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

3. Tears and Trash: Economies of Redfacing and the Ghostly Indian

Tears and Trash Economies of Redfacing and the Ghostly Indian On January 4, 1999, Iron Eyes Cody died in his modest Silver Lake bungalow in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-four. A Wild West show recruiter, motion picture actor, stuntman, production crew member, and cultural consultant for almost eight decades, Cody began his career at the age of twelve and starred in hundreds of films (often in uncredited roles) as wide-ranging as Custer’s Last Stand (1936), Union Pacific (1939), The Paleface (1948), Broken Arrow (1950), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), and in television series such as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, The Waltons, and Fantasy Island. Best known for his role as the crying Indian in the televised 1971 Keep America Beautiful Inc. (kab) public service announcement, Cody became, for many people throughout the world, the quintessential symbol of the American Indian. In the announcement he weeps bitter tears about the destruction of the environment; he appears as a stoic and silent wise elder; and he wears the mid-nineteenth-century Plains accoutrements—the beads, buckskins, and braids, long 3 associated with a popular mainstream vision of redfacing. Each night in thousands of suburban homes, Cody’s anachronistic, ghostly Indian figure paddled swiftly across the screen against the backdrop of polluting factories, an image that foregrounds modern anxieties about autochthony and (im)migration, nature 103 Tears and Trash 17. Iron Eyes Cody from the Keep America Beautiful public service announcement. Image courtesy of Keep America Beautiful Inc. © 1971. All rights reserved. 104 Tears and Trash and technology, authenticity and imitation. Cody, in all his majesty and high seriousness, was a real Indian. But these images belie a tension surrounding Cody’s identity that members of Native American communities, particularly those involved in mass media, had long known or suspected: Iron Eyes Cody most likely was not an Indian after all. Although he claimed to be Cherokee and Cree in his 1982 collaborative autobiography , Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian, Angela Aleiss and others have argued that he was white, the Louisiana-born son of Italian immigrants, who broke into the movie business by masquerading as an Indian.1 Rayna Green terms Cody a “staple ‘Indian’ actor” who starred in hundreds of western films, but adds that although he was “enormously supportive of many Indian causes, [he was] really of Mediterranean heritage.”2 While many Native American actors were compelled to enact redface performances for Indian roles, most Indian characters in Hollywood films have been played by non-Indians. Cody was an anomaly because he performed as an Indian both on- and offscreen . I examine two economies of the Indian that are central to the practice of redfacing—impostors and the “ghosting” of Native Americans in popular culture modes—in order to demonstrate how these economies trouble conventional, often static notions of Indigenous identity, identifications, and representation. Rather than define racial impostor identities like Cody’s or create a barometer against which we can gauge “wannabes” from “real” Indians, I interrogate how figures such as Cody have inhabited, tested, and stretched the seams of Native American identity. I analyze redfacing by non-Natives, which parallels blackface, yellowface , and brownface performances of the twentieth century. Yet the striking difference in Cody’s case is that, unlike other actors such as Al Jolson, John Wayne, and Marlon Brando, Cody rarely appeared out of character.3 He tried on the stereotypical “leathers and feathers” costume of the Hollywood Indian and found it fit him like a glove, both on camera and off, throughout his long and successful acting career. This chapter’s literary, journalistic, and pop cultural archive—an autobiography, newspaper accounts, and a televised public service announcement—reveals an economy of passing that is counterintuitive in a national culture that privileges whiteness. Passing has always been tricky business in North America and arose as a result of the inherent instability of racial categories and the desire to codify, legislate, and control racial purity. It has been a central motif in American literature and visual culture and has been interpreted alternately as a sociocultural threat and opportunity. Passing has been a threat to the dominant racial ideology of the United States and Canada, which seeks to maintain Eurocentric hierarchies and control through visually recognizable phenotypes. It has also provided very clear economic and social opportunities to light-skinned individuals who are able to...