Smoke Signals

“Smoke Signals” In the movie, Smoke Signals, two men from the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, take a journey to Arizona. The trip turns into a philosophical journey as much as a physical one, encountering odd ball characters and discovering poetic messages at the end of the road. The main characters, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire have known each other since childhood, they are not exactly friends but share a special link. On July 1976, Victor’…

…cut his hair as his father did after the fire. This represented the first process of letting go of the anger. For Thomas, the trip from Idaho to Arizona means an opportunity to come to grips with his ancestry. For Victor, it’s a change to forgive his estranged father in death. For me, it offers the prospect of seeing beyond the stereotypes and realizing that all cultures seem to have the same internal struggles.