The last time actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth popped into town for a media event, fans showed up outside Powwow Grounds to get his autograph.
The “Reservation Dogs” star will be back in Minneapolis this week to curate “Once Upon a Time In Manhood,” a summer film series at the Walker Art Center, which begins on July 10.
Goldtooth, an environmental activist who pivoted to comedy and acting, chose to focus this year’s Moving Image series on the ways Indigeneity, urban and rural environments and popular culture shape ideas of masculinity.
“There’s been a recurring theme in my life of speaking on the topic of masculinity, speaking on the topic of being a man and having conversations with men about what it means to be men,” Goldtooth said. “Because I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, and there were lots of movies that influenced my identity, I [thought] this would be a great topic.”
Goldtooth, who is best known as a founding member of the Twin Cities-based Indigenous comedy group The 1491s and actor and writer on the series “Reservation Dogs,” said his first idea was to screen films about migrant communities through the perspective of Native Americans.
As a member of Mdewakanton Dakota and Diné tribes who spent some of his formative years in south Minneapolis, interacting with both the “Minnesota Nice white folks that are passive-aggressive beyond compare” and immigrants and refugees residing in Minnesota, he wanted to see how transnational identities and preserving culture in a foreign country related to Native communities.
Upon further reflection though, he decided to pursue the topic of masculinity instead, a theme he has been exploring for the past six years in his comedy and acting performances. Focusing mostly on the representations of manhood he witnessed as a child in his family and community, he wanted to investigate how the men he saw on the screen also impacted his manhood.
“I talk a lot about masculinity and the experience of growing up around and with problematic men and with just funny dysfunctional men,” Goldtooth said. “Growing up around dysfunctional men whose dysfunction essentially is really [expletive] hilarious, because it’s all built on insecurities and fears.”
Goldtooth’s selection of the theme and the movies that would be screened, which include cult classics such as “Die Hard” or “Fight Club” and films exploring indigeneity such as Taika Waititi’s “Boy” or “The Last of the Mohicans,” came as a surprise to Walker’s Moving Image team.
These films are not what the Walker Art Center’s audience is used to seeing at the theater, Moving Image director and curator Pablo de Ocampo noted. In the past years, other outside curators and artists in the summer film series, such as the poet Hanif Abdurraqib or writer Adrienne Maree Brown, chose less mainstream films to screen. De Ocampo, however, supported Goldtooth’s film selection.
“Dallas is provoking a really interesting question … about how contemporary films from his youth influence society, your view of the world and who do you want to grow up to be,” de Ocampo said.
“Once Upon a Time in Manhood” poses the question of what kind of representations of manhood boys grow up with and inherit into adulthood and whether they should embody them or leave them behind. Goldtooth posed the same question to himself. He stresses the importance of revisiting the films audiences watched as children and engaging with them critically as adults.
“For me, I own up to the idea that I have absorbed and actually internalized almost all the aspects of masculinity in these films,” he said. “I’m actively trying to have a conversation since I’ve seen them now; to be accountable [for] what I’ve learned, and to let go of what I deem as unnecessary, unhealthy and toxic.”
From the beginning of his acting and comedy career, Goldtooth expressed and explored his masculinity through art. In his comedy group 1491s, he and his collaborators Migizi Pensoneau and Bobby Wilson show the relationship between contemporary Native manhood and colonialism. The name of the group 1491s is a reference to Prince’s “1999” lyric “Let’s party like it’s 1999” to “Let’s party like it’s 1491,” a year before “it all went to hell,” Goldtooth said, referring to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492
Goldtooth’s work is known across the country, spanning beyond just the Native communities for whom he intended his comedy. Being well aware of this, he does not ever want to remove his people from the center of his target audiences, which includes the upcoming film series.
“In my art, comedy, my stage performances and everything … I’m not as worried or interested in catering to non-Native people, as much as I really want to make Native people feel like they have a voice and that they see something that is reflected in their experience,” Goldtooth said.
Goldtooth will attend the first two screenings of the series at the Walker on July 10 and 11, introducing the films “Willow” by Ron Howard and “The Last of the Mohicans” by Michael Mann. The rest of the screenings will feature pre-recorded short videos of him, in which he will speak about the films and the impact they had on him growing up from boyhood to manhood.
Date: Friday, July 10 through Friday, Aug. 14
Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis.
Cost: $15, $12 for Walker members, seniors and students, Friday screenings are free for students
More info: walkerart.org/seasons/once-upon-a-time-in-manhood
