1 of 3
The word "Indian" has been as fluid as smoke. Misapplied to the aborigines of the New World, the name stuck even when the geographical confusion it revealed had been plainly exposed. Displaced for a while by "Native American," it has been recuperated by some among the very people it supposedly demeaned—but not fully rehabilitated, so its use is self-conscious and often ambivalent.
In the history of film, Indians themselves have had all the smoky shiftability of signs. Sometimes they represent the peace of the "noble savage" uncorrupted by civilization; more often than not, of course, they have been signals of evil, murderous impediments to Western advancement. One early silent, The Aryan (1916), warned viewers about Indians thus: "Oft written in letters of blood, deep carved in the face of destiny, that all men may read, runs the code of the Aryan race: 'Our women shall be guarded.' " (That the original Aryans were Indo-Europeans, including the peoples who created India's great civilization—Indians, in short—was an irony lost on the guardians of women.) In the 1940s, Native Americans employed by Hollywood were sometimes given lessons on how to "act" Indian; they became smoke signals of themselves.
Indeed, Indians are signals of movie-making itself—not only in the sense that our image of Indian culture is largely a construction of the movies, but also that Indians are so much a part of America's self-representation that they inspired some of its earliest moving representations. In 1893, Thomas Edison captured a "Hopi Snake Dance" on film in order to demonstrate his kinetoscope invention at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. After him, silent filmmakers produced nearly 3,000 cowboy and Indian movies, including Hollywood's very first feature film, Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man (1913).
There are at least nine scholarly books focusing on portrayals of Indians on film. Two of the most recent, Celluloid Indians and Hollywood's Indian, discuss how the meaning of Indians has changed with differing cultural contexts.1 Some critics speculate, for example, that John Ford, the director most responsible for our traditional image of "the Western"—in films like Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), Rio Grande (1950), and The Searchers (1956)—created a more favorable depiction of Indians in Cheyenne Autumn (1964) because debates on black racism had made him more sensitive to the plight of minorities. And film historians discuss how the anti-establishment sentiments of the Vietnam era created sympathy for America's disenfranchised natives. More recently, Dances With Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1993) have been celebrated for the nobility they grant to Native Americans as a result of increased cultural sensitivity to the dignity of marginalized peoples.
The assumption seems to be that current filmmakers, and hence the audiences they seek to please—you and I, for example—are morally superior to their benighted predecessors. Taking our cue from C. S. Lewis, who called such hubris "chronological snobbery," we should be suspicious of the idea that no one before the 1960s questioned the portrayal of Indians as one-dimensional signs, whether of savagery or of childlike innocence. Indeed, as early as 1911 an essay appeared protesting the depiction of Indians in film, followed by a 1912 movie sympathetically portraying Indians. And in 1936 The Southwest Review published an essay appropriately titled "The Hollywooden Indian." Furthermore, one could argue that the "sensitive" Westerns merely inverted the simplistic binary between good and evil, with the white establishment now acting the latter role. Certainly, as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick argues in Celluloid Indians, Native Americans in films like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue (both 1970) were merely serving as signs for something else: white guilt over Vietnam.
share this page
RSS Feed
