By Jon Bowman, Photography by Gwendolen Cates

Born on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon, raised as an adoptive son by white parents in Portland, Chris Eyre (pronounced "air") has always straddled two worlds: the Indian realm that is his by birthright, and the world of what he calls the "Over Culture."

The soft-spoken, 32-year-old director of the film Smoke Signals admits that he's not sure which of the film's two polar-opposite heroes-the sullen and athletic Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) or the talkative, nerdy Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams)-best fits his own self-image. The ambiguity mirrors the dilemma voiced by Thomas, wondering aloud how to describe the offspring of a dog and a cat: "You wouldn't know whether it was a cog or a dat."

Eyre might not be able to choose between Victor and Thomas, cog and dat, but he's not losing any sleep over it. In fact, his strength as a groundbreaking filmmaker could very well rest with his embrace of the conflicting crosscurrents that have shaped his vision and his refusal to steer down any one safe or predictable path.

Eyre is a bundle of contradictions. He studied filmmaking at New York University, but is now ensconced in Rapid City, South Dakota, about as far removed from the urban art circles as it's possible to get. "It's not a Mecca for artists," he readily confesses, but the heartland ambience and close proximity to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation have given him a wealth of first-hand material to feed his own work.
Critic Roger Ebert recognized that homespun honesty and Eyre's ear for the vernacular in praising Smoke Signals. "Most films about Native Americans have had points to make and scores to settle, like all those earnest 1950s white films about blacks," Ebert wrote, but "here come two young Indians [Eyre and screenwriter Sherman Alexie] who speak freshly, humorously and for themselves."

Humor-as opposed to a burning urge to mount a soapbox-compelled Eyre to pursue filmmaking. It dawned on him watching Chief Dan George in the movie Little Big Man that Hollywood might be receptive to a pointed message, if it's given a tongue-in-cheek delivery. "Am I dead yet?" Eyre recalls Chief Dan George asking. "Not yet, grandfather," Dustin Hoffman replies. "Geez, I can never get this right," answers Chief Dan George, getting the last laugh.

Eyre has been trying to get it right ever since, setting the record straight that the American Indian didn't vanish or become a museum piece with the close of the 19th century. The filmmaker has, so far, shunned period pieces, preferring to spin contemporary yarns that are alternately funny and tragic, but invariably grounded in the real-life experiences of modern-day Native peoples.

Since his first short, Tenacity (1994), which he completed at NYU, Eyre has relished the opportunity to puncture any and all stereotypes loosely applied to Indians. He loves bursting the bubbles of conservatives and liberals alike who would paint Indians into a corner as either noble or ignoble savages. The no-nonsense, populist tone for his work was set in Smoke Signals when Victor declares, "Some days, it's a good day to die. Some days, it's a good day to play basketball."

Introduced at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where Eyre won the coveted Filmmaker's Trophy, Smoke Signals went on to garner more than $6 million at the box office. But success didn't come overnight for Eyre. In preparation for Smoke Signals, he paid his dues with a series of shorts, allowing him to define and refine his voice and his craftsmanship. In Tenacity, he wove a tale of two Indian boys and their harrowing encounter with a couple of redneck drifters, foreshadowed by the discovery of a road-killed dog.

In 1995 he followed with another short, Someone Kept Saying Powwow. It was a dry run for Smoke Signals, adapted from the same source-Sherman Alexie's short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven-set on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Idaho. In Powwow, Eyre introduced actor Evan Adams, donning the geeky glasses and long braids for the first time to portray Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Adams and Eyre embellished the character in Smoke Signals, adding the prosthetic crooked front tooth, evident as Thomas gleefully chimes in with Vincent to sing about John Wayne's false teeth.

Eyre sharpened his joke-telling abilities collaborating with notable performance artist James Luna (Luiseno) on the documentary Bringing It Back Home (1997). Along the way, Eyre found time to direct the music video Things We Do (1998) for the red-hot Nakota blues band Indigenous, and to produce Randy Redroad's Doe Boy (2001), the stunning drama of a hemophiliac Cherokee boy confronting his status as a pariah in a society where bloodlines are paramount.

Skins, Eyre's first feature since Smoke Signals, debuted at Sundance this January, and should reach theaters in mid-summer. Based on a novel by Adrian C. Louis, Skins chronicles the divergent fates of two brothers, both Vietnam veterans returning to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Rudy Yellow Lodge (played by Eric Schweig from The Last of the Mohicans) upholds tribal law as a police officer, while Mogie Yellow Lodge (Graham Greene) faces an uphill battle to retain his dignity amidst a sea of alcohol and a mountain of psychological problems.

Eyre continues to stretch his wings. Up next, he'll make his first foray into genre territory, working with Robert Redford (serving as executive producer) on a screen adaptation of Tony Hillerman's thriller Skinwalkers, set on the Navajo Reservation. Eyre has several other projects in the developmental stage, including a biopic of Indian activist Leonard Peltier and a dark comedy called Riverhead, about an unlikely hero in an Alaskan fishing village.

He measures his growth as a filmmaker by the increasing complexity of the stories he's tackling and his willingness to walk a fine line, neither diluting the Indian references nor becoming too hung up on the trappings to sacrifice audience appeal, whether on or off the Rez. For Skins, he cut his favorite scene-a full-blown, hot and heavy love scene-because it didn't move the drama in the direction he wanted. "When you can take your best shot and take it away, then you're making progress," he concludes.