Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The White Man's Indian

1993; Volume: 23; Issue: 1-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.1993.a395797

1548-9922

John E. O’Connor,

Australian History and Society

Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199317 The White Man's Indian John E. O'Connor The most obvious explanation for the Native American's Hollywood image is that the producers, directors, and screenwriters and everyone else associated with the movie industry have inherited a long intellectual and artistic tradition. The perceptions that Europeans and Americans have had of the Native American were emotional and contradictory. Either an enemy or a friend, he was never an ordinary human being accepted on his own terms. As Robert Berkhofer explains in his book White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1977), the dominant view of the Indians has always primarily reflected what the white man thought of himself. As the positive concept of the "Noble Savage" took shape, especially in eighteenth century France, it was conceived as evidence to support the arguments of enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau. Such thinkers believed that people would be better off as children of nature, free of the prejudices and conventions imposed by such established European institutions as the monarchy and the church. The negative view of many of the captivity narratives common in the literature of the New England Puritans proved to the faithful that the forces of the Devil were alive and at work in the dark forests of America. Berkhofer argues that from the first contacts of the European explorers, white men tended to generalize about Indians rather than discriminate,, among individual tribes, to describe Indians primarily in terms of how they differed from whites, and to incorporate strict moral judgements in their descriptions of Indian life. This has proved true in prose, painting, documentary photography— in every art form that chose the Indian as its subject, including film. Consider, for example, the characteristic view of the Indians' relationship to the land. The view—that since the Indian lacked the ambition and good sense that the whites used in developing the American landscape, he impeded progress—has prevailed throughout our history. The movies and television, the popular art forms of today, continue to present images of Native Americans that speak more about the current interests of the dominant culture than they do about the Indians. As war clouds rose overseas in the late 1930s and early 1940s and the dominant American culture sought to reaffirm its traditional patriotic values, the negative stereotype of the Indian (a traditional enemy) served a broader purpose in films such as Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and They Died With Their Boots On (1941). Thirty years later, with America embroiled in a different kind of war and millions of its citizens challenging the government's policies, the movies reflected its divided John O'Connor is the founder and long time editor of Film & History. He is professor of history at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His most rescent book is Image as Artifact. 18 O'Connor / The White Man's Indian consciousness. In films of the sixties and seventies such as Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Little Big Man (1970), Berkhofer perceives that "the Indian became a mere substitute for the oppressed black or hippie white youth alienated from the modern mainstream of American society." One must take care, however, in drawing generalizations. Even with the gradual shift in public interests and values, certain plot formulas have persisted. The Indian raids, for example, on the stagecoach {Orphans of the Plains (1912), Stagecoach (1939), Dakota Incident (1956); on the wagon train (Covered Wagon (1923), Wagon Wheels (1934), Wagonmaster (1950)); on the heralds of technological progress {Iron Horse (1924), Union Pacific (1939), Western Union (1941), on the peaceful frontier homestead {The Heritage of the Desert (1924), The Searchers (1956), Ulzana's Raid (1972)) have changed little. There have been cycles of Indian pictures such as the string of sympathetic films that followed Broken Arrow (1950), but at times a romanticized, even glorified, image could coexist with the vicious one. In 1936, for example, when most screen Indians were the essence of cruelest savagery, Twentieth Century-Fox made the fourth screen version of the idyllic Indian drama Ramona, starring Loretta Young. Even in the very early days, when small...