Whose Home on the Range? Finding Room for Native Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans in the Revisionist Western

Abstract

In 1939, John Ford, the master auteur of the Western film, directed two films with significantly different endings. In Drums Along the Mohawk, after Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda survive the English, the Indians, and the French, the entire community gathers to watch the raising of the first American flag. The camera pans from Old Glory to a united people, lingering a moment on the faces of Blue Back, the film's only good Indian,(1) and the maid, Daisy, the film's only black face and one which has barely been seen until she is needed for the finale. These underdeveloped, or perhaps even misdeveloped, characters are included only to create an illusion of wholeness and integration at the birthing of America. In contrast to the inclusive, communal world of Ford's great Eastern, his first great Western, Stagecoach, concludes with the expulsion of the Ringo Kid and Dallas John Wayne and Claire Trevor). These outlaws, expelled from a fledgling U.S., head off to Mexico, fleeing a country that has become too respectable, uptight and prudish to tolerate the different and the dangerous, a country no longer hospitable to a man with a pistol or a woman with a past. The movement from inclusion to exclusion could suggest Ford's growing disillusion with the vision of American harmony he had first imagined, were it not for the inconvenient fact that the two films were made in the reverse order: Stagecoach precedes Drums Along the Mohawk. Rather than suggesting the opposite conclusion, however (i.e., that Ford experienced a sudden burst of faith in the American dream), it is more likely that the later film reflected his growing awareness of the threat to that dream, as it became clear that American intervention would be necessary to check Nazi aggression. Ford created a mythic multicultural America in order to persuade a somewhat reluctant populace to unite in the war against the Axis. Whichever came first, however, the antithetical endings of these films define two competing visions of America, the inclusive versus the exclusive. Exclusion from America, at least the vision of America presented in the Hollywood Western, has been the traditional fate of Native Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans. Attempts to re-insert them into the fabric of the West are often no more successful than the unconvincing unity of the anthem singers at the end of Drums Along the Mohawk.(2) In the past decade, particularly interesting attempts to remedy this omission have been supplied (with widely varying degrees of success) by Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves, Mario Van Peebles in Posse, and Robert Young with Edward James Olmos in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. Although most of us seem to recall Native Americans as ubiquitous in Westerns, Jane Tompkins makes the surprising claim that she found no Indians in them: Images of Indians sprang to mind, detached from any one picture. That yipping sound on the soundtracks that accompanies Indian attacks, the beat of tom-tome growing louder as you near the Indian encampment. The encampment itself...[m]ost vividly, a line of warriors. . . [b]ut no people. (9) While Tompkins herself acknowledges (barely) some exceptions, like Cheyenne Autumn, she overstates her case(3) and overpraises the late arrival, Dances With Wolves, which she claims represents Native Americans in a serious, sympathetic way (10). But does it? Like Posse and Ballad, Dances with Wolves begins with a claim to authenticity, situating the narrative in the middle of the Civil War (1863).(4) This is only the first move, however, in the film's consistent strategy of textualizing its narrative (a feature it shares with Posse). The opening appeal to the authority of history and the written word is an attempt to establish a truth claim that recurs in the repeated references to Lieutenant John Jay Dunbar's diary, a text that is intended to validate the film, although it is, of course, the film that invents the book, thus creating a remarkably circular claim of authenticity. …