Can a reel Indian, ever be a sign for a real Indian? The question is somewhat specious, since most Caucasians imaged on American film are not signs of real people: the teeth are too white, the noses too sculpted, the bodies too buffed, the hair too perfectly coifed, the repartee too witty. To a certain extent, every movie is a smoke signal of cultural values. For this very reason, then, we should pay attention to cinematic signs generated by Native American culture itself, as in the 1998 film Smoke Signals, the first commercially successful movie written , directed, co-produced, and acted by Indians.
             With a comparatively modern setting, Smoke Signals is about the signs that represent Indians in contemporary culture. Not only do drumbeats associated with Indian war parties punctuate the score, but televisions in the background of several shots also display Indians on the rampage in old black-and-white Westerns. When one of the protagonists answers his question, "What is the only thing more authentic than Indians on TV?" with "Indians watching Indians on TV", we realize that the film ironizes the very idea of authenticity. The desire for "authentic" movie Indians may simply generate "types" rather than complex human beings with strengths and weaknesses like our own. In contrast, Smoke Signals not only gives us flawed characters that elicit our sympathy and admiration but also displays, with affection, the dysfunction of the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in Idaho from which they come.
             The movie opens in 1976 with the voice of Lester Fallsapart reporting traffic for KREZ radio from atop a broken-down Winnebago. When the film cuts forward to 1998, Fallsapart, situated on the same Winnebago at the same crossroads, announces "It's a good day to be indigenous." The image, of course, forces us to question whether the "indigenous" have made any gains at all or, like the appropriately named Fallsapart and his Winne
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