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Reviewed by:
  • Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film by Michelle H. Raheja
  • Joanna Hearne (bio)
Michelle H. Raheja. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. ISBN: 9-780803-211261. 338pp.

In this compelling book, Michelle H. Raheja develops several nascent theoretical threads in Native American film and media studies into a richly coherent framework for theorizing Indigenous films, while bringing substantial archival work on silent-era films into conversation with late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century productions. The field has seen the publication of a number of historical surveys of Hollywood images of Indians, including Jacqueline Kilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians, M. Elise Marubbio’s Killing the Indian Maiden, Angela Aleiss’s Making the White Man’s Indian, and others, as well as books that integrate studies of Native films with literature and other arts (e.g., Dean Rader’s Engaged Resistance), and comparative studies of Fourth World transnational Indigenous cinemas (e.g., Shari Huhndorf ’s Mapping the Americas, Corinn Columpar’s Unsettling Sights, and Houston Wood’s Native Features).

Reservation Reelism contributes to the development of Native film and media studies in a number of ways. First, Raheja integrates the study of images of Indians, Native performers, and Indigenous control over film productions, producing a more holistic understanding of the production of Indigeneity on-screen, and one that privileges the presence of Indigenous perspectives even in studio-era films that seem to perpetuate Hollywood stereotypes. Second, her analysis retrieves and reinterprets silent-and studio-era productions and performers as part of a genealogy of Indigenous film, arguing that they should be understood [End Page 107] as the historical precursors to unfolding production practices. Perhaps most importantly, the book brings together interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives from media studies, cultural studies, and Indigenous studies to develop several existing keywords into fully articulated conceptual tools around the ideas of performative redfacing (“the process and politics of playing Indian”), virtual reservations (“the imagined and imaginative sites produced by the cinema”), and visual sovereignty (“the creative self-representation of Native American visual artists”) (xii, 9).

The introductory chapter, “Toward a Genealogy of Indigenous Film Theory,” foregrounds Raheja’s substantial archival work on the network of Native performers in and around Los Angeles during the studio era. Emphasizing both the frustrations and the agency of these actors, consultants, and directors, she describes Hollywood as a “vexed social and imaginary geography where self-representation and stereotype collide and are continually negotiated” (3). Importantly, this emphasis upon negotiation revises previous assumptions about Hollywood Indians as an “abject repository of the dominant culture’s national visual fantasies about race, gender, legal discourse, and anthropological knowledge” (15).

If one strength of the study is its focus on a range of productions, from silent films to music videos, another is Raheja’s close attention to Native actors as well as non-Native actors in Hollywood. In the second and third chapters, she continues this focus on complexities of performance—what has happened behind the scenes in terms of casting practices, individual careers, and the physical elements of dance, costume, movement, and language, across the fraught issues of authenticity that permeate the cultural work of redfacing. Aligning redfacing with the potentially subversive and pedagogical elements of Indigenous trickster figures, Raheja considers several case studies during the twentieth century, from the silent film work and stage performances of actresses Minnie Ha Ha (Cheyenne) and Molly Spotted Elk (Penobscot) to the long career of Italian American actor Iron Eyes Cody (stage name of Espera Dicorti). If Ha Ha and Spotted Elk complicate our understanding of stereotypical Indian “drudge” and “maiden” screen roles, Cody’s long career presents us with the opposite case, a non-Native actor’s controversial, career-long practice of playing Indian both on and off the screen. The case of Cody, whose stylized Plains Indian costume became the “pervasive metonym for ‘Indianness’” after his appearance in the widely circulated 1971 Keep America Beautiful (kab) public [End Page 108] service announcement, opens up larger issues in US visual culture, particularly the field of fantasy or “economy of passing” in which “the mass-mediated Indian subject...

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