. EDWARD BLOCK: Welcome to the program, Ryan.
Mr. RYAN RED CORN: Well, thank you for having me.
. EDWARD BLOCK: You have dedicated this video to the photographer Edward Sheriff
Curtis. Did you mean that dedication sincerely or were you being sarcastic?
. Mr. RED CORN: I think it would be fair to say that I was being sarcastic.
. EDWARD BLOCK: Well, why is that? What's
your problem with those images from
Edward Curtis?
.Mr. RED CORN: Basically, they appear in ever
y history book, you know, from the time
that you enter grade school to even the documentaries that are shown on TV now. It
becomes the dominant image that people have
of Indians. I mean, they imagine that
Indians don't ever smile.
.EDWARD BLOCK: You know, it's interesting because when I look at those old
photographs, I see images that seem to me very dignified, very
proud
, unsmiling, yes,
but in most photographs from the early
1900s people would not be smiling. It was a
serious business to have your picture taken!
.Mr. RED CORN: It's true, but unfortunately, that was kind of the end of the era when
people were taking pictures of Natives. Even if you just Google Native American or
Indian, you'll still come up with a ridiculous,
lopsided
image of what Native Americans
are like today.
.EDWARD BLOCK: There are babies smiling in this video. There are a few times when
there's somebody who starts out looking very serious and then
breaks into a grin
. And
what were you telling people when you were trying to get them to smile or explaining
what you were doing here?
.Mr. RED CORN: I just told them I was shooting a video of smiling Indians.
.EDWARD BLOCK: And it worked?
.Mr. RED CORN: It pretty much worked. I mean, it's like... the presence of humor in
Indian country is everywhere, it's just right there on the surface all the time. All the
Indians I know are smiling Indians. While we were making the video, everybody in the
community wanted to participate in order to show that the old-fashioned image that
Indians are always serious is simply not true.
.EDWARD BLOCK: Isn't it true, however, that
many North American Indians have really
hard lives? Isn't it difficult to smile when life around you is so tough?
.Mr. RED CORN: It is true that for many Indian
s, especially those living in poor areas in
and around reservations, life is not easy. And
sometimes there aren't many reasons to
smile. But even in those conditions, people always find a reason to be positive, and
that happens to everybody, not just Indians. The point here was to show a side of our communities that a lot of people never get a chance to see. It's like saying, not only are
we still here, we're enjoying ourselves, too.
.EDWARD BLOCK: And you really must have
enjoyed yourself making this video, right?
.Mr. RED CORN: Oh yes, very much. When I was shooting the video, I couldn't stop
smiling all the time and my face hurt so much just from looking at all these people
laughing, especially the children and the older people, they were having so much fun!
.EDWARD BLOCK: You have this message at the very end of your video. This
message pops up: If you remember nothing else about me, remember that I smiled.
.Mr. RED CORN: When I was editing the video, we heard some
gunshots
across the
street. And I thought: Man, this would be a really poetic way to end my days if I'm
sitting here working on this video, and a
stray
bullet comes in and gets me. So I had
this idea that if that happened, I was just going to type on my cell phone that if you
remember nothing else about me, just remember that I smiled. And we decided to put it
at the end of the video. It seemed like a good way to finish because, you know, that
was exactly what we were trying to show in this project.
.EDWARD BLOCK: Well, Ryan Red Corn,
thanks for talking to us about it.
.Mr. RED CORN: You're very welcome, I appreciate it.