Navajo was sold to audiences as a documentary when it was released in 1952, and it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 25th Academy Awards. It is not a documentary, and it’s weird that anyone was willing to accept that it might be. Told largely in voiceover, it features Son of the Hunter, a seven-year-old raised traditionally by a Navajo family, what we see is harrowing. Throughout the film, Son of the Hunter’s family dies off. The grandfather who is his closest link to Navajo culture dies early in the film. His mother and a sister die as well, although he is not there to mourn them. The father, ironically, who hangs upon the child in the name like a cloak, disappeared years ago. And Son of the Hunter, who has no interest in the world of the whites, is forced to enter that world when his grandfather dies. He is disappeared, too; the whites send him to a reservation school.

This is a short movie, and I’ve covered about half of its runtime in the preceding paragraph. No documentary has the allegorical power that Navajo has, not even the abstract ones, for the best documentaries do not have the power to shape events so cleanly. Son of the Hunter’s family represents the Native American experience from Jamestown on so acutely that it hurts. The hunters are erased. Women die of disease. The old men who know the old ways have shelf lives. The genocide is completed, presumably, when the young Indians are taken into white custody and stripped of their names and backgrounds in favor of the Christianizing influence. Yet Son of the Hunter refuses to stay at the reservation school even knowing that if he were to be caught, he would be strictly punished. He refuses to stay even though his family is gone, and if nothing else, at least the school feeds the kids. (He quickly gets hungry while on the run, and to his credit he does his best to barter for food rather than letting an empty stomach turn him around.) He refuses to stay even though he still has baby teeth. He insists on maintaining the lifestyle that he believes is best for him. By rights it’s the lifestyle that he ought to have had if he had not had such rotten luck, or if he had not been kidnapped.

Navajo depicts the school’s staff as a well-meaning group, and I suppose they are. The men who go after Son of the Hunter once he’s successfully gotten away, one white, one Indian, are more concerned about the fact that the boy might die somewhere in Arizona more than they’re concerned that he’s run away from the school. The white man had gone out of his way to show some kindness to Son of the Hunter back there, giving him the pocketknife that the boy went on to trade for food. Neither of them say racist things to the kid or anything, or hurt him physically. Decent men do indecent work, and if we know people by their actions as opposed to how friendly they are at church, then there’s a terrible rot inside two good men.

Son of the Hunter’s method of dealing with these two men is shockingly mature. Violence meets mercy; self-defense merges with the recognition of the value of a persecutor’s life. One of the counselors is hurt badly, though not mortally, by a booby trap left by the seven-year-old. It is his intention, originally, to leave the man there with only the hope that his companion can come back with help for him. More accurately, the trap is a diversion of sorts by which Son of the Hunter can raid their supplies and get food. It is impossible not to sympathize with the boy at this moment, not when the film has worked so hard to convince us that Son of the Hunter is not a boy at all but a symbol of what remains of the Indian in the middle of the 20th Century. And because he is a symbol, he hears his equally symbolic grandfather telling him to put away his malice. Son of the Hunter himself strikes out to find help for the man he maimed. Violence is a temporary measure for him in the end, not a means in and of itself. He exerts the force which is necessary for him to live, but ultimately acts to protect the life of the man he has injured.