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The Hollywood Indian is a fictitious image of Native Americans used in movies, especially in the Western genre. Since the majority of Westerns and other depictions of Native Americans in movies originiates in Hollywood, the concept is called the "Hollywood Indian." The image of the Hollywood Indian does neither mirror Native American contemporary reality nor their historical past, but rather shows how producers, screenwriters, directors, and actors have chosen to represent Native Americans. The concept of the Hollywood Indian is closely connected to myths and images created about Native Americans and the Wild West, and has undergone significant changes from the beginning of cinema to the present day. It brings with it complex questions of stereotyping, representation/misrepresentation, casting and production issues, and a debate about race and ethnicity in cinematic representations.

Stereotypical images of Native Americans

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History

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Images of Native Americans have been shaped from the first encounters between whites and Native Americans onwards. The Hollywood Indian still observable today 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 – among others – by James Fenimore Cooper. The popular wild west literature revolved around frontiersmen, pioneers, and settlers struggling against nature, lawlessness, and Native Americans.[1] Drawing upon genres such as the captivity narrative, these novels display 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 positively regal, he also portrayed them as the last of their kind and thus enforced the image of the ‘vanishing Indian’.[2] 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.[3]

Supplementing these stereotypes, Wild West Shows transported visual reductions to the audiences. Single individuals, such as Sitting Bull, became famous and nourished the idea that one man could stand for all Native Americans.[4] The visual image underwent a major change in the 19th century. While in the centuries before, the Native image 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 tepee, 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.[5][6]

Concepts of stereotyping

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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, images of the drunken Indian, and the shaman character, who was depicted as mysterious and deeply religious, exist.[7] In more theoretical terms, Ward Churchill states that from the mid-20th century, the method of stereotyping can be divided into three major themes.[8] First, Native Americans were represented as “creatures of a particular time and a particular space”, geographically and temporally confining Native Americans to the Plains cultures during the times of the last Indian Wars in the second half of the 19th century. Second, their culture was always interpreted through a ‘white’ perspective which led to the alternative reality, preventing any depiction of ‘real’ Native identity in favor of a fictitious one. Third, any “visual cultural characteristics” originally individualizing the tribal groups were blended together.

Kilpatrick uses a different approach to Native American depiction in film and establishes three classes of 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.[9]

The Hollywood Indian

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Hollywood Indians are generally also modelled after different tribes of the Plains, such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche. Although the film industry “is (mostly) far from purposeful distortion”, technical and business-related production decisions affect the Native American screen image.[10] Questions of point of view, dramatic structure, and the translation of traditional myths into visual material threaten to enforce the dichotomy between good and bad, noble and ignoble, friendly or hostile Native Americans. The reduction to a binary opposition is further strengthened because films have to appeal to the broadest possible audience to guarantee financial success. It is especially important to present simple, straightforward narrative structures and perspectives, as moral ambiguities are perceived to be tiring by mass audiences. People 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.[11] 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. Furthermore, 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.[12]

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 perfect opposition to the white Western hero personifying the “agent of civilization”.[13] These antagonists in form of a fictional, homogenized celluloid Indian have never really existed except in the stories told by white Americans to white Americans.[14]

20th century

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Early depictions of Native Americans in film are surprsingly diverse. Although the Indian as the villain, antagonist, or simple-minded savage was present, a complex array of characters populated the silent screens between 1910 and 1912, a period when Indian characters where especially popular: the villain could be as well white as Indian, lasting white-Indian relationships were depicted, and people with mixed ancestry could be bad as well as good.[15] An extraordinary example from this time is the 1910 film White Fawn's Devotion, which was even directed by Native American, James Young Deer. 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 in the late 1930s. One of the most notable directors from the late 1930s to the 1960s was John Ford, often working with John Wayne as his male protagonist. John Ford's depiction of Native Americans often concentrated on Native Americans as an obstacle to progress and manifest destiny, as in Stagecoach (1939), but ultimately underwent a change to a more sympathetic stance towards Indians. The first two movies in the cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) feature Indians with speaking roles and conflict is mostly the fault of white prejudice and not the inherently bad nature of the screen Indians. Still, simple-mindedness and savagery remained the dominant Indian characteristics at the time.[16]

A decisive change in regards to the screen image of Native Americans happened 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 ” starts being noticable. The social and political consequences of the World War II gradually led to changes. Native Americans were no longer the principal antagonists of the all-American white male, as World War II supplied America with new enemies: the Germans, Italians, and Japanese.[17] The albeit slow change in the portrayal of Native Americans in feature films was partly due to established Hollywood practices. The Motion Picture Production Code, for example, was in effect until 1968. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a decline in the production of Western films, thus also diminishing the representation of Native Americans.[18] 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, such as the Viet Cong.[19] 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. However, the 1970s and especially the late 1980s saw the emergence of independent films outside the Western genre which, for the first time, depicted contemporary Native life. The decisive difference to any earlier depiction is that “Native American characters become significant in and of themselves”.[20] 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. Examples are House Made of Dawn (1972), Spirit of the Wind (1979), and Powwow Highway (1989). However, they reached nowhere near as much dissemination as earlier representations in Western.[21]

The release of Dances with Wolves (1990) unexpectedly revived the genre. Arguably the most influential Native American themed film of the last few decades, it paid careful attention to the depiction of Sioux life, traditions, clothing, and language. However, the basic formula of the Hollywood stereotypes – at its heart the idea of the white lead ‘going Native’ – was not transcended. 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.[22][23][24] Dances with Wolves was followed by other sympathetic or revisionist Western blockbusters such as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), and most recently although also more covert Avatar (2009), and caused mainstream media to put American Indians on their agenda in a big way for the first time in decades. One of the few Hollywood movies that portrays Native life outside the time frame of the Indian Wars and the geographical limitation of the West is Thunderheart.

Native American cinema

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In the past two decades, a striving Native American cinema production has developed. Native Americans have inserted themselves more and more into the production of movies depicting Indians in order to gain influence over their own representation and to counter the stereotypes and misrepresentations promoted by the image of the Hollywood Indian. What distinguishes Native American cinema from Hollywood productions is not only the involvement of Native Americans as directors, writers, and producers, such as Sherman Alexie or Chris Eyre. Two of the most characteristic features are the casting of Native actors for Native roles, and the setting of the stories in contemporary Indian country as opposed to the 19th century West. Powwow Highway (1989), Smoke Signals (1998), and The Business of Fancydancing (2002) are just the most known examples.[25]

See also

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Works cited

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References

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  1. ^ John A. Price, "The Stereotyping of North American Indians in Motion Pictures." In G.M. Bataille and C.L.S. Silet, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies (Ann Arbor: Books on Demand, 1994), 77.
  2. ^ Jacquelyin Kilpatrick , Celluloid Indians. Native Americans and Film (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 3.
  3. ^ Ken Nolley, "John Ford and the Hollywood Indian." Film and History 23.1-4 (1993): 49.
  4. ^ Ward Churchill, Norbert Hill, and Mary Ann Hill, “Media Stereotyping and Native Response: An Historical Overview.” The Indian Historian 11.4 (1978): 46.
  5. ^ Churchill, Hill, Hill, “Media Stereotyping”, 47.
  6. ^ Hartmut Lutz, Aproaches. Essays in Native North American Studies and Literatures (Augsburg: Wißner, 2002), 51.
  7. ^ John Mihelich, “Smoke or Signals? American Popular Culture and the Challenge to Hegemonic Images of American Indians in Native American Film.” Wíčazo Ša Review 16.2 (2001), 130.
  8. ^ Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race. Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of the American Indians (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1998), 175ff.
  9. ^ Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians, xvii.
  10. ^ John E. O'Connor, “The White Man’s Indian. An Institutional Approach.” In P.C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds. Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington/KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 30.
  11. ^ O'Connor, “The White Man’s Indian”, 32ff.
  12. ^ Vine Deloria, Jr., “Foreword/American Fantasy.” In G.M. Bataille and C.L.S. Silet, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. (Ann Arbor: Books on Demand, 1994), ix.
  13. ^ Richard Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian. Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978), 80.
  14. ^ Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians, 48.
  15. ^ Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man's Indian. Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport/CT and London: Praeger, 2005), 2.
  16. ^ Aleiss, Making the White Man's Indian, 97ff.
  17. ^ Price, “The Stereotyping of North American Indians”, 90.
  18. ^ Price, “The Stereotyping of North American Indians”, 82-83.
  19. ^ Lutz, Approaches, 57.
  20. ^ Michael Hilger, From Savage to Nobleman. Images of Native Americans in Film (Lanham/MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 205.
  21. ^ James Sandos and Larry Burgess, "The Hollywood Indian versus Native Americans. Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969)." In P.C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds. Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film. Lexington/KY: University Press of Kentucky, 108.
  22. ^ Hilger, From Savage to Nobleman, 223.
  23. ^ Seth Bovey, “Dances with Stereotypes: Western Films and the Myth of the Noble Red.” South Dakota Review 31.1 (1993), 119ff.
  24. ^ Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “The Radical Conscience in Native American Studies.” Wicazo Sa Reveiw 7.2 (1993), 9.
  25. ^ Joshua Brockman, “Telling the Truth from Inside Indian Country.” The New York Times (Sept 29, 2002).

Further reading

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