Ashilay Dillow
SIU850015144
SOC215
November 14, 2013
Film Response to Smoke Signals The film Smoke Signals is about two young Native American men, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who venture off their reservation in Idaho to go to Phoenix, Arizona to pick up the ashes of Victor’s dead father. The film opens with a house fire on the Fourth of July, 1976. Infant Thomas is saved from the fire by Victor’s father, Arnold, but is also left parentless when his parents aren’t so lucky. Twelve years later, Victor’s drunk and abusive father abandons his family and leaves the reservation. Twenty years later, Victor learns of his father’s death and decides that he should go retrieve his father’s ashes in Phoenix. Knowing that Victor does not have the funds needed for the trip, Thomas offers to pay for it as long as he can come along. After arriving in Phoenix, Victor learns of one of his father’s secrets. He learns that it was his father that accidently started the fire that killed both of Thomas’ parents and that is was that guilt that resulted in much of his father’s drinking and him leaving the reservation and his family. Both men come home with a better understanding of their pasts and Victor is finally able to come to terms with his father’s mistakes and absence. One of the first lines is a great example of an illusion in this film. During Thomas’ voice-over during the house fire he says, “A fire rose up like General George Armstrong Custer and swallowed up my mother and father.” The writers are referring directly to George A. Custer who was a man in the U.S. military in the mid and late 1800s. He is well-known by history as an Indian killer for his attack on a Cheyenne village on the Washita River in November of 1868 where he charged into a village full of innocent, sleeping Cheyenne Indians and slaughtered over one-hundred people including women and