Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian

Winds of change blew with cyclone force across the United States and across Indian country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the era when the most famous and infamous Red Power warriors, the American Indian Movement (AIM), had its heyday. These putatively "new" Indians challenged five hundred years of colonial domination by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for Native nations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation for the minerals exploited from reservations, and a renaissance of Native cultures. But it is important to say at the outset that, despite its name, AIM was not the Indian movement, but rather only one organization among many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other important Indian resistance groups preceded AIM by many years, ran parallel to AIM, and continued after AIM's rise and fall. AIM was far from universally loved in Indian country. To some they were true warriors offering a much-needed wake-up call. To others they were arrogant, disrespectful of tradition, and much too oriented toward white America. Their enemies admitted that AIM had a flair for getting the attention of the mass media, and that attention is the subject of this essay. Specifically, I want to examine how Hollywood has framed the American Indian Movement in a series of fiction films.

As I consider the strengths and weaknesses of movies about AIM produced in Hollywood, I will be drawing information about the group from various written sources, including primary documents, memoirs, and histories, and from two documentary films, all of which offer generally better information than the fiction films. Indeed, I would not recommend any of the films as the best sources of information about Indian radicalism. For that I would direct readers especially to the primary accounts given in Akwesasne Notes (newsletter) and to the secondary analysis given in the first full-length history of the Red Power era, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior's book Like a Hurricane. ¹ But the films are the most widely circulated texts about AIM, the ones reaching the widest audience of Indians and non-Indians. Thus it is important to examine what they have to say to folks who may not have access to other information on the Red Power era, especially young people who were not alive during the peak years of Indian radicalism in the sixties and seventies. My focus will be on three fiction films that deal to one degree or another with the AIM, and I'll talk about each of them in order of release: Powwow Highway (1989), Thunderheart (1992), and Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee (1994). ² In addition to assessing and comparing each film's strengths and weaknesses as a representation of the nature and aims of Indian radicalism, I will be asking some general questions about the possibilities and limits of insurgent groups trying to get messages across through mainstream media.

While there is a small but thriving independent Native American documentary and fiction film community, no breakthrough to the mainstream has occurred such as that achieved to one degree or another by African-American, Latino, and Asian-American filmmakers. ³ Racism and extremely high production costs have so far kept Hollywood-style films largely beyond the control of the economically poorest population in North America. This means that the filmed stories about AIM do not emerge directly out of the movement's culture or even out of the Native community. AIM activists were involved to one degree or another in each of the three narrative films I'll discuss, but in none did they have anything approaching full control of the final cinematic product. Given this fact, what occurred were various attempts by AIM members to influence a movie-making process in the hands of mostly sympathetic but culturally and politically limited white outsiders who were at best...