"White Man's Book No Good": D. W. Griffith and the American Indian

D. W. Griffith made some thirty short films on Indian subjects during the Biograph years. Yet these mostly melodramatic treatments have received little critical attention. Analyzing films such as The Call of the Wild, A Romance of the Western Hills, and The Massacre, this essay explains how the apparently sympathetic representation of the Native American still adheres to the logic of white supremacy eventually enunciated in The Birth of a Nation.