Exiles on Main Street: Searching for the Ghosts of Bunker Hill's Native American Past

We all kind of expected as much. Still, the question remains: “Where did they all go?”

Sitting in the bedroom of her comfortable Bellflower apartment, purple curtains drawn, muted light shining down on her purple bedspread, Yvonne Walker smiles as she watches herself on TV.

Kent Mackenzie directs on the set

Eddie Sunrise sings on Hill X

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More About

• Yvonne Walker
• Thom Andersen
• Bunker Hill
• Moses Yakanac
• Native American Issues

“I wish I was that young again,” she laughs.

It’s been nearly 50 years since Walker starred in Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 film The Exiles —to this day, arguably the only film ever made about urban Indians. (See sidebar review.)

Buried for years in the USC archives, the film was given new life after being featured in Thom Andersen’s 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself. Andersen called The Exiles “the best film ever made about Bunker Hill” — praise lofty enough that Milestone Films, in conjunction with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, decided to resuscitate and restore The Exiles, and is in the midst of a nationwide theatrical-distribution effort.

Shot during the heyday of the Third and Main scene and the Indian exodus to Bunker Hill, Mackenzie’s film follows 12 hours in the lives of Walker, her Hualapai husband, Homer, and their Mexican friend Tommy as they struggle to find identity amid the hedonistic chaos of downtown Los Angeles.

Fusing lightly directed improvisational scenes with vérité documentary voice-over, The Exiles captures an otherwise unexplored chapter in Los Angeles’ history, and a chapter in Walker’s life that she thought was long hidden.

“I’ve only even seen the movie one time,” she says. “I lost touch with all these people years ago.”

(Click to enlarge)

Eddie Sunrise sings on Hill X

Orly Olivier

(Click to enlarge)

Back from exile: Walker today, in her Bellflower apartment

Orly Olivier

(Click to enlarge)

Without a trace: The now mostly Mexican Bunker Hill haunt

Back then, Walker was known as Yvonne Williams. An Apache born on the San Carlos reservation in Arizona in 1938, she traveled a hard road to get to Los Angeles, and things didn’t get any smoother when she eventually arrived.

At 5 years of age, Walker became a de facto orphan when her mother died and her father refused to take responsibility for her. “He said he couldn’t look after a girl,” says Walker skeptically. “I never did buy that.”

Walker was put in the care of her aunt, who paid to send her to Catholic boarding school. As she got older, Walker stopped spending her summers on the reservation and instead headed to Los Angeles, where she’d work and save money for the school year.

“I first came to Los Angeles when I was 14,” she says. “I cleaned houses for rich people.”

When Walker was 16, her aunt passed away. Without her guardian, she was alone and broke, and couldn’t afford to keep going to school. She was on her own.

“I knew I didn’t want to go back to the reservation,” she says. “Bad stuff happening all over. People were dirt poor. I saw enough of what life was like there.”

So, Walker again came to Los Angeles, supporting herself by cleaning houses. Over time, one of her bosses, a wealthy real estate agent, took an interest in her. The two women would often have long talks together about life and love. “I used to tell her that I wanted a little baby, but I didn’t want a husband,” Walker laughs. “That got her mad. She was always trying to tell me that I needed a husband.”

The real estate agent was taken with Walker, and told her she wanted to adopt her. But Walker’s father refused to sign the papers.

“I sometimes wished she would have been able to adopt me,” Walker says. “My life probably would have been a whole lot easier than it was.”

Instead, Walker scraped by, doing what she could to earn a living. She never really drank, but nonetheless started hanging out in the Main Street bars when she turned 18. She met her first husband, Cliff, in the Ritz Café, and she was married and pregnant by the time she turned 20. The couple moved to the bottom apartment of an old Victorian boarding house on Bunker Hill.

“It was actually a nice place,” says Walker fondly. “There was a big yard out back with avocado trees. You could just go out and pick them.”

But married life wasn’t easy. Cliff, a heavy drinker, was rarely home, spending most of his time on Main Street. Cliff was apparently quite talkative during his drinking spells, because shortly after their marriage, a young filmmaker named Kent Mackenzie stopped by the house to talk to Walker.

“Cliff must have told him about me,” says Walker, “because he just came by one day and asked if I wanted to be in a movie. Kent wanted someone who didn’t hang out in the bars all the time.”