Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

Abstract

Reviewed by: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black Jennifer L Jenkins Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. By Liza Black. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 327. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, filmography, index.) Picturing Indians examines twenty years of U.S. film history, post-Stagecoach, in the so-called Golden Age of the Western. Distinct from many film histories of the period and of Native representation in the period and beyond, Picturing Indians examines the economics of what might be called settler-colonial lenses. By disaggregating the production processes from the film narratives, Black exposes the embedded structures within Hollywood's studio system that did much to reify racist views of indigeneity from behind, around, and in the margins of the scenes. Chapters deal with script issues, labor of Native and non-Native actors, the role and race of extras, and the construction of "Movie Indians" upon both Native and non-Native bodies through makeup, costume, and the iconography associated with both. The focus on the labor dynamics of the industry is a clever choice, for it foregrounds typically unseen labor (even now)—doubly unseen when done behind the scenes and by people of color. Every chapter merits careful reading and rereading, but I found the chapter on Indigenous performativity, "'Not Desired by you for Photographing: the Labor of American Indian (and Non-Indian) Extras," particularly resonant and thought-provoking. Black is adept at weaving together close readings of film narratives, granular details about productions, details from Native-produced revisionist documentaries such as Reel Injuns (Diamond, 2009), and firsthand responses from Native viewers to fully deconstruct—and I mean that in the strictest Derridean, not colloquial, [End Page 98] sense—Hollywood's construction of Indianness. Her reportage of coeval and latter-day resistance to such "picturing" is a model of critical storytelling practice as well as of applied decolonizing methodologies. This is film history as activism. As Black argues, this is a project dedicated to Native sovereignty. It is interlaced with critical Indigenous theory, and draws heavily upon Native scholarship, including her wide—and not deferential—reading in Euro-American film studies. Indeed, the literature review should be (and will be in my courses) required reading and a model for how to decolonize academic research. The volume includes an extremely useful filmography in two parts: Hollywood fiction films containing Indian characters from 1941 to 1960 and a broader list of global films with Native characters, many Native-directed or -produced, from 1914 to 2019. Numerous needed courses in film history and theory, economic history, American Indian Studies, regional studies and beyond could be built from these two lists. Liza Black frames this history of "the hyperreality of filmic Indians" (xi) from Cherokee positionality. Black explains that her identity is grounded in Cherokee history but that she presents as White and grew up off-reservation in Southern California. In most cases an author's biography would be irrelevant to an academic study, but American Indian personhood is central to this work. Life details here are an authorizing impulse as well as a respectful means of introducing one's storytelling position. As her final chapter's subtitle indicates, "The Search for Authenticity" is ongoing and urgent. In both method and content, this book charts a new movement in Indigenous film studies in particular and film studies in general. It is welcome, indeed. Jennifer L Jenkins University of Arizona Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association