Settling Scores: Claiming Ground for Native and Indigenous Critique in the Americas‪.‬

Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 320 pp. The 1989 independent film Powwow Highway stands out as a unique contribution to the American road movie. The film tells the story of two Cheyenne tribesmen--the portly and naive Philbert, a whimsical dreamer committed to the stories of his ancestors, and the world-weary Buddy Red Bow, a dedicated American Indian Movement freedom fighter and member of his tribal council--as they drive from their reservation in Lame Deer, Montana to Santa Fe, where Buddy's sister has been arrested on false charges of drug trafficking. While Buddy frets over his sister's uncertain fate, Philbert rescripts their adventure as a spirit journey, imagining their run-down car as a war pony guided by the Cheyenne's trickster god, Lightcloud. During their trek Philbert stops to visit "Sweet Butte," a native sacred ground, participate in a Cheyenne powwow, and finally, pay homage to his ancestors at Fort Robinson, a historical site commemorating the deaths of the more than 150 Cheyenne who fled Oklahoma in 1878 in search of their original homelands. In this way, Powwow Highway places Native Americans in the driver's seat of the road movie, and it sets native identity on the move as it travels through the very lands upon which native peoples continue to reside even as they are surrounded by the war machine of the US empire.