by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

What do you do when you’re outnumbered?

That is the core question of Billy Jack, a hippie wish fulfillment Western that takes its formidable ethics from the feminist, black power, and American Indian Movement philosophies. After facing what seems to be years of production and distribution challenges, Billy Jack came into theaters this month and seems to be doing quite well.

The plot is as simple or as complicated as you want to be: it’s about a man using Korean and special forces martial arts to defend a hippie school on a Native American reservation; it’s about sexual assault as a tool of white supremacy and torture; it’s about white people's mistreatment of American Indians, in general and in specific; it's about white supremacy as a tool of powerful men seeking to control the younger generation; in a few of the more lighthearted scenes, it's about power of improvisational theater to change powerful people‘s hearts and minds.

Continue reading [May 12, 1971] Billy Jack: A Hippie Western →