At home in Ojai with the most successful
Native American actress working today



By Wolf Schneider

photo by Michael Neese

Irene Bedard's rustic 1938 stucco house sits on a California hillside, the lemon trees outside it bearing fruit, with the apricots, pomegranates, lettuce, and corn yet to come. Inside the house, ferns bloom in a makeshift greenhouse, a guitar is propped against the wall on the hardwood floor, a pack of American Spirit cigarettes is tossed on the kitchen counter, and the answering machine is blinking like crazy.

Bedard, is, by nearly all measures, the most successful Native American actress working today. She's completed a film called Wildflowers with Daryl Hannah, Eric Roberts, and Sheila Tousey, which she hopes will screen at Sundance Film Festival; she's about to star with Chad Lowe in the film Your Guardian, she's voicing a Native American female general on the animated Starship Troopers television series; she's in rehearsals for a play in Los Angeles; and she's hoping to reprise her Smoke Signals role as Suzy Song. Phone calls flood in, too, about auditions, various Indian cultural events, and the activities of Guardians of Sacred Lands, an entity she helped create to further Native rights.

The 32-year-old Bedard has lived in Ojai, a secluded hamlet north of Los Angeles with a population of just 8,154, for two years now.

photo by Michael Neese

Born in a suburb of Anchorage, Alaska, the daughter of a French Canadian/Cree Indian dad who worked for the government negotiating Native American land rights and a full-blooded Inupiat Eskimo mom, she lived in Alaska until she was 8. "My father spoke French, and my mother spoke Malamute, and neither one spoke it in the house, so I basically grew up with TV and programs like Bewitched."

Then her dad moved the family to Washington state, where he went into business for himself. "We owned this little place called the Thunderbird Motel, and it had a pond and he stocked it with trout. So, I grew up helping out with the motel, painting the rooms," They didn't stay put there for too long. "He traded that for an apartment building, and he traded the apartment building for a roller rink in Port Townsend, Washington. So, I worked in the roller rink."

She still has strong ties to Alaska–she goes back there to visit family each year and has performed with the Eskimo dancers at their Spirit Days event–but Bedard's own path took her east. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, then co-founded the Chuka Lokali theater ensemble for Native Americans in New York City. Her big breakthrough came in 1994, in TNT's historically potent Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee. Bedard won a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Mary Crow Dog, a woman whose life gains meaning when she joins the famed 1973 Indian protest event involving the American Indian Movement. "I came out feeling I'd done my job well," she says of that role.

Hollywood noticed. Bedard donned buckskins for Disney's Squanto: A Warrior's Tale and held her wedding on the set when she couldn't get time off for the summer-solstice nuptials she had planned. A year later came Pocahontas. "My head was spinning," she says. "I mean, it was the world's largest premiere ever in the history of filmmaking, and it was held in Central Park. I was wearing this glittery Armani-like thing, my hair was long, and I looked like the Pocahontas character."

That same year, People magazine named her one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. "I cried. I looked at myself in the mirror and wanted to put my glasses back on–I had been wearing disposable contacts during Squanto–and say, ‘You don't know. This is who I really am. What are you talking about?'"

photo by Jill Sabella/Miramax Films

The ground-breaking Smoke Signals helped change the rules in Hollywood, where Indian roles have tended towards the same few stereotypes. "The Western, with the cowboys killing the Indians, is so engrained in our social consciousness. I really want to be able to go beyond that and change that perspective and bring us into the 20th century."

Bedard has mostly played Native parts, sometimes not, and that's fine by her. "I want to be known as a Native American, but also to let people know how Native people live now. Why not have this lawyer who grew up on the rez but is now living in New York City? I'm saying: let's bring us into the mainstream."

The sun has set now; the temperature's dropping. Bedard's essentially upbeat nature wants to reassert itself. "I'm basically still a child at heart and an idealist."

Copyright ©1999 Cowboys & Indians


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