How to say ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ in Navajo

Whether it’s a welcome attempt to address centuries of neglect, or yet another too-late acknowledgment slap in the face to America’s First Nation citizens, in recent years there have been a number of translations of classic films into indigenous languages.

There’s an Arapo language version of Bambi, a Sámi language Frozen 2 and a Dakota and Lakota dubbed version of the animated series The Berenstein Bears.

Now the Navajo nation has become the first indigenous group to have a western — that most problematic of historical interpretations of the US’s relationship to native Americans —  dubbed into its indigenous language: Clint Eastwood’s 1964 spaghetti western classic A Fistful of Dollars.

But it’s not the first Navajo translation of an English language film — that honour belongs to Star Wars IV: A New Hope.

The film, whose title translates as Béeso Dah Yińiłjaa, is a strange choice, not least because it’s not a traditional John Ford Monument Valley “cowboys versus Indians” western, but rather a Sergio Leone spaghetti western shot in Europe. It’s also a film that includes no mention of native Americans.

Perhaps you could see the Navajo embracing of [Eastwood’s] on-screen persona as a testament to the macho, rugged image he’s become associated with over his long career.

Ever since the Star Wars translation came out in 2013, Manuelito Wheeler, the director of the Navajo Nation Museum, has been implored by elders of the Navajo to translate a western into their language.

Manuelito told the Associated Press that westerns are immensely popular with Navajo elders and that the absence of native Americans in the Eastwood classic was a plus factor for choosing it for translation.

Eastwood, who at 91 has just written and starred in a neo-western, Cry Macho — received lukewarmly by critics — was recently the target of Twitter outrage stemming from a clip from the 1973 Academy Awards show in which Marlon Brando refused his statue for best actor and sent native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather on stage to voice the actor’s protest against the treatment of native Americans by the film industry.

Eastwood, who at that time had cemented his reputation with his role as the “Man with no Name” in Leone’s trilogy of westerns and starred as conservative vigilante cop Dirty Harry, then went on stage to present the award for best picture to The Godfather, and quipped: “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years.” The joke may have angered progressive online activists 48 years later, but in the end, as with many social media fires in the era of culture wars, the controversy petered out, with many coming to Eastwood’s defence.

Eastwood is an avowed Republican and over the years he has certainly made some cringeworthy comments in defence of his chosen political party, including a 2016 defence of the litany of racist and offensive statements made by then presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Asked in an Esquire interview during that year’s election campaign about Trump and his dodgy mouth, Eastwood growled that people should “just fucking get over it”, arguing that when he grew up, “those things weren’t called racist”.

What the actor makes of his new Navajo language incarnation is unknown, but perhaps you could see the Navajo embracing of his on-screen persona as a testament to the macho, rugged image he has become associated with over his long career.

From A Fistful of Dollars to Dirty Harry and beyond, Eastwood has been a figure of determined masculine self-sufficiency whose on-screen mission is to ensure that good prevails over evil by any means necessary — and in a film like A Fistful of Dollars in which that struggle is so ironically reduced to its bare essentials, it’s easy to see how broader political and historical considerations are removed from the equation.

If you really want to get technical, you could argue that Leone’s film is even less of a true-blood western as its plot is lifted almost point by point from Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai classic Yojimbo — a fact which did not get past that film’s production company Toho Studios which successfully sued Leone, though Yojimbo was itself inspired by the 1929 Dashiell Hammett detective novel Red Harvest.

And so it is that in this angry outraged age of online wars about cultural appropriation the Navajo nation will, thanks to a collaboration between the Navajo Nation Museum and the Kino-Lorber distribution company, soon have the pleasure of watching an Italian version of an American western based on a Japanese Samurai film inspired by an American pulp novel, available to enjoy in their indigenous language when Béeso Dah Yińiłjaa has its world premiere at the Window Rock movie theatre in Arizona on November 16.

At the very least, we’ll all soon know how to say “Get three coffins ready” in Navajo.