American Indians and the Mass Media edited by Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez (review)

It is arguable that after elementary school education, the mass media are where most Americans learn about American Indians. Research has shown that media portrayals of American Indian people are generally historical and stereotypical and lack context. Robert Berkhofer's 1978 The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present contextualizes these findings succinctly: "The essence of the White image of the Indian has been the definition of Native Americans in fact and fancy as a separate and single other. Whether evaluated as noble or ignoble, whether seen as exotic or downgraded, the Indian as an image was always alien to the White." Mass media portrayals, images, reports, and stories have always been based on a white perspective and served a white ideology. Unfortunately, elementary school educators relay their knowledge to their students, and the vicious cycle of misinformation about American Indian people continues. The images and accepted ideas about American Indian people are often vastly different from the image and reality of historical and contemporary American Indian life.

Examining old newspaper clippings and contemporary films tells us more than what the images of American Indians are and were. Clippings and films tell us how the mass media have impacted American Indian people and communities and how the mass media continue to shape historical and contemporary images of American Indian people. These images have the potential to affect public perception and public policy and thus individual and collective lives of American Indian people. As Patty Loew writes in the introduction to American Indians and the Mass Media, "Many mainstream Americans believe that all Indian nations have prospered because of gaming, when in reality just one-third of Indian tribes host high-stakes gambling and only a handful make what can be describe as serious money from it" (5).

American Indians and the Mass Media examines the depictions of American Indian people in the mass media from macro, micro, historical, and contemporary perspectives. This comprehensive collection of scholarly research and essays includes fifteen chapters in four parts: "Historical Analyses," "Contemporary Viewpoints," "Mediated Images and Social Expectations," and "Interior Views and Authentic Voices."

At the macro and contemporary levels, Ruth Seymour's chapter, "Names, Not Nations," is a rhetorical examination of New York Times and Los Angeles Times newspaper reporters' use of words such as "Indians" and "tribes" to replace the differences among individual nations. "Word choice," she writes, "becomes a rhetorical battle for cultural and political survival" (74). Social psychologists deem this the outgroup homogeneity effect: the tendency to classify outgroup members as more similar to one another and thus stereotype all members of the group. At the micro level, in the "Mediated Images and Social Expectations" part, andré douglas pond cummings's chapter investigates the intersection of stereotyping, American Indian people, and the law. Cummings opens with a look at the historical treatment of American Indian people by the US government, followed by a reflection on Hollywood's perpetuation of "hateful, disgraceful images … and stereotypes." He connects the two by presenting examples of historically offensive judicial decrees of federal judges as well as examples of legal victories. At the micro and historical levels, John P. Sanchez's chapter, which examines news frames, finds that ethnocentric cultural perceptions about American Indians started with the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. The chapter examines how the beginnings of ethnocentric cultural framing of American Indians in America's first newspaper came to "represent a reality to European settlers and eventually to more recent citizens who absorbed the images from stories in the media of their eras." Historical frames are further analyzed in Selene Phillip's chapter, "Indians on Our Warpath: World War II Images of Native Americans in Life Magazine, 1937–1949." Phillip's visual and contextual analysis of more than six hundred images concludes: "Life editors, advertisers and readers repeatedly mocked American Indians."

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