There’s laziness, there’s racism, and there’s lazy racism. About 45 minutes into IT: Chapter Two, which remained atop the box office last weekend, the three-hour movie reveals it’s aiming for the latter.
For this sequel to the 2017 film, Argentinian director Andrés Muschietti was tasked with interpreting an epic, and epically weird, work. Like with most adaptations, there was plenty of material from King’s version of the story that was excised or altered for its most recent film version. For instance, instead of a mystic turtle vomiting the King macroverse into existence, as it does in the book, the movie places numerous turtle motifs throughout.
IT began as a Stephen King novel in 1986, followed in 1990 by a popular television miniseries. The 2017 film version from Muschietti was a huge hit critically and commercially, and audience members, me included, were left wondering how the shape-shifting creature known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown would be defeated once and for all by a group of friends who affectionately refer to themselves as the Losers’ Club. The answer comes by way of a favorite—and racist—crutch for horror-films: Native American spiritualism.
In the film, one of the Losers, Mike (played by Isaiah Mustafa), secretly drugs a fellow Loser, Bill (James McAvoy). This prompts a psychedelic trip that reveals Mike’s recent visit to a fictional Native American tribe outside their hometown. There, Mike apparently had willingly consumed the same drug, causing him to trip with the Natives, who, for reasons unexplained, allowed him to take part in a spiritual ceremony that showed how ancestors had fought the monster centuries ago: by employing a sacred ritual involving an urn and some ancient magic.
That the scene had cribbed Native culture to serve as a plot point is typical of the American film industry. But it’s galling how this film, which otherwise attempted to stake out ground as a progressive exploration of modern fear, defaulted to such a blatantly stereotypical depiction of Native religion. There’s no meta joke about how Mike’s theft of a Native religious item falls in line with a long-standing colonizer tradition, and no attempt to be inclusive or authentically representative. There’s also not a single line of dialogue for the hazy, drugged-up Natives; they’re simply there, floating around the frame, more inanimate objects than real human beings with beliefs that demand respect.
This is not merely a Hollywood problem. Native people have never had their religions respected—not by the major film studios, by the government, or by the settlers they welcomed onto their land. Sacrificing Native concerns to American myths is one of this country’s time-honored traditions.
In 1714, when the English were attempting to colonize Virginia, my people, the Saponi (now “Sappony”), were a small band. We had our own religion, our own language, our own way of living. We were distinctly Saponi, in the same way that the Cherokee were distinctly Cherokee, the Iroquois were distinctly Iroquois, and so on—separate cultures with unique belief systems. I imagine it was a beautiful thing.
But, according to John Kincheloe’s 2019 book, Rediscovering Christanna: Native Worlds and Governor Spotswood’s Fort, that all changed from 1714 to 1717. The Saponi were forced to enter Fort Christanna, run by Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood, or face death. In the camp, the English government and their religious institutions set to erasing the Saponi belief system. Conversion to Christianity was mandatory. English was required and the Saponi language discarded. The colonizers took in Native children and taught them the old ways were wrong. Within two decades, the Saponi way was dangling by a thread, blending with the Anglo culture in a mix that will ring familiar to many Southern Native bands.
My tribe survived. Still staking out the land in southern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, the majority of our tribal members are now some form of Southern Baptist, a direct result of what the English government sought some 300 years ago. While there are no fluent Saponi speakers remaining, an annual youth camp teaches the Tutelo-Saponi language to the rising generation, word by word. Other Saponi tribes, such as the Haliwa-Saponi, have put forth similar efforts.
The most sobering aspect of this portion of the Sappony story is not that it is unique but that it is nearly universal among smaller tribes. Across the continent, cultures that had thrived for hundreds of years were nearly wiped away. While the colonizers started this cultural genocide, the American government they formed continued and expedited the process. Only in the past half-century has the United States attempted to right this wrong.
By 1978, the federal government had been in the genocide business, cultural and physical, for two centuries. In the twentieth-century version, federal boarding schools, often tied to religious institutions, snapped up Native kids, not unlike the British colonizers did, indoctrinating them with their purportedly superior American ideals. They cut their hair and burned their old clothes, toys, and religious items. As it would soon do to the land and its natural resources, the U.S. attempted to extract every last ounce of culture from an entire people. And for too long, the government proceeded largely unimpeded.
Then, 41 years ago, to little fanfare from the American public or media, a bill was passed with Native people in mind, and for once, it wasn’t just about taking something from them: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Approved by Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter two months before the Indian Child Welfare Act, the legislation was part of a monumental shift in the 1970s in the federal government’s policy toward Indigenous nations.
The American Indian Religious Freedom Act was drafted with the colonizers’ history in mind. Congress sought to put an end to forced assimilation policies, calling them a violation of the First Amendment. For the Native nations who had been driven to hide their beliefs, it was a chance for a new start out in the open. They could again openly practice their religions and speak their languages without looking over their shoulder. Or at least that was the idea.
From a legal perspective, the actual effects of the law were underwhelming. While the act called for the federal government to cease actions that could be detrimental to Native culture, it was largely toothless. It often failed to provide the tribal nations and the U.S. courts the tools to implement the intended changes. As a result, in the years following its passage, the law repeatedly wilted under legal scrutiny. But it was an acknowledgement of enforced evil where previously there had been only been silence, or worse, excuses.
It might be difficult for people outside of tribal communities to connect the dots backward from IT: Chapter Two to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to Fort Christanna. But I, like so many of my Native brothers and sisters, see the connections. We see the historical erasure. We see how the textbooks conclude Native history in the nineteenth century. We see the companies that seek to profit off what was once stolen from us. At the moment, there is little we can do about IT: Chapter Two—or Johnny Depp’s demeaning campaign for the Dior cologne Sauvage, or the “Indian burial grounds” in Pet Sematary—save to remind the creators that they are wrong. We are not gone, and we are not theirs to lean on when their own imaginations or traditions fail them.