The Hollywood Indian is a fictitious stock character, a stereotype and misrepresentation of Native Americans used in movies, especially in the Western genre. The image of the Hollywood Indian reflects neither contemporary nor historical Native American realities; instead, it is based in the views and desires of non-Native producers, screenwriters, directors, and actors. Closely connected to myths and images created about Native Americans and the Wild West, the stereotype has undergone significant changes from the beginning of cinema to the present day.
Contents
History
The Hollywood Indian has his roots in the Western as a literary genre. Ideas such as the vanishing Indian, or the noble and ignoble savage, were made popular by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. This popular wild west literature revolved around frontiersmen, pioneers, and settlers struggling against nature, lawlessness, and Native Americans. Drawing upon genres such as the captivity narrative, these novels rely on a variety of stereotypes. Although supposedly sympathetic to Native Americans, Cooper simplified and polarized Native characters and experiences. While portraying some of his Native main characters as regal, he also portrayed them as the last of their kind and thus enforced the image of the 'vanishing Indian'. This is one of the most persistent images carried into the 20th century. Literary models promoted the idea of Native Americans being either noble or ignoble, and the negative image legitimized concepts such as manifest destiny and the resulting need to eliminate the "Indian threat" to American civilization.
Wild West Shows spread these stereotypes to even larger audiences. Some individual Natives were made famous by non-Natives, who then promoted the racist idea that one man could stand for all Native Americans. The mainstream image of Natives underwent a major change in the 19th century. While in the centuries before, European depictions of Native Americans had been characterized by a certain nakedness, from mid-century on the naked or partly naked “demi-god or cannibal” was replaced by the mounted, be-feathered, and ‘decently’ dressed warrior. Most characteristics of this latter stereotypical Native American were taken from various tribal groups of the Great Plains as they appeared in the 19th century – such as the war bonnet, the teepee, the pipe, and the riding skills. Apparently, already Buffalo Bill picked the Sioux as his favourite "tribe" due to their riding skills and outer appearance.
Theories of Indian stereotyping
In the context of the Western movies, images ranged from ‘the savage warrior’ who took the shape of the noble savage – the heroic and noble hunter/warrior who is most often stoic, in touch with nature, and peace-loving but willing to fight when necessary. Furthermore, derogatory images of the drunken Indian, and the shaman character, who was depicted as mysterious and deeply religious, exist.
Jacquelyn Kilpatrick names three classes of these offensive stereotypes: mental, sexual, and spiritual. She attributes most meaning to the first class, which characterizes Native Americans as being inferior to Euro-Americans in terms of intellect, leading to a “dumb, dirty, and stupid” image of Native Americans. The second class portrays especially male Native Americans as intensely sexual beings who are more "creature than human", run around half-naked, and do little more than lusting after white maidens. The last category views the Native American as a spiritual being. Although this spirituality is perceived as an inherent closeness to nature and especially the earth, which gives Native peoples a “certain nature-based nobility”, it is also regarded as simple and heathen.
The Hollywood Indian
Hollywood Indians are usually based solely on stereotypes of the Plains Indians, such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche, ignoring completely the cultural diversity of the many tribes in North America. Although the film industry “is (mostly) far from purposeful distortion”, technical and business-related production decisions affect the Native American screen image.
O'Connor argues that audiences have certain expectations for characteristic representation – such as easy comprehensibility of the storyline and the morality – which they value over authenticity, and the same holds true for stereotypes. While most of the above features also apply to literature or other media, specific business-related decisions influence film in a way that might advance the stereotypical depiction of Native Americans. The impact of the resulting distorted images in film can be considered in different terms than that of other media. While novels certainly reach a broad public, the world-wide distribution of films allows for an amount of spectators on a totally different scale – not only in numbers, but also emotionally by using filmic devices such as light, music, and camera angles.
As the dominant carrier of filmic misrepresentations of Native Americans, the Western genre emerged in the early days of cinema and remained popular through much of the 20th century. Crucial to the frontier myth, the settlement of the West, and the founding of white civilization are the antagonists, and the indigenous population, served as the opposition to the white Western hero personifying the "agent of civilization". These antagonists in form of a fictional, homogenized celluloid Indian have never really existed except in the stories told by white Americans to white audiences.
Twentieth-century images
Early depictions of Native Americans in film are surprisingly diverse. Although the Indian as the villain, antagonist, or simple-minded savage was present, a complex array of characters populated the silent screens between 1909 and 1913, a period when Indian characters where especially popular: the villain could be white as well as Indian; lasting white–Indian relationships emerged; and mixed-blood Indians could be villainous as well as sympathetic. Edwin Carewe (real name Jay Fox), a Chickasaw filmmaker from that era, made more than 60 feature films and directed the 1928 version of Ramona starring Delores Del Rio and Waner Baxter. By the late teens, the popularity of Indian movies and cowboy-and-Indian movies decreased, and even though Indian movies continued to be produced in moderate numbers, they only became popular again by the mid 1930s. One of the most notable directors from 1924's The Iron Horse to 1964's Cheyenne Autumn was John Ford, often working with John Wayne as his male protagonist. Ford's depiction of Native Americans actually showed both hostile and sympathetic Indians such as in Stagecoach (1939), but also in Fort Apache (1948) and Wagon Master (1950). The first two movies in the cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) feature sympathetic Indians with speaking roles and the conflict is mostly the fault of white prejudice rather than the inherently bad nature of the typical screen Indians. Not all Indian portrayals were savage; by 1950, Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow had set the stage for a new era of Indian/white peaceful coexistence.
A gradual change in the American Indian's screen image did occur from the 1940s and 1950s onwards, at the height of the Western's popularity, when a turn towards “the gradual elimination of the stereotypes in big budget movies ” is noticeable. The social and political consequences of the World War II paved the way, as Native Americans were no longer the principal antagonists and World War II supplied America with new enemies, namely, the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a decline in the production of Western films, thus also diminishing the representation of Native Americans. Influenced heavily by the experiences of the Vietnam war, Native Americans symbolically came to signify any indigenous population threatened by annihilation at the hands of the United States. In this way, though the typical savage disappeared almost entirely from the big screen, Native Americans in motion pictures were reduced to a vehicle of criticism of contemporary politics.
The 1970s and especially the late 1980s saw the emergence of independent films outside the Western genre depicted contemporary Native life. The decisive difference was that "Native American characters become significant in and of themselves". At a time when the Western was nearly extinct, this new image marked an important step towards a greater variety of Native American images on screen. By the mere fact that it involved Native Americans in the production process more than ever before – by employing Native actors for Native parts, for telling stories from a Native perspective, sometimes basing them on Native novels – these films contributed to the visibility of Native peoples. Some examples are House Made of Dawn (1972), Spirit of the Wind (1979), and Powwow Highway (1989), although none of these films attracted a large, mainstream audience. More accurate film representations were now being made, but they were reaching nowhere near the exposure of the earlier, stereotypical images in Westerns.
The release of Dances with Wolves (1990) unexpectedly revived the Western genre. Arguably the most influential Native American-themed film of the last few decades, it paid reasonably careful attention to the depiction of Lakota life, traditions and clothing, at least compared to earlier efforts. However, the basic formula of the Hollywood stereotypes – at its heart the idea of the white lead ‘going Native’, the arrival of the 'White Saviour' – was not transcended, and there were still cultural errors in the film. Thus, the evaluation of scholarly criticism boiled down to granting the film good intentions, but at the same time classifying the movie as a revisionist Western simply replaying the romantic Noble Savage with the white as the hero. Dances with Wolves was followed by other sympathetic or revisionist Western blockbusters such as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and caused mainstream media to put American Indians on their agenda, at least for a short while. One of the few Hollywood movies that portrays Native life outside the Old West and instead sets its story in contemporary times is Thunderheart.
Contemporary Native American cinema
In the past two decades, a striving Native American independent cinema has developed. Native Americans have formed their own production companies and political organizations to influence their own representations and to counter negative stereotypes. What distinguishes Native American cinema from Hollywood productions is the involvement of American Indians as directors, writers, and producers, such as Sherman Alexie, Chris Eyre, Sterlin Harjo, Hanay Geiogamah, and Greg Sarris. Two of the most characteristic features are the casting of Native actors for Native roles, and the setting of the stories in contemporary America as opposed to the 19th-century West. Lakota Woman (TV 1994), Skinwalkers (TV 2002), Smoke Signals (1998), The Business of Fancydancing (2002), Grand Avenue (TV 1996), and Edge of America (TV 2003) are some best-known examples. Additionally, new media is providing a platform for short films and videos by independent producers, comedians, and other content-creators.