--Ward Churchill, from Fantasies of the Master Race (1992)

Now those movie Indians wearing all those feathers can't come out as human beings. They're not expected to come out as human beings because I think the American people do not regard them as wholly human. We must remember that many, many American children believe that feathers grow out of Indian heads.

--Stephan Feraca, Motion Picture Director, 1964

1. The handling of American Indians and American Indian subject matter within the context of commercial cinema is objectively racist on all levels, an observation which extends to television as well as film. In this vein, it is linked closely to literature both fictional and non-fictional, upon which many if not most movie scripts are at least loosely based. [. . . .]

   The American Indian as a Creature of Another Time
   

2. We are all aware of the standard motion picture technique of portraying the Native American with galloping pony and flowing headdress. We have seen the tipi and the buffalo hunt, the attack on the wagon train and the ambush of the stagecoach until they are scenes so totally ingrained in the American consciousness as to be synonymous with the very concept of the American Indian (to non-Indian minds at any rate and, unfortunately, to many Indian minds as well). It is not the technical defects of the scenes depicted here - although often they are many - which present the basic problem. Rather, it is that the historical era involved spans a period scarcely exceeding 50 years' duration. Hence, the Indian has been restricted in the public mind, not only in terms of the time of the people portrayed (the Plains Nations), but in terms of the time of their collective existence (roughly 1825-1880s).

3. The essential idea of Native America instilled cinematically is that of a quite uniform aggregation of peoples (in dress, customs, and actions) which flourished with the arrival of whites upon their land and then vanished somewhat mysteriously, along with the bison and the open prairie. There is no "before" to this story, and there is no "after." [. . . ] The point of the historical confines involved in this category, however, is that indigenous people are defined exclusively in terms of certain (conflict and demise) interactions with Euroamericans. There is no cinematic recognition whatsoever of a white-free and autonomous native past. Similarly, no attention is paid at all to the myriad indigenous nations not heavily and dramatically involved in the final period of Anglo-Indian warfare. U.S. audiences know no Aztec, Inca or Anasazi [. . . . ] Small wonder the public views the native as some briefly extant, mythic and usually hostile apparition. As a consequence, the public perception of the historical existence of Native Americans is of beings who spent their time serving as little other than figurative pop-up targets for non-Indian guns.

4. Nor is there an abundance of films attempting to deal with contemporary Indian realities. In effect, the native ceased to exist after the onset of the reservation period of the Plains peoples. [. . . ] A result is that the U.S. mainstream population finds itself under no particular moral or psychic obligation to confront the fact of Native America, as either an historical or topical reality.

   Native Cultures Defined by Eurocentric Values
   

5. An Anishinabe (Chippewa) friend of mine once visited the Field Museum in Chicago. While examining the exhibits of American Indian artifacts located there, she came across an object which she immediately recognized as being her grandmother's root digger, an item the museum's anthropological "experts" had identified and labeled as a "Winnebago hide scraper." She called the mistake to the attention of the departmental director and was told that she, not the museum, was wrong. "If you knew anything at all about your heritage," she was informed, "you'd know that tool is a hide scraper." My friend, helpless to correct this obvious (to her) misinformation, went away. "They never listen to the people who really know these things," she said later. "And so they never understand what they think they know."

6. The above sad-but-true story is not unusual. It serves to illustrate a pattern in Euroamerican dealings with indigenous people which extends vastly beyond the mere identification of objects. In terms of commercial cinema and acting, the problem may be considered on the basis of "context" and "motivation." Put more simply, the question of context is one in which specific acts of certain American Indians are portrayed in scenes devoid of all grounding and explanation. [. . . ] Thus the real acts of indigenous people - even when depicted more or less accurately - often appear irrational, cruel, unintelligent or silly when displayed in film.

7. [. . .] Insofar as indigenous American and Euro-derived worldviews are radically and demonstrably different in almost every way, such a projection can only serve to misrepresent dramatically the native cultures involved and render them nonsensical at best. Such misrepresentation serves two major stereotyping functions. Since the complex of dominant and comparatively monolithic cultural values and beliefs of Eurocentrism presently held by the bulk of the U.S. population are utilized to provide motivation for virtually all American Indians portrayed in commercial film, all native values and beliefs appear to be lumped together into a single homogeneous and consistent whole, regardless of actual variances and distinctions. [. . .] A primary device used by Hollywood to attach Eurocentric values to native acts has been to script a white character to narrate the story-line.

   "Seen One Indian, Seen 'Em All"
   

8. [In the third category] lies the implied assumption that distinctions between cultural groupings of indigenous people are either nonexistent (ignorance) or irrelevant (arrogance). Given this attitude regarding the portrayal of American Indians in film, it is inevitable that the native be reduced from reality to a strange amalgamation of dress, speech, custom and belief. All vestiges of truth - and thereby of intercultural understanding - give way here before the onslaught of movieland's mythic creation.

9. The film A Man Called Horse may serve as an example. This droll adventure, promoted as "the most authentic description of North American Indian life ever filmed," depicts a people whose language is Lakota, whose hairstyles range from Assiniboin through Nez Perce to Comanche, whose tipi design is Crow, and whose Sun Dance ceremony and the lodge in which it is held are both typically Mandan. They are referred to throughout the film as "Sioux," but to which group do they supposedly belong? Secungu (Brule)? Oglala? Santee? Sisseton? Yanktonai? Minneconjou? Hunkpapa? Those generically - and rather pejoratively - called "Sioux" were/are of three major geographic/cultural divisions: the Dakotas of the Minnesota woodlands, the Nakotas of the prairie region east of the Missouri River, and the Lakotas of the high plains proper. These groups were/are quite distinct from each other, and the distinctions do make a difference in terms of accuracy and "authenticity."

10. [. . .] Nor does the dismemberment of reality in this "most realistic of westerns" end with visual catastrophe. The door to cultural reduction is merely opened by such devices. Both the rationale and spiritual ramifications of the Sun Dance are voided by the film's Eurocentric explanation of its form and function. Thus is the Lakota's central and most profoundly sacred of all ceremonies converted into a macho exercise in "self-mutilation," a "primitive initiation rite" showing that the Indian male could "take it." It follows that the film's Anglo lead (Richard Harris) must prove that he is "as tough as the Sioux" by eagerly seeking out his fair share of pain during a Sun Dance. He does this in order to be accepted as "one of them." Just bloody up your chest and no further questions will be asked. How quaint.

11. This, of course, paves the way for the Harris character to become leader of the group. The Sioux, once they have been reduced to little more than a gaggle of prideful masochists, are readily shown to be possessed of little collective intellect (surprise, surprise). Hence, it becomes necessary for the Anglo captive to save his savage captors from an even more ferocious group of primitives coming over the hill. He manages this somewhat spectacular feat by instructing his aboriginal colleagues in the finer points of using the bow, a weapon in uninterrupted use by the people in question for several hundred generations, and out of use by the English for about 200 years at the time the events in the film supposedly occur. But no matter the trivial details. The presumed inherent superiority of Eurocentric minds has once again been demonstrated for all the world to witness. All that was necessary to accomplish this was to replace a bona fide native culture with something else.

12. It is elementary logic to realize that when the cultural identity of a people is symbolically demolished, the achievements and very humanity of that people must also be disregarded. The people, as such, disappear, usually to the benefit - both material and psychic - of those performing the symbolic demolition. There are accurate and appropriate terms which describe this: dehumanization, obliteration or appropriation of identity, political subordination and material colonization are all elements of a common process of imperialism. This is the real meaning of Hollywood's stereotyping of American Indians.

    Conclusion
    

13. It should be relatively easy at this point to identify the stereotyping of American Indians as an accurate reflection of the actual conduct of the Euroamerican population vis-à-vis Native America in both historical and topical senses. North American indigenous peoples have been reduced in terms of cultural identity within the popular consciousness - through a combination of movie treatments, television programming and distortive literature - to a point where the general public perceives them as extinct for all practical intents and purposes. Given that they no longer exist, that which was theirs - whether land and the resources on and beneath it, or their heritage - can now be said, without pangs of guilt, to belong to those who displaced and ultimately supplanted them. Such is one function of cinematic stereotyping within North America's advanced colonial system.

14. Another is to quell potential remorse among the population at large. Genocide is, after all, an extremely ugly word. Far better that the contemporary mainstream believe their antecedents destroyed mindless and intrinsically warlike savages, devoid of true culture and humanity, rather than that they systematically exterminated whole societies of highly intelligent and accomplished human beings who desired nothing so much as to be left in peace. Far better for their descendants if the Euroamerican invader engaged in slaughter only in self-defense, when confronted with hordes of irrationally bloodthirsty heathen beasts, rather than coldly and calculatedly committing mass murder[. . . .]

15. Filmdom's handling of "history" in this regard is, with only a few marginal exceptions, nothing more or less than an elaborate denial of European/Euroamerican criminality on this continent over the past 350 years. Implicitly then, it is an unbridled justification and glorification of the conquest and subordination of Native America. As such, it is a vitally necessary ingredient in the maintenance and perfection of the Euroempire which began when the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Hollywood's performance on this score has been, overall, what one might have legitimately expected to see from the heirs to Leni Riefenstahl [Hitler's 'documentary' filmmaker], had the Third Reich won its War in the East during the 1940s.

16. As the Oneida comedian Charlie Hill has observed, the portrayal of Indians in the cinema has been such that it has made the playing of "Cowboys and Indians" a favorite American childhood game. The object of the "sport" is for the "cowboys" to "kill" all the "Indians," just like in the movies. A bitter irony associated with this is that Indian as well as non-Indian children heatedly demand to be identified as cowboys, a not unnatural outcome under the circumstances, but one which speaks volumes to the damage done to the American Indian self-concept by movie propaganda. The meaning of this, as Hill notes, can best be appreciated if one were to imagine that the children were engaging in a game called "nazis and Jews."

17. [. . . ] Only a concerted effort to debunk Hollywood's mythology can alter the situation for the better. While it's true that the immortal words of General Phil Sheridan - "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" -- have continued to enjoy a certain appeal with the American body politic, and equally true that dead Indians are hardly in a position to call the liars to account for their deeds, there are a few of us left out here who just might be up to the task.