Native American Actress Takes Featured Role And Makes It Her Own

The role of Bangor, the long-suffering mate of a Vermont logger in "Where the Rivers Flow North," may be the best part Tantoo Cardinal has ever played.

Indeed, it may be the best movie role any Indian actress has had. When the picture played the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford referred to it as "the first-ever featured performance by a Native American actress."

Even critics who don't care for the movie have raved about her work. "Tantoo Cardinal gives Bangor a freshness rarely on the screen," claimed Janet Maslin in The New York Times. "Her face is a map of the film's emotions," wrote The Boston Globe's Jay Carr. One critic gushed that "Oscars should rain from the heavens and fall at her feet."

But this low-budget grassroots production, which opens tomorrow at the Seven Gables Theater, is more than a movie to Cardinal. She and her family grew so fond of the New England locations that they decided to move there.

"We were kind of looking for a place that was conducive to raising human beings," she said by phone from the Vermont home she shares with two young children and her husband, actor John Lallor.

"We had been living in L.A., which was not enriching. I found it desolate. It's a business town, not a creative town. In L.A. you're constantly reminded of everything you're not a part of. It's extremely frustrating being a Native American woman in her 40s. It's more than I need to go through.

"My husband had been living in L.A., and I had gone there because of him. But he was finally ready to get out of town, and we'd found this wonderful small community in Vermont."

Raised by her Cree grandmother, Cardinal grew up in northern Alberta. She met Lallor 12 years ago at an Edmonton dinner theater. He works in television ("Facts of Life") and movies (he was Judge Spicer in "Wyatt Earp"), while she has played key roles in "Dances With Wolves," "Black Robe" and "Silent Tongue."

Genie nominee

Her first break came with "Loyalties," a Canadian drama about the tentative friendship between an Englishwoman (Susan Wooldridge) and an Indian woman (Cardinal) who becomes her housekeeper. One of the high points of the 1986 Seattle International Film Festival, it was nominated for several Genies (the Canadian Oscars), and she won best-actress awards at three festivals.

"It made a difference in Canada, but it was not released in the States," she said. "I have no theater or film-school experience. The first film I did was a historical docudrama for the CBC. That's essentially where I got a lot of my experience. I'd also made small appearances in American films when they'd come to Canada."

Writer-director Jay Craven saw her in "Dances With Wolves" and asked her to play Bangor. The character is drawn from a Howard Frank Mosher novel about a logger's resistance to the building of a hydroelectric dam in 1927. Michael J. Fox, who has a home in Vermont, has a small role as an insistent power-company boss. Another part-time Vermont resident, Treat Williams, turns up briefly.

"Jay had done a number of hour-long dramas, but this was his first feature," said Cardinal. "I really admired the approach he was taking to the character. She's very well-written, quite well-defined. In the book, the story didn't continue after the death of Lord (the logger). In the film you get an image that goes beyond that, and I love that."

As she does in the book, Bangor talks in the third person. Cardinal found this more gift than challenge.

"That was Howard's writing. It was so her. For me it wasn't a big adjustment at all. That way of expression, her character and the way she speaks is one - the way to get into her character."

Too much justification

She also likes the fact that there's no attempt to explain why the logger, played by Rip Torn, would be living with an Indian. She feels that too many writers need justification for bringing Native Americans into their scripts.

"They always gotta explain why a native woman is here, and that's when I lose interest," she said. "Over the years there have been some pretty major attempts on our life. We have no rights as native people. Outside forces didn't see us as human beings with any right to life, any right to belonging on this earth. Maybe that's why they have to explain why we're still here, still alive."

Although the $2 million budget required that the actors work fast, often in poor weather conditions, she and Torn were given plenty of rehearsal time to get their bearings: "You have a lot of responsibility in that two weeks before production. You don't have money to cover your tracks."

Fox's role required only a few days, and he worked for scale: "He was shooting a movie in Canada at the time, and he took Thanskgiving weekend to do ours. It was a big sacrifice for him, and true to his word he helped us out."

`High-profile extra'

Cardinal will next appear in "Lakota Woman," a TNT movie to be broadcast Oct. 16, and "Legends of the Fall," a big-budget film that's scheduled to open in theaters early next year. Neither role has the size of Bangor.

"In `Legends of the Fall,' I'm a high-profile extra," she said. "I'm just sort of there. But I got to spend the whole summer with Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn, and there were no high-tension responsibilities."