| More than any other group of people, Native Americans have had their public identity established and shaped by motion pictures. While the cultural construct of the Indian was created during the earliest years of European settlement in North America, Hollywood widely disseminated it across the nation, and the globe, during the twentieth century, appropriating the image of the Indian for its own ends. This dissertation examines a number of American Indian films produced between 1930 and the early-1970s, exploring the movies, themselves, their production, and their reception by critics and audience members. It argues that white filmmakers deployed the image of the Indian in various ways, but always did so for their own purposes, and thus these movies tell us much about the issues preoccupying the United States when they were made, but little to nothing about Native Americans, themselves. During the 1930s, for instance, Hollywood used Indians as background figures in nostalgia-heavy stories that encouraged Americans to return their country to greatness, while in the 1950s, it utilized Indians to promote postwar conformity in films that extolled the virtues of the nuclear family and the assimilation of minorities into mainstream society, and during the 1960s, it presented Indians as virtuous Others whose decency stood in stark contrast to the corruption that appeared to be inherent in Vietnam-era America. Over the course of the four decades examined in this dissertation, Indians emerged from out of the background of these films, eventually becoming prominent characters and even protagonists, and yet the films they occupied were never actually about them. Whether they presented Indians as minor characters or major ones, bloodthirsty monsters or paragons of nobility, American Indian films were always about white, not Native, America. Thus, Hollywood took what it wanted from the image of the Indian, deploying that image in whatever way it required, while leaving Native Americans, themselves, behind. |
