Native Americans in film


The portrayal of Native Americans in films has varied throughout the 20th century, employing stereotypes that range from violent barbarians to noble and peaceful savages. A variety of images appeared from the early to mid 1930s, and by the late 1930s negative images briefly dominated Westerns. But in 1950, the watershed movie Broken Arrow appeared that many credit as the first postwar Western to depict Native Americans sympathetically. Starting in the 1990s, Native American filmmakers have attempted to make independent films that work to represent the depth and complexity of indigenous peoples as people and provide a realistic account of their culture.

History

According to Beverly R. Singer, "Despite the fact that a diversity of indigenous peoples had a legal and historical significance in the formation of every new country founded in the Western Hemisphere, in the United States and Canada the term 'Indians' became a hegemonic designation implying that they were all the same in regards to culture, behavior, language, and social organization. The view of 'Indians' as savage and uncivilized was repeated in early films and crystallized the image of 'Indians' as dangerous and unacceptable to the normative lives of European immigrants whose lives appeared in films to be more valuable than those of the indigenous people they were colonizing."
Early films featuring Native characters relied heavily on stereotypical depictions. These characters were often shown wearing leather clothing with feathers in their hair or with elaborate feather headdresses. Further, Native communities were often depicted as cruel societies that sought out constant warfare and vengeance against white characters. Individual Native characters were often written to be drunkards, humorless, cruel, or unintelligent. These depictions, however, are generalized stereotypes and were used largely for aesthetic purposes. Specifically, the use of feather headdresses was culturally and historically correct for approximately only two dozen Plains tribes and not for the other Native societies depicted wearing them.

Revisionist Western

The Revisionist Western, also known as a Modern Western or an Anti-Western, is a subgenre of Western films that began around the mid 1960s and early 1970s. This subgenre is characterized by a darker and more cynical tone that was generally not present in earlier Western films.

Revisionist Western films featuring Native characters

In the 1970s, Revisionist Westerns like Little Big Man and Soldier Blue often portrayed Native Americans as victims and white people as the frontier's aggressive intruders. While the studio comedy Little Big Man still centers on a white protagonist, Dustin Hoffman, the Native Americans are depicted sympathetically while members of the United States Cavalry are depicted as villains. The Cheyenne in the film are living harmoniously and peacefully at the start of the film, and it's the encroachment of the violent white men who are the harmful, disruptive influence on their culture and landscape. The film is also noted for including a Two-Spirit character as well as showing George Armstrong Custer as a lunatic – a fool and a fop – whom the white protagonist betrays for the sake of his adopted Indian family.
The 1980s saw the emergence of independent films with contemporary Native content, such as Powwow Highway, a road movie and buddy film where one protagonist, an angry young activist, namechecks the American Indian Movement while the other visits sacred sites to greet the dawn, both on their way to free a friend from jail.
1990's Dances with Wolves, while hailed by mainstream audiences and providing jobs for many Lakota actors, has also been cited as a return to the White savior narrative in film. In the film U.S. soldiers capture John Dunbar and take him as a prisoner. Native Americans race onto the scene and kill all of the U.S. soldiers while none of the Native Americans get killed. Some of them receive injuries, but they are portrayed as strong and immune to the pain. However, Dunbar then becomes part of the tribe, leads the Sioux against their rivals the Pawnee and later helps them escape the army he once served. The final credits of the film promote the false narrative that Sioux people are now extinct.
Also in the 1990s, more Native Americans wrote, produced and directed their own projects, such as Chris Eyre's 1998 award-winning film, Smoke Signals, which has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is one of few films featuring Native American characters that received a wide viewership. Smoke Signals was written, directed, and acted in by Native Americans. Like Powwow Highway, it is also a road movie and buddy film, that examines friendship, fatherhood, and the roles of tradition versus modernity in Indian Country.
The New World offers a largely fictionalized retelling of the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas. John Smith arrives to the Americas with the Pilgrims and is immediately captured by a Native American tribe. The movie perpetuates several myths about Pocahontas, changing her into an adult so the film can be made into a love story. In reality, Pocahontas was a child of about ten she met John Smith, and there is serious doubt as to whether any of the events he describes ever took place.

Native Americans in animation