The Indigenous Imposition: Settling Expectation, Unsettling Revision, and the Politics of Playing with Familiarity

The space race and lunar landing still manage to evoke a futurist framework within the American cultural imaginary; however, given that the audio transmission used in the closing seconds of Judd's film is from a different lunar mission, one that never actually landed on the moon (Apollo 13), it is reasonable to assume that the scene and space-race references here are intended rather to call to mind a vague type of nationalism and futurity rather than a precise mimetic construction of any single mission. "Armstrong," visage concealed behind the faceless reflective glass of his helmet, is generalized through this anonymity and therefore similarly nonspecific: because Armstrong is one of the best-known astronauts other than Buzz Aldrin, the title of the film, while specifying Armstrong's name, seems to operate more as a metonymy for NASA and "American greatness" during the fullest flourish of the race for space rather than any individual astronaut. Even in the choice of construction material, this dichotomy is emphasized by Judd: as an Indigenous earthen embodiment of the historical nexus between sovereign tribal nations and the founding and history of the U.S. government, the Indigenous girl is rendered in clay and nestled in the sandy lunar soil; this in contrast to the faceless astronaut and American flag, both composed in hard plastic. Neatly tying together the history of imperial conquest and the space race through a temporal and perspectival reorientation, we find a familiar historical narrative: an agent of U.S. state power, motivated by the mission of discovery, powered by an ideology of progress, propelled by military technology, wielding the American flag to justify a declaration of ownership, encounters an Indigenous population that complicates the mission.