Film as Mirror, Film as Mask: The Hollywood Indian versus Native Americans in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199381 Robert Blake as Willie Boy returns to Banning hitching a freight train in Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (Universal, 1969). Polonsky used a modern train and contemporary dress to stress the allegorical nature of his historical tale. Photo courtesy of the museum of Modern Art/Film Still Archive, number 2023-23. 82 Sandos - Burgess / Tell them Willie Boy is Here Film as Mirror, Film as Mask: The Hollywood Indian versus Native Americans in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here James A. Sandos and Larry E. Burgess Students of American film have long noted the fascinating connections between Hollywood portrayals of major social issues and the conflicting tensions in the American society which produced them.1 In 1952, an ostensible film biography of Emiliano Zapapta, famed leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, tells us nothing about Zapata's agrarian radicalism, his anarchist-communist notions of taking land from the rich and distributing it among the poor according to their needs, and instead, focuses on his opposition to dictatorship. In Viva Zapata! (Twentieth Century-Fox) historian Paul Vanderwood persuasively argues, we see director Elia Kazan, himself an active anti-communist, transform Zapapta from a radical Mexican revolutionary into an American "cold warrior," one totally opposed to communism. Through the Hollywood lens Zapata is inverted and perverted into something he was not. Yet, if Mexicans and Mexico are subject to Hollywood stereotype and distortion through ignorance, profit seeking and some racism, the portrayal of American Indians springs from a deeper source of misunderstanding. That source Herman Melville called the "metaphysics of Indianhating ," an attitude born in the American notion of its special mission to "civilize" this land and its peoples, ruthlessly and remorselessly, so as to usher in a new and better age. As Roy Harvey Pearce explained, the role of civilized mission, according to Melville, led to the idea of the tragic role of both Indian-hater and Indian, inextricably linked in the conquest of the wilderness. To Pearce, Indian-hating "functioned not so much as an argument but as an assumption; not so much as a step in a logical chain leading to action, as the very foundation of logic itself. Even those who were genuinely concerned with the welfare of the Indian acted on this assumption."5 Telling or retelling an episode in Indian-white relations, a narrative usually undertaken by a member of the dominant culture with access to printing presses and cameras, risks expression of the assumption in the very way the teller told the tale. Not questioning the assumption of Indian-hating has meant that much of what we think we know about Indian-white history is one-sided; frustrated seekers trying to correct the record, especially about the Hollywood Indian, have generally failed to see that no correction is possible unless an alternative, Indian version, is given credibility and expression. When films supporting the Indian voice are made, such as Pow Wow James A. Sandos is Professor of History at the University of Redlands, in Redlands, California where Larry E. Burgess is Director of the A. K. Smiley Public Library. They are co-authors of The Hunt for Willie Boy: Indian-hating and Popular Cuture (Norman, Ok. : U of Oklahoma P, 1994) Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199383 Highway (Warner Brothers, 1989) and Geronimo (Columbia, 1993), the booking line in theaters is short and typically the audience few in numbers. Credibility in Indian films is further confounded by the western genre, to which most Indian stories belong, and its traditional cavalier disregard for accuracy. Abraham Lincoln Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Universal, 1969) reveals the interplay of all these elements. Our analysis suggests the ways in which Willie Boy mirrors American social concerns in the late 1960s and how it masks an Indian version which our ethnographic fieldwork has brought forward. The film is based upon a 1909 incident in Banning, California, in which an allegedly drunken and lust-crazed Paiute, Willie Boy, stole a rifle and shot to death the sleeping father of a young woman whom he then abducted. Willie Boy and the girl...