PicoBlog

“Ah-koo-chee-moya, we are far from the bones of our ancestors,” is how the closed captions would read anytime a first-season episode of “Star Trek: Voyager” featured Commander Chakotay.

My mother would furrow her brow, I would wince, and my dad would laugh and say, “Hoh! Ece!” roughly translated as, “No. As if.” Seriously. My parents never knew what to make of my pre-teenage love of science fiction in the mid-1990s. Frankly, I think they were just happy that I wasn’t engaging in the scourge of our time: huffing paint underneath a bridge. Or so the educational videos would tell us.

In the 1998 Indian Country blockbuster “Smoke Signals,” Thomas Builds-the-Fire notes, “the only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.” And there used to be some truth to that. In the glory days of Hollywood’s outright anti-Indigenous narratives, Indians on TV were pathetic.

Most often, they were played by white people in brown face speaking in stilted, broken English or some few smattering words of mispronounced Lakota, or worse yet, an entirely synthetic language made up after what could only be described as a screenwriter’s bender. On the rare occasion that an actual actor of color was hired, they were often of any ethnicity except Indigenous. The rare exception was Jay Silverheels who played Tonto on “The Lone Ranger.”

Robert Beltran, lauded Mexican American actor, portrayed the semi-stoic Maquis leader-turned-Starfleet-first-officer every week on my TV screen but on occasion, his story would delve into his Indigenous identity. At first, it’s hinted that his Indigenous ancestry is rooted in the Southwest United States and/or Mexico, then in season two’s “Tattoo,” we learn that his Indigenous identity is from deep in the Central American jungle where his cousins are “inheritors” of a genetic memory going back to 43,000 B.C.E. from an alien race who visited earth over millennia because they had a strange “admiration” of Indigenous people who “honored the land.” It got weird.

Over the years, we are reminded that Chakotay is Indigenous on occasion whenever he begins sage wisdom-dispensing with, “my people … ” It’s a device I’ve used to tell hard truths to white folk in Minneapolis for 10 years now, so thanks to Robert Beltran for teaching me the right voice and gestures to affect when necessary. But ultimately, Chakotay is a synthetic Native American (in the broadest sense possible), we even learn that his people, his tribe, are colonists from a world that is assumed to be the birthplace of the Maquis movement in the Cardassian-Federation peace efforts.

So much of this Indian on TV for me was filled with the potential of what could have been. But as soon as the synthetic language was created, pasted and sewn together with rituals and beliefs from multiple tribal cultures, I was just happy that another Brown man got his screen time on UPN’s dime. For whatever it’s worth, in my 41 years, I know from personal experience that the U.S.-Mexico border is an arbitrary and silly creation that is the bulwark for white supremacy in the southwestern United States.

I have cousins who are half Lakota and half Mexican. I have nieces, nephews, grandchildren (we count grand-niblings as grandchildren in our system) who run every shade of Black and Brown and I’ve stopped worrying about the racial purity of Indigenous people that my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents relied on as an indicator of virtue.

The history of this nation is one where white folk come in to divide and conquer and keep us fighting against ourselves over systems they left in their wake of settlement.

That’s why the cancellation of “Star Trek: Prodigy,” is a matter of Indigenous erasure. In this series, we were about to learn about what happened to our synthetic Indigenous commander-turned-captain. After the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager return to earth after their contractually-obligated seven-season run in the Delta Quadrant of the Milky Way Galaxy, we find out that so many main characters got their own stories, except Chakotay.

He wasn’t a perfect character and at the end of the show, he was used more as a device to advance the character growth of Borg white woman Seven of Nine. And while Beltran turned down a role in Star Trek: Picard, he has said he loves the character, show but has some ambivalence about the character’s love life and other misgivings, I can’t help but feel this is all indicative of the reality of living in white supremacy.

In an age where the biggest controversy about Indigenous representation on TV with the next season of “Reservation Dogs” is that each principal actor is from a different tribal nation, it feels like we shouldn’t have to hang onto vestiges of a time when studio execs saw Brown people, assumed we were all the same and tagged each other with our own struggles. But here we are, Chakotay is forever lost in the Delta Quadrant (again) and we will never know whether Admiral Janeway is down for another adventure to get Number One Indian and it’s now a matter of Indigenous erasure.

Paramount+ executives are looking at their bottom lines and that’s the way capitalism works. But it is a story about what happens to an Indigenous person, whether that tribe is entirely made-up or not. The thing about science fiction is that it relies a good chunk on futurism to cast what any production thinks life will be like in 50, 100 or 1,000 years from now.

“Star Trek,” by Gene Roddenberry’s original design, is an intentionally optimistic view of the future, a place where humanity has found a way past violence and disagreement, where Earth is a utopia and peace reigns in the galaxy. And the thing about Indigenous folks is that our post-contact history is almost always centered around colonization, conflict, genocide, and assimilation.

In the story of Chakotay, we could be unlearning so many of those tropes, we could be diving deeper into his own decolonizing (ironic, given that he was born on a colony but I digress). Imagine what would happen if Admiral Janeway finds him on some backwater planet and he’s having the time of his life, talking to the Sky Spirits every few years and communing with his dead father and grandfather through some temporal anomaly?

Star Trek: Prodigy has the potential to showcase Indigenous joy and autonomy. That’s powerful. And while I still wince whenever I hear “Ahh-koo-chee-moya,” I wonder what is possible far from the bones of the ancestors.

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