A Los Angeles billboard for Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.

Tarantino’s "Dead Indians" and the Roots of American Violence

As other viewers of Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film 'Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood' laughed at Leonardo DiCaprio's 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian' refrain, Nancy Marie Mithlo, Chiricahua Apache, cringed....

My day job is as an American Indian Studies professor at a major university. Actually, like many educators, it is my day and night job. The luxury and the burden of being an academic is that you get to think about complex and weighty ideas ALL THE TIME. That is why I particularly relish going to the movies. I want complete immersion — to be fully entranced, to luxuriate in a space, place and time frame that is totally unique. I want the fantasy. Often, I need the fantasy.

Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film 'Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood' promised to be all that. And in many, if not most ways, it delivers. Described by critics as his ode to Los Angeles, the film conveys the textured, layered and vibrant world of 1969 that I knew as a child. The radio jingles, the go-go boots, the television shows and the hippies, evoked all the sensations I recalled from my youth. It was complete nostalgia. READ MORE