arnold saving his life.

Victor didn’t believe anything good came out of visions and stories, but he had a vision that changed his entire outlook on all of that. He ran to get help for a dying woman, who had been given up as dead by the drunk who caused a car accident. When Victor was about ready to give up, and his legs gave way beneath him, a vision of his father’s outstretched hand and his sympathetic countenance bid him to go on to the hospital and get help for both himself and the woman.

Victor slowly reabsorbed the traditions of his heritage and grew to respect his father through the stories he heard from Suzie, a close friend of his father’s. Going into his father’s old trailer, after much pushing from Suzie and a lost bet in basketball, Victor discovered a family photograph and a valuable knife. With the knife, Victor cut his long hair, a physical sign of mourning his father’s spirit.

Life on the reservation, cut off from mainstream society, also proved to be a major element in the storyline, for Victor and Thomas were taking themselves out of the home they knew, and discovering the real differences in how the outside world views situations, when the differences were only imagined or perceived beforehand. Basketball was also an interesting mainstream society activity that was adopted on the reservation as a pastime. To Arnold, winning against the Jesuits in basketball was like a real victory in war between the Native Americans and the Christians.