American Indians and film

Significance:Film images serve as a major source of information and misinformation regarding American Indian history and culture for people who have no personal contact with American Indians. Although these images often perpetuate damaging stereotypes, films concerning American Indians can also be informative, educational, and entertaining.

Filmmakers in the early twentieth century relied upon the glories of the mythic Wild West as the basis for motion pictures involving American Indians. Early films usually portrayed American Indians as primitive people determined to wreak havoc on innocent white settlers. These films were so offensive that a delegation of American Indians traveled to Washington, DC, in 1911 to protest the misleading representations. Although there were some exceptions to these depictions, the stereotypes that appeared in these early films remained popular for many decades.

Stereotypes

Most films presented one of two stereotypical images: that of a bloodthirsty warrior or a noble savage. Under the first stereotype, American Indians represented an evil to be eliminated. Brave cowboys or cavalry officers pursued and punished savage Indians who had committed some misdeed, in many cases either a massacre or the kidnapping of a white woman. Films ignored the diversity of American Indian cultures, typically portraying member of all regions and tribes in warbonnets and breechclouts, wielding tomahawks and living in tipis. Those who did speak English inevitably did so badly and were given to single-syllable words in short sentences. To compound the errors these films made, white actors usually played the parts of American Indians, especially those with important roles in the film.

The extreme stereotype of the bloodthirsty warrior had its opposite in the noble savage, an image perhaps more sympathetic to American Indians but still inaccurate. While this facet of the stereotype also lived in the nineteenth century West, they were depicted as decent people who had legitimate grievances against the white settlers. However, their dignity and their pride could not preserve their doomed cultures. This romantic image became increasingly popular after World War II. The noble savage stereotype reached new heights during the 1960s and early 1970s, when disenchantment with the war in Vietnam led to critical evaluations of American life. During this period, the treatment of American Indians came to symbolize the failure of the United States as a liberal democracy. The noble savage theme was revived in the popular Dances with Wolves (1990), which contrasted a romantic image of the Lakotas against the barbaric actions of whites in the years following the Civil War. Once again, the film images of Native Americans expressed larger cultural issues that had little to do with their actual lives. However, some filmmakers received credit for attempting to arrive at accurate depictions of American Indian life, even though such efforts were usually flawed.

Changing Images

Westerns fell out of favor with audiences during the 1970s, and film images of American Indians underwent significant changes. Although the character called Chief in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) was to some degree a noble savage stereotype alienated from the world, he was nonetheless a modern American Indian. In addition, Creek actor Will Sampson played the role. The work of Sampson and Dan George, a Suquamish actor, marked the beginning of a promising new trend, the hiring of American Indians as featured actors in motion pictures. Graham Greene, an Oneida Indian, received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for his work in Dances with Wolves. Although the increase in American Indian actors was laudable, perhaps the most encouraging development in regard to American Indians and films was the appearance of American Indian writers and directors committed to presenting accurate representations of American Indian life. Critics hailed Smoke Signals (1998), the first major film written and directed by American Indians, for its realism and honesty. The film won the Dramatic Audience Awards and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

Documentary films also offered insight into American Indian life and into non-Indian perceptions of American Indians. Early films purporting to accurately portray American Indian life often took liberties with the truth. Performers in one of the earliest of these films, Thomas Edison’s Sioux Ghost Dance (1894), were probably not actually performing the Ghost Dance. Director Robert Flaherty set higher standards with his study of life in the Arctic, Nanook of the North (1922), the first film ever referred to as a documentary. Although the film was praised for its production values, some film historians contended that it romanticized native life and therefore fell into the noble savage stereotype.

During the 1970s, documentary films became an increasingly important form of artistic communication for many American Indians. One film historian estimated that fourteen hundred documentaries concerning American Indian life were made between 1968 and 1990, many of them produced by American Indians. Sarah Osawa, a Makah filmmaker, produced In the Heart of the Big Mountain (1988), which examined the lives of Navajos forced to relocate from their homelands. Other documentary films examined the practice of traditional religious rites by American Indians in prison, the struggle to preserve treaty rights, and memories of Wounded Knee. These and other works helped to preserve oral traditions and informed non-Indians about modern American Indian life.

Despite the increase in American Indian filmmakers telling their own stories, mainstream films in the twenty-first century are generally lacking in American Indian representation—a 2015 study published in the Journal of Social Issues found that American Indians and Alaska Natives, who make up 2 percent of the total US population, made up 0 to 0.4 percent of prime-time television and popular film characters. In addition to this issue, when American Indian characters do appear, they are frequently mishandled. One criticism that has garnered increasing attention over the first two decades of the twenty-first century is that American Indian roles are often given to actors without Native heritage, or who may have a small amount of such heritage but were not raised with a connection to the culture they are portraying. Prominent examples include Taylor Lautner as Jacob in the Twilight series (2008–2012), Johnny Depp as Tonto in the remake of The Lone Ranger (2013), and Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in the Peter Pan–inspired Pan (2015).

Bibliography

Bold, Christine. The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Cummings, Denise K. Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2011. Print.

Edgarton, Gary R., and Michael T. Marsden. Westerns: The Essential Journal of Popular Film and Television Collection. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Fitzgerald, Michael Ray. "The White Savior and His Junior Partner: The Lone Ranger and Tonto on Cold War Television (1949–1957)." Journal of Popular Culture 46.1 (2013): 79–108. Print.

Leavitt, Peter A., et al. "'Frozen in Time': The Impact of Native American Media Representations on Identity and Self-Understanding." Journal of Social Issues, vol. 71, no. 1, 2015, pp. 39–53.

Sim, Gerald. The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Wilmer, S. E. Native American Performance and Representation. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2011. Print.