Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film

Preface

Preface Reel and Real Worlds Stemming from a long tradition of staged performances such as the Wild West shows that were themselves informed by American literature’s obsession with Native American plots and subplots, film and visual culture have provided the primary representational field on which Native American images have been displayed to dominant culture audiences in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.1 But these representations have also been key to formulating Indigenous people’s own self images. Spokane and Coeur d’Alene writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie recalls watching western films on television as a child: “I hated Tonto then and I hate him now. However, despite my hatred of Tonto, I loved movies about Indians, loved them beyond all reasoning and saw no fault in any of them.”2 For many Native people, it has been possible to despise the numerous abject, stereotypical characters Native Americans were forced to play and deeply enjoy and relate to other images that resonate in some way with lived experiences of tribal peoples or undermine stereotypes in a visual field that otherwise erased Indigenous history. The often excluded or undervalued stories and acts of “survivance ” of Native American spectators, filmmakers, and actors, and the memories of their descendants have inspired me to imagine the early half of the twentieth century as an era of heartache and happiness, poverty and prosperity, loss, revitalization, and creation of traditions.3 Because most twentieth-century cinematic images of Indigenous peoples often either reflected important pressures that Native communities were facing or completely elided Native concerns in ways that demonstrate deep-seated cultural anxieties , film scholarship provides a useful framework of analysis for x Preface considering how Native Americans have responded to change and persisted in keeping and improvising traditions from the silent film era to the present. Analyzing cinematic images of Native Americans produced by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists of the early film period is also vital to understanding how contemporary Native American filmmakers and visual artists engage and critique this field of discourse. Paul Chaat Smith has argued, “The movies loom so large for Indians because they have defined our self-image as well as told the entire planet how we live, look, scream, and kill.”4 The plotlines of most westerns feature Native Americans living outside of their historical, geographical, and cultural context, situated in the past with no viable future. Native Americans are often hypervisible in North American films, especially in films produced during the first half of the twentieth century; at the same time they are rendered invisible through plotlines that reinforce the trope of Indigenous people as vanishing or inconsequential, they receive few speaking parts, and they are often uncredited. Certainly one of the more insidious effects of Hollywood’s racial optics regime was that, despite intentional and unintentional inaccuracies , the films served as pedagogy and knowledge production for spectators. These films have been highly influential in shaping perceptions of Native Americans as, for example, a dying race that is prone to alcoholism and is inherently unable and unwilling to adapt to change. Even in films that express admiration for Native Americans, such as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914) or Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950), seemingly respectful and balanced representations are often rooted in uncritical, problematic racial ideologies that reflect unexamined notions of Native American culture on the part of the director and on the part of North American society as a whole. As Alexie’s discussion of the figure of Tonto suggests, narrative film has provided a space in which to critique the often fantastic xi Preface and surreal images of Native Americans. But these cinematic and televisual experiences also enable Indigenous spectators to engage critically with the artifacts of imagined cultural knowledge produced by the films and their long political, narrative, and historical context, stretching from at least 1492 to the present, particularly as film viewers intuited that those images were the partial products of Native actors. These reactions to films are complicated because Native American spectators neither wholly identified with the representations onscreen nor did they entirely reject them. This viewing practice is similar to what Rey Chow calls “ethnic spectatorship,” a critical examination of the often intractable and egregious stereotypical spectacles of racialized popular images.5 Ethnic spectatorship, according to Chow, also involves a politics of identification that radically re-reads the viewing practices of ethnic and racialized spectators...