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 Andre Seewood Liza Black. Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 354 pp. Hardcover, $65.00. The Hollywood Indian is a well-known constructed figure born within the mythology of White civilizing of the American wild West as represented in hundreds of Hollywood films of the twentieth century and beyond. Various Native American, White, and Black scholars have [End Page 405] studied the construction of the Hollywood Indian from White actors painted in “red face” to the dramatic binary trope of the savage Indian and the noble savage. The Hollywood Indian is a necessary component of the White racial imaginary, just as its counterparts of the Black and the ethnic other form the base upon which an ideal of White purity can exist. That much we know is true, but the book Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black takes an altogether different approach to the construction and maintenance of the Hollywood Indian during and through the immediate postwar period. Through combined methodologies of archival research, tribal histories, actor biographies, and labor histories Black provides insightful, “connections between Indian Actors and the tribes represented on screen” (11). Black teases out tensions between the White man’s Indian and the Native American individuals and tribes surviving their attempted cultural erasure and negotiating resistance to the mythology of settler colonialism as actors within the Hollywood Western. Black’s study of the lives, labor, and organized guilds of Native American and (faux) Native American actors within the Hollywood film industry is not a recuperative gesture, but instead it is a radical intervention that turns the tables on the simple vilification of the Hollywood Indian and the settler colonialist ideology imbued within the films. If Picturing Indians is a book about tribal sovereignty, then the author looks at that sovereignty through a critical lens to address how “Native Americans as employees in the film industry . . . sought to delimit and control their representations,” within a system of production created only to exploit that tribal sovereignty for its own gains (4). In an approach similar to that taken by African American scholar Cedric J. Robinson (Forgeries of Meaning and Memory, 2007), whose critical reading of the performances of African American actor Mantan Moreland revealed a thinly veiled secondary message of resistance and criticism of Whites in his once-thought stereotypical servant roles, Black reads a similar thinly veiled resistance and criticism in the work of Native Americans cast as extras or in supporting roles in Westerns. For example, when Native Americans were hired in Hollywood films for authenticity and to speak their native language, Black discusses how these actors either intentionally spoke gibberish or words that when accurately translated were critical of the settler colonialist ideology, the [End Page 406] role, or the accuracy of the representation of historical events in the Hollywood Western. This resistance and criticism were cloaked from the Whites controlling the film but could be understood by those Native Americans participating in the film and any of those who might watch it. Just as the “twoness” of the African American allowed for a double-coded gesture of resistance against the White racial imaginary within the servant role in film, there is a “twoness” in the representation of the Hollywood Indian that also affords a mode of resistance through language for Native Americans. Black’s intervention into the labor of Native Americans allows her to investigate the material construction of a mythological figure. The mass manufacture of fake Indian noses, the accumulation and refinement of fake Indian wigs, and the mass body painting of Native American extras with cost projections and limits provides the scale and scope of the economy of racial misrepresentation in the construction of the Hollywood Indian. Black invites us to contemplate the material basis of a racist mythology as an economic artifact and as a cultural ideal for transnational export. If Native Americans were to be confined to roles of extras and small speaking supporting roles, then the notion of tribal sovereignty is maintained by the creation of labor guilds and the acceptance of several...