I finished The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (David Treuer, 2019) last night. It took a few weeks of on-and-off reading; it’s close to 450 pages (without the references) and small print. And dense.

I knew some of the pre-1890 history from reading other books, but the way it was presented in the first section of this book made me think about it in a completely different way. It had never dawned on me how different the pre-1890 experience was for different tribes. Different geographies, different cultures, different relations with their neighbors, different encounters with colonizers, different experiences with disease, different and shifting alignments during times of warfare. And so on. The first section of the book opened my eyes to how richly varied things were.

Subsequent sections dealt with 1890-present and most of that material was new for me. I came away from the book with (I think!) a much more realistic and nuanced understanding of Native America. Highly recommended.

I’ve been watching quite a few movies on the Criterion Channel lately. One of them was Sorcerer (1977).

I saw the plot summary and looked up the film up on Wikipedia, which says that Roger Ebert called the movie an “overlooked classic”. I decided to give it a try, expecting basically an action film where four people had to fight their way through a jungle for two hours. And the title intrigued me.

Turns out that the jungle journey is only part of the film; the first hour or so is “vignettes” about how the characters wound up in Central America. Then there is the trek through the jungle while transporting dynamite. Then some unexpected turns near the end.

The scene where they cross a wide river on an aging suspension bridge is crazy and would make the film worth watching even if the rest of it were bad. Which it isn’t. The “blow up the tree” scene was a bit too MacGyver-y for me, but since the MacGyver TV show came out in 1985 I guess you could argue that it was MacGyver that was a bit too “blow up the tree”.

You’ll take your own meaning from the film, but it might be worth reflecting on what the director said about it in an interview:

“The Sorcerer is an evil wizard and in this case the evil Wizard is fate, it’s more a film about fate and about the mystery of fate. The fact that somebody can walk out of their front door and a hurricane can take them away, an earthquake or something falling through the roof or something. And the idea that we don’t really have control over our own fates, neither our births nor our deaths, it’s something that has haunted me since I was intelligent enough to contemplate something like it”

Recently watched: Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter, 1987), Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012), Hard Boiled (John Wu, 1992), To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990), In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994), Infernal Affairs (Lau/Mak, 2002), The Battle Of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966). Battle and Sleep are worth your time.

Reading: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (David Treuer, 2019)

Recently watched: A trio of films from John Carpenter on the Criterion Channel: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Vampires (1998), Ghosts of Mars (2001). Went to the movies on cheap night and saw One Battle After Another (2025).

Books: Recently finished A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, which I really enjoyed. There were a few twists that I did not see coming. Working my way through The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs.

I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works.

Yuval Noah Harari, quoted in The Guardian on 04 Oct 2025.

Working out a few technical glitches.