The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies ed. by Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L. P. Silet, and: Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film by Arthur G. Pettit

Abstract

Reviews 323 The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Edited by Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L. P. Silet. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Uni­ versity Press, 1980. 202 pages, $9.95.) Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film. By Arthur G. Pettit. Edited by Dennis E. Showalter. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981. 282 pages, $19.50; $9.50 paper.) Ethnic stereotyping may be one of the primary reasons why popular western fiction and film often suffer from low critical esteem. Who can deny that Native Americans and Mexican Americans have been exploited for the purposes of formulaic entertainment? Whether this is a matter of prima facie injustice or, as Leslie Fiedler would view racial stereotyping these days, of giving the devil his necessary due, it is hardly something to be ignored. “Motion pictures,” Rita Keshena says in her contribution to The Pretend Indians, “are guilty of almost total distortion of American Indians and their culture, the presentation of which has contributed harm beyond calculation to the concepts, attitudes, and beliefs that Indian people have about them­ selves.” This sense of injustice runs throughout the anthology edited by Bataille and Silet. Many of the editor’s own comments are well-placed rhetorical licks against Hollywood. In the pieces they have collected, Bataille and Silet first offer general views of media stereotyping, then a section on Indians in early films, one on post-World War II films, and a final group of reviews on films from the late sixties and the seventies. Vine Deloria has contributed both a foreword, in which he castigates white images of Indians in general, and a later essay, in which he points more objectively to problems in both media and selfimages of Native Americans. Some selections, such as one that focuses mainly on Buffy Sainte-Marie as a media figure, present little information about film. One by Donald L. Kaufmann attacks white America with such ad hominem vengeance as to render it useful only as a sample of one point of view (com­ plete with factual errors, such as postponing Sitting Bull’s death until 1900). The selection from Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence pulls passages together from two chapters — without ellipses — and thus over-simplifies his rather complicated view of American myth. Yet by bringing together such statements, along with reviews of specific films, the anthology should serve to raise important questions, especially among undergraduate and high school students, about a subject often taken for granted. The annotated biblio­ graphical information at the end of the anthology seems especially useful. There is one curious feature of the book which may illustrate the diffi­ culty involved in juggling the aesthetics of film, the nature of popular enter­ tainment, and the rights of real people to decent treatment by others. This feature is the anthology’s general appraisal of recent films about Indians. Although the editors themselves refer to Little Big Man as having “repeatedly done well with critics,” at least five separate critics represented in The Pre­ 324 Western American Literature tend, Indians cite serious deficiencies in Arthur Penn’s film. Only Philip French takes a genuinely favorable view. Much the same is true of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, Soldier Blue, and A Man Called Horse; even though the films themselves are intended to show Indians in new ways, the critics who comment on them in the anthology often find serious flaws in their treatments of Native Americans. The real favorite, it appears, is Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid — praised by Richard Schickel and Richard Combs, attacked by no one. There is some irony in this fact, especially in view of the generally critical tone of the anthology. As Schickel points out, Ulzana’s Raid features “an Apache of no redeeming social value by modern standards” and probably represents “the last movie in which the soldiery and the savages had at one another, with no liberal-minded questions asked.” The irony here may indicate the need for more attention to such matters, especially by critics and scholars with a broad knowledge of western American literature, both in print and film. In Images of the Mexican American in Fiction...