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

2. Ideologies of (In)Visibility: Redfacing, Gender, and Moving Images

Ideologies of (In)Visibility Redfacing, Gender, and Moving Images Historically, motion picture companies have hired fewer Native American female actors than their male counterparts. Because the politics of representation in films with American Indian plots and subplots privilege the frontier as an imagined site where Native American warriors must be conquered, secured, and surveilled , especially in westerns, male characters have been more visible. Silent film, in particular, supported Frederick Jackson Turner’s privileging of the frontier as the primary lens through which to view North American history, allowing spectators to render genocide natural and inevitable, even as this era in cinematic history witnessed a record number of films with Native American storylines, some of which feature sympathetic portrayals of Indigenous people.1 “If Turner’s thesis was a blueprint for a compelling shape for American identity,” Paula Marantz Cohen argues, “silent film was the form of its realization. The oscillation between the civilized and the primitive could find conceptual correlatives in the still and the mobile shot . . . which 2 were fundamental to the lexicon of film.”2 Although the silent era featured hundreds of films with Native American characters and contexts, the majority of these images fixated on the frontier as a metaphor for the doomed, static present of Native Americans set against the kinetic, animated future of the dominant culture and constitute what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have called “a kind of national obsession.”3 Within this masculinist paradigm of the western, film and literary plots often center on queer and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “homosocial” relationships between men.4 In plots that feature raced relationships, Native American men are often emasculated and primarily invested in conditions of “friendship ” and “love.” In Sitting Bull (1954), a western directed by Sidney Salkow that attempts to narrate a complicated history of the frontier, for example, the title character (played by J. Carrol Naish) repeatedly invokes the language of “friendship” and “love” rather than, say, sovereignty and treaty rights in his interactions with the U.S. cavalry. He forms a homosocial triangle with Major Robert “Bob” Parrish (Dale Robertson), an officer determined to recognize Lakota land claims, and Charles Wentworth (Bill Hopper), a newspaper reporter who becomes engaged to Parrish ’s ex-fiancée, an unlikeable, superficial general’s daughter. Parrish is loyal to Sitting Bull, although he is court-martialed and almost executed, and exchanges intense, sexually charged glances with Wentworth, whose company he seems to enjoy more than his former fiancée’s. He also develops a homosocial relationship with Sam (Joel Fluellen), a runaway slave who has been living among the Lakota and voluntarily becomes a loyal servant to Parrish, underscoring a flawed conventional narrative that assumes that forms of slavery can be predicated on a relationship equally beneficial to both parties. These complex relationships reflect Leslie Fiedler’s assertion that “the western glorified pure, same-sex love.”5 Blake Allmendinger character47 Ideologies of (In)Visibility 48 Ideologies of (In)Visibility izes the western as “the queer frontier”: “at the heart of most westerns are male friendships and rivalries, both of which constitute complex lovehate relationships.”6 When Native American women were represented , they tended to embody what M. Elise Marubbio terms either the helpless “celluloid maiden” or the destructive “sexualized maiden,” both of which served the colonial interests of the westward-moving frontier.7 As early as the fifteenth century, the Americas were imagined by conquistadors, explorers, potential settlers, and bureaucrats in European print culture as a metonym for an Indigenous female body that was readily available for conquest. Jan van der Straet’s print of Theodor de Galle’s late sixteenth-century 9. Nova Reperta (New Inventions of Modern Times)/America. Print made by Theodor de Galle after Jan van der Straet, Antwerp, ca. 1588–1612. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 49 Ideologies of (In)Visibility image below epitomizes what Anne McClintock describes as colonial “porno-tropics”: “Roused from her sensual languor by the epic newcomer, the Indigenous woman extends an inviting hand, insinuating sex and submission.”8 The reclining, naked figure of the Indigenous woman standing before the fully clothed, authority- and technology-bearing European man metaphorizes the scene of colonial dominance by suggesting simultaneous sexual and military penetration. The image also inaugurates the trope of the Indigenous whoretraitor exemplified by Malintzin (La Malinche or Doña Marina), Pocahontas, and Sacajewea, women who have borne the onus of...