Old Cowboys, New Indians: Hollywood Frames the American Indian

Abstract

Winds of change blew with cyclone force across the United States and across Indian country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the era when the most famous and infamous Red Power warriors, the American Indian Movement (AIM), had its heyday. These putatively "new" Indians challenged five hundred years of colonial domination by fighting for a return to full sovereign status for Native nations, restoration of lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation for the minerals exploited from reservations, and a renaissance of Native cultures. But it is important to say at the outset that, despite its name, AIM was not the Indian movement, but rather only one organization among many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other important Indian resistance groups preceded AIM by many years, ran parallel to AIM, and continued after AIM's rise and fall. AIM was far from universally loved in Indian country. To some they were true warriors offering a much-needed wake-up call. To others they were arrogant, disrespectful of tradition, and much too oriented toward white America. Their enemies admitted that AIM had a flair for getting the attention of the mass media, and that attention is the subject of this essay. Specifically, I want to examine how Hollywood has framed the American Indian Movement in a series of fiction films.