Playing at Being Indian: Specta Torship and the Early Western

Abstract

Anickelodeon screening of an “Indian” melodrama almost one hundred years ago might have seemed both novel and reassuringly familiar to audiences at the time; novel, since “Indian” films were suddenly en vogue at the time, and this may have been the spectator's first taste of the exciting new genre, and familiar, since many of the films' narrative and iconographic tropes would have been instantly recognized from nineteenth-century painting, photography, theater, popular literature, advertising, museums, world's fairs, and traveling Wild West shows.1 As early as 1840, visitors to Barnum's American Museum in New York City would have marveled at the “Grand Exhibition of a large company of Indian Warriors with their Squaws.” Performing at the museum every evening, the troupe demonstrated the “various modes and ceremonies of savage life, superstitions, war songs, dances, etc.”2 Consumed as popular entertainment for well over half a century before the emergence of cinema, audiences would have had few problems recognizing enduring tropes in the representation of Native Americans when they encountered them in cinematic form in the 1890s. While cut from the same discursive cloth as their precinematic antecedents, these films nevertheless, as the quote from “The Vogue of Western and Military Dramas” indicates, provoked a lively debate over the generic parameters of the Western, including expressions of dismay at the artistic liberties taken by some filmmakers. I explore the topic of spectatorship and the early film Western, approaching the subject from two perspectives: first, the role of Indian actualities as cinematic intertexts for the “ethnographic” set pieces used in “Indian” films, and second, the ways in which audiences may have understood the widespread practice of casting whites in Indian leads in early Westerns.