Having written his doctoral dissertation in the grammar of the Pawnee language and studied eight different American Indian languages, IU anthropology professor Douglas Parks said he has dedicated his life to documenting American Indian linguistics and cultures.
Parks, the co-founder of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, was recently flown to Hollywood to help make the dialogue of two American Indian languages, Pawnee and Arikara, in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film “The Revenant” as accurate as possible.
The two languages were historically spoken in what is now Nebraska and the Dakotas.
The film is set in the northern plains in the early 19th century, and its characters include fur trappers and people from indigenous Arikara and Pawnee tribes.
Parks said he was not surprised to receive a phone call asking for his help, since he is one of the few scholars in both Pawnee and Arikara.
“Well, it was very simple,” he said. “One day the phone rang, and it was a woman who works for the studio. She told me that they had had several people try to do translations for them, but they weren’t able to do what was needed.”
Most of his work on “The Revenant” involved translating dialogue, Parks said.
Parks worked on syncing mouth movements with accurate dialogue in the post-production process while in Los Angeles, he said.
Although he was only working on the film for four days, he said it wore him out.
“You get pooped out, to be quite honest,” he said. “When I was out there, you start early morning, and then you go until the end of the afternoon.”
A few weeks later, Parks said he received another call from the studio asking him to fly out for a couple weeks to work with the actors.
Because he was unable to commit, Parks said he sent a student of his, Logan Sutton.
Like Parks, Sutton has studied Pawnee and Arikara extensively, which made him the perfect choice to work with the actors, Parks said.
“The Revenant,” which is nominated for 12 Academy Awards, is different from other films portraying American Indians due to its emphasis on accuracy, Parks said.
He said the driving force behind that emphasis on accuracy came from Iñárritu.
“The movie is so successful, and it’s taking so many awards that it can’t help but catch the attention of people in the movie business and make them think about, ‘Well, if we portray an Indian tribe, shouldn’t we perhaps have authentic speech if we’re going to use it?,’” Parks said.
Parks said previous films like Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” and Elliot Silverstein’s “A Man Called Horse” are offensive, because the Pawnee and Arikara characters in the films were speaking gibberish.
Because there is such a small population of speakers of American Indian languages and because there often isn’t a written language, Parks said sensitivity to the languages is often disregarded in the film industry.
“You know, somebody doing a film that needs Spanish spoken in it, they wouldn’t think of doing nonsense,” he said. “Too many people in the public would recognize that and be offended by it.”
Due to the film’s success, Parks said he is hopeful “The Revenant” will be groundbreaking in the way American Indian cultures are represented in future films.
“The recognition that they’re as legitimate as any other language, to me, is very important,” he said. “Instead, too many people write off Indian languages as irrelevant.”
