Tremblay uses metallic thread, white film leader, and 35mm film from the 1980 Western, “Windwalker," to construct this basket. The basket is woven around a plexiglass core that she designed. (Her larger baskets are often times woven around a plexi core in order to create a more stable structure around which the unwieldy film material is woven.) She uses a porcupine stitch here to point to the prickly and ironic nature of the film’s subject matter and ironic casting of an English-speaking actor to play a Cheyenne leader. The plot surrounds a battle between the Cheyenne and Crow Nations. The western genre's good guy – bad guy narrative is a complicated one, the artist says. From Tremblay’s perspective, the film poses Crow people as “bloodthirsty savages” who fight against Cheyenne people, who are framed as “noble savages,” age-old racist tropes in cinematic history. The use of these tropes, Tremblay says, constructs a certain world view and “way of talking about Native Americans that divorces the savagery of settler colonialism” from the narrative frame.*

*Froelick Gallery telephone correspondence with the artist, June 2020.
**Froelick Gallery telephone correspondence with the artist, June 2020.

Film Synopsis:
Directed by Keith Merrill, the screenplay was written by Ray Goldrup, and was based on a novel by Blaine Yorgason. The film tells the story of Windwalker, an aging Cheyenne Nation warrior, his long-standing battles with Crow Nation warriors, and his pursuit to re-unify his own family. The film was noted for its accurate use of Cheyenne and Crow language, among other details. The committee that nominates films for Academy Awards wanted to nominate this film, but they had a dilemma. The movie had to be in the category of foreign films because it was not spoken in English and had subtitles, but a movie that is in that category has to be nominated by the country it represents. This made it a catch 22 and, at the time, they could see no way to circumvent the rules, so the nomination fell through.