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Reviewed by:
  • Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film by Michelle H. Raheja
  • Scott D. Emmert
Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. 358 pp. $30.00.

This thoroughly researched book is a significant contribution to film studies. Arguing that from the silent era to today Native American directors, actors, and screenwriters have helped to shape the dominant image of Indigeneous peoples, Michelle H. Raheja both calls for and provides a more sophisticated examination of how cinematic stereotypes of Native Americans are formed, maintained, and negotiated.

While she acknowledges that movies are largely responsible for a negative image of Native Americans, Raheja challenges the “common assumption” that “Hollywood Indians … are an abject repository of the dominant culture’s national visual fantasies about race, gender, legal discourse, and anthropological knowledge” (15) because “the active participation of Native Americans in shaping North American cinematic history somewhat undermines (or at least problematizes)” this assumption (16).

Raheja then employs theoretical concepts, many of her own devising, in an analysis of films and performers both familiar and neglected. In the familiar category is Iron Eyes Cody, who, it is now [End Page 296] widely acknowledged, was not a Native American, as he claimed. Since Cody performed in redface on and off the screen, Raheja analyzes his life and career, especially the 1971 television commercial in which he portrayed a “crying Indian” (102) distraught about environmental destruction. Here Raheja makes visible the connections among redfacing, the “ghost effect” of the supposed vanished Indian, and the history of whites “playing Indian” to set themselves apart from their European forebears and America’s Natives.

For the most part, however, Raheja focuses on lesser-known Native American actors and filmmakers. She considers, for instance, the early actors Minnie Ha Ha (Minnie Devereaux) and Molly Spotted Elk (Mary Alice Nelson), who in silent films and early talkies played characters more subtle than the intertwined stereotypes of the “maiden” and the “hag” (75). Raheja also examines the “trickster” role played by Chauncey Yellow Robe in the 1930 film Silent Enemy, in which Yellow Robe delivered a prologue in Lakota and not in the purported Anishinabe. Through this act Yellow Robe refused to be demeaned as a “Hollywood Indian” while performing an in-joke for Native American viewers, who would see in his speech a “symbolic form of counting coup” (88).

Raheja concludes by discussing more overt expressions of Native American identity in contemporary movies by Native directors, in particular It Starts with a Whisper (1993) by Shelley Niro and Imprint (2007) by Chris Eyre. These films are seen as part of a “virtual reservation” on which Native Americans appear, through an “Indigenous-led aesthetic” (180), as neither ghosts of a vanished past nor spiritual threats contained within Western religious traditions. Both films create, furthermore, a “visual sovereignty” by “refusing a white point of entry for the spectator” (209), and by being “set in the present” they oppose mainstream movies “that situate Native Americans in the nineteenth-century past with no viable future” (208).

Raheja’s theoretical inventions recommend Reservation Reelism not only to scholars of Native American history and film but also to all critics interested in portrayals of race in American popular culture. [End Page 297]

Scott D. Emmert
University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley
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