Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film by Michelle H. Raheja (review)

Reservation Reelism, Michelle Raheja's timely, well-researched and well-written study, asks provocative questions about the intersections of Native American subjectivity and visual culture, from early Hollywood cinema to contemporary works by Native American actors and directors, and offers innovative critical paradigms for reading indigenous film, from "redfacing" to "the virtual reservation" and "visual sovereignty." Recovering several early Hollywood Native American actors' and directors' work, Raheja's project is ambitious and important. She argues, for instance, that early Hollywood cinema included more American Indian "presences" than did future eras in the history of the studio system (xiii). Aside from discussing the work of Native filmmakers of the silent film era such as Edwin Carewe (Chickasaw) and James Young Deer (Ho-Chunk), Raheja uncovers a long repertoire of well-known Native actors during the silent film era: Charles Stevens (Apache); Minnie Ha Ha/Minnie Devereux (Cheyenne); Molly Spotted Elk/Mildred Nelson (Penobscot); Ray Mala (Inupiaq); Luther Standing Bear (Lakota); Chief Tahachee/Jeff Davis Tahchee Cypert (Cherokee); Nipo T. Strongheart (Yakima); Jay Silverheels/Harold J.Smith (Mohawk); and Chief Many Treaties/William Malcolm Hazlett (Blackfoot). Most importantly, Raheja shows how Native American actors and filmmakers, especially in early North American cinema, responded to the popular image of the Hollywood Indian.

Building on a growing body of scholarship on American Indian and indigenous film, Raheja offers an ambitious genealogy of indigenous film theory. Expanding film studies scholarship to include the work of Native American actors and directors, she asks, "How can we reconceptualize North American cinema?" She proposes that we move indigenous cinema to the center of cinematic history and offers a blueprint for "a reading practice for narrative films that Native Americans starred in and sometimes directed—from B-grade westerns to award-winning feature-length films" (7-8). Her readings of Hollywood films from 1900 to 1940, alongside contemporary indigenous film, video, and new visual media artists (such as Chris Eyre, Shelly Nero, and Zacharias Kunuk) draw on recent work in Native American Studies that challenge conventional and reductive representations of Native American people on screen. Additionally, Raheja writes with a keen eye toward feminist, critical race, and queer studies scholarship to show how gendered, raced, and queer spectators—Native and non-Native—responded to stereotypical representations on screen.

In the first chapter, Raheja deftly delineates a genealogy of indigenous film theory and proposes innovative analytical frameworks for reading Native American narrative film. She starts from placing the concept of "redfacing" in historical context, defining it as a role Native actors performed to "absorb, deflect, redirect and placate the fantasies projected on these 'celluloid Indians' by the dominant culture" (11), and relates it to the practices of early Hollywood to represent Asian American, Latino, and African American actors. Acknowledging the similarities between redfacing and blackface minstrel stage and screen performances, Raheja emphasizes that "unlike blackface, redface performance by white actors often assumed "that Native Americans as a distinct group of people had disappeared" (72). She argues that "Native directors and actors have appropriated the narrative and visual conventions of the film medium stereotypes of themselves for their own interests and to their own ends" (11). Another useful concept Raheja introduces is "visual sovereignty," a cinematic practice Native directors have empoyed since the 1960s, which "recognizes the complexities of creating media for multiple audiences, critiquing filmic representations of Native Americans" (200). The self-representations that respond to older stereotypes and connect Native films to "more traditional modes of cultural understanding" inform visual sovereignty (194). Raheja also introduces the concept of the "virtual reservation," an imagined space, a site of critical engagement that can simultaneously counter stereotypes about Native people and create "new modes of indigenous knowledge thorough visual culture" (9). Through the virtual reservation, Native filmmakers and artists can decolonize and transform the film industry.

To illustrate the complicated nuances of "redfacing," in Chapter Two Raheja zooms...