Native America: Movies

If you're going to look at Native America, you're going to look at movies. Maybe you won't know you're looking at Native America: you think you're seeing "Indians" in a Western-- but those are (often, not always) Native Americans playing Indians.

Consider Stagecoach: Apache played by Navajo; the Navajo are cracking jokes and making comments about John Wayne and the rest-- in Navajo. They are talking back to the white man.

So here are a few movies worth putting in a pile for students to view. Most of them are wild misreadings of Native American life and experience-- Dances With Wolves may be more destructively stereotypic, even, than Fort Apache.

• The Westerns. From Stagecoach and Fort Apache to the most recent anti-Westerns, Indians appear. They are, as the authors in the bibliography point out, constructions of desire and fear by the people who make them-- rarely, if ever, Native American.
• The Good White Man's Indian. Two movies are must-sees in this regard: Kevin Costiner's well-meaning loincloth-epic, Dances With Wolves, and the roughly coterminous Last of the Mohicans. Both are stereotypic imagery updated to sentimental contemporaneity. Lately they've begun to date in amusing ways.
• The Good White Man's Native American. Only one movie fits this mold fully, and that's Little Big Man, a thoroughly engrossing comic epic about a man who shifts from white to Indian and sees the death of Indian identity as a result. Sentimental, noble, stereotypic, and then, an instant later, busily puncturing its own self-importance.
• The Native American's Indian. Sherman Alexie has made the best one yet; it's Smoke Signals.

This list is frustratingly incomplete, but it provides a start.