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Expert discusses American Indians in film

American Indians in motion pictures was the subject of a lecture at Montana State University-Northern Thursday afternoon, part of a series of activities hosted by the college in observance of American Indian Heritage Week. The event was sponsored by Humanities Montana.

Richard Elllis, a retired professor of American and western American history, was the featured speaker. Ellis spent 20 years teaching at the University of New Mexico before going on to be a faculty member at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, as well as director of the college's center of SouthWest Studies and later the Institute of Southwest Studies. He also later taught as a Fulbright Professor in Denmark.

Ellis said that the medium of film has played a major role in forming the impressions people in the United States and around the globe have of American Indians. In making this point he saidd out that "The Searchers" a classic western of the 1950s that perpetuated negative stereotypes of Apache Indians, was considered one of the most iconic films of all time, the novel on which it was based sold only 14,000 copies.

The history of American Indians in film, Ellis said, has largely been one where portrayals are riddled with inaccuracies and depicts Natives either as primitive people that need to be led into the modern world, forces in the American West or obstacles to the expansion or survival of white civilization.

"So Native people have had to bear the burden of that negative image," said Ellis.

Those depictions, Ellis said, have a history that reaches almost as far back as the history of Europeans in America. Ellis said that in the 1600s, captivity narratives or accounts of former white prisoners held by Natives were one of the earliest forms of American literature. These stories portrayed Natives as uncouth and violent. This stereotype was furthered with the emergence of the dime novel, a cheap form of formulaic western literature that often had iconic cowboys such as Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill Cody battling American Indians who robbed stage coaches and menaced white settlers.

Ellis said Cody was at the intersection of the changing media landscape, taking the classic western confrontation between cowboys and Natives from the pages of dime novels in which he was so prominently featured and to the Wild West shows. Eventually he persuaded the Bureau of Indian Affairs to allow him to effectively bring the narrative of cowboys and Natives in confrontation to the big screen.

"So he's the guy who ties it all together," Ellis said about Cody.

Despite the widespread image of Natives as violent and uncivilized in an America where whites largely shaped the narratives and images of Native peoples, there were some opportunities for American Indians in the young film industry.

Filmmakers often hired Natives in both supporting and leading roles, primarily in western films. Native actors, such as Montgomery Blue, Lillian Redwing and James Young Deer were able to seize opportunities in a young film industry.

Some white filmmakers, such as Thomas Ince, even depicted Natives as heroes or at least in a sympathetic light and whites as the villains, thereby turning the common western narrative on its head.

But with such advances also came setbacks racism and the large number of short silent films in a young industry limited their potential. Ellis said, much to Blue's dismay, he was eventually relegated to being a stunt double or horseback rider for films.

As the silent era slowly advanced into the world of sound in films, the old narrative of American Indians as half-devil and half-child once again began to emerge. Stories sympathetic to Natives were altered to conform to the prejudices of the age and gain the approval of censors, who, for example, forbade interracial romances from being hinted at or depicted on screen.

By that time, Ellis said, a censorship code had been established, which films had to conform to in order to be marketed by studios and shown in theaters. From then until the 1950s, Ellis said the portrayal of Native people was once again largely negative.

By the 1950s, however, the solidarity Americans felt during the Great Depression and World War II, and the small gains of a civil rights movement in its infancy began to change the attitudes American society had toward nonwhites, including Natives.

In 1950, a new film, "Broken Arrow" starring Jimmy Stewart, was released in theaters, once again changing how Natives were portrayed in films. For example, at the beginning of the film, its star and narrator, Jimmy Stewart, acknowledged that the film was in English because the majority of viewers did not understand Apache. That in and of itself was groundbreaking according to Ellis, which in effect recognized the legitimacy of a Native language.

Even more pioneering was the fact that the film portrayed a romance between Stewart, the film's white leading man and an Apache woman, thereby breaking the rules of the old censors.

"This film is a complete reversal of stereotypes," said Ellis. "The Indians are the good guys, the moral guys and the upright people; the white guys are the bad guys."

But the progress Natives made in getting better treatment in film was often not consistent. Even in films that showed American Indians in a positive light, historical inaccuracies and crude portrayals were still a reality. In the 1970s, for example, "A Man Called Horse" took the old captivity tale of a white man captured by Lakota Indians and portrayed the relationship between prisoner and the captor in a more complex way, but painted the white lead as a white savior who, contrary to history, teaches the Lakota people how to fight and defend themselves.

Even the award-winning Kevin Costner film "Dances with Wolves" showed Lakota Indians needing the help of a sympathetic U.S soldier to fend off enemies.

But by the 1960s it was indisputable, Ellis said, that the image American Indians in film was changing. "Little Big Man," released in the early 1970s, was the story of a white man who, as a child, was taken in by Natives who had killed his parents. From there, the central character finds himself constantly caught between the worlds of the white and Native, and in a fashion similar to Forrest Gump, traverses the landscape of late 19th century American history.

The movie, Ellis said, showed Natives as real human beings and even injected Native humor. Then in 1990, the movie "Dances with Wolves," was lauded for its attention to detail using authentic Lakota regalia and the use of actual Lakota language.

But social advances and richer storytelling often inspired historical inaccuracies, Ellis said. In the 1993 film "Geronimo," events were included that had not actually taken place in the life of the legendary Apache leader.

Still, a few films, such as the 1999 film "Smoke Signals," a comedy-drama, portray Native characters outside the traditional Western narrative. Ellis lauded the film but says that expenses required to produce a film today puts those seeking to make and market such films at a disadvantage.

Ironically, he says, if the studio system that existed in the 1930s and 1940s when images of Natives were at their most negative in film existed today and an old film mogul could be convinced, such stories would stand a better chance of making it to the big screen.

 

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