Lone Ranger Research Articles

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands

Book review

Enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within agricultural higher education: Insights from Black faculty and administrators in agricultural colleges at United States land grant institutions

The experiences of Black faculty as leaders and administrators in the field of agriculture have not been widely studied nor reported. The goal of this research focused on Black faculty leaders' experiences in agriculture to gain firsthand insights regarding the enhancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion within agricultural higher education. The central research question guiding the study was: What are the experiences of Black faculty leaders at Colleges of Agriculture at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)? Counter-storytelling was used to explore the personal narratives of eight participants. These experiences fall within the tenets of Critical Race Theory. Three primary themes emerged: Navigating Leadership: Microaggressions in the Midst; Inequities: Is Everyone Really Equal; and Isolation: The Lone Ranger. Findings of this study hold valuable implications for practitioners, policymakers, and academic institutions seeking to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion within agricultural higher education. Recommendations for policy and practice include providing support for leadership mentoring and professional development, conducting robust research on the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender for faculty of color, and establishing collaborative initiatives between academic institutions, industry partners, and community organizations to address historical disparities and stimulate interest in agriculture among Black communities.

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands, By Dustin Tahmahkera

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands, By Dustin Tahmahkera

THE REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN IN THE LONE RANGER FILM: A GENETIC STRUCTURALISM ANALYSIS

Racism is part of America's dark history. Racism seems to have never been resolved. This article examined how racism is narrated in The Lone Ranger Film. As genetic structuralism studies, The Lone Ranger film is exploited both intrinsically and extrinsically. At first glance, this film features American-Indian characters but with a white character. This is contradictory considering that American Indians are Native American tribes who have colored skin. Therefore, this film is used as an object of study to look at social construction, especially about Native Americans, which actually wants to be conveyed to the wider community, and the empirical reasons for this construction are shown. The research results showed that intrinsically, the character Tonto, played by Johnny Depp (a white), correlated to the economic purpose. As a mass culture, this film was produced to gain profits. choosing John Depp is a form of strategy to achieve the film's success because Johnny Depp is one of the top actors who has many fans. Portraying characters using well-known actors is one of the strategies for achieving the success of a film. Furthermore, this film showed how Native Americans are reconstructed by a new image. White and smart Americans are positive stereotypes. It is contradictive due to This is very contradictory considering that Native Americans are a group that has a negative stereotype. Native Americans are also a minority that experiences a lot of discrimination, especially from white or European-American groups. In conclusion, the stereotype of native Americans in the film Lone Ranger is constructed in different stereotypes showing how the whites (European-Americans) have always occupied a high position in the social strata. This film shows that Native Indians can have the same position in the social strata if their skin is colorless. This makes racism actually perpetuated through this film.

The Portrayal of American Indian Identity in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

This study delved into the cultural identity of American Indians residing in the Spokane reservation area, with a focus on Sherman Alexie's collection of stories, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." The stories portrayed various aspects of the divide between American Indians and white people, as well as the distinctions between reservation-based Indians, urban Indians, modern Indians, and traditional Indians. The main objective of the research was to explore how the identity of American Indians is depicted in Alexie's book using Homi K Bhabha's cultural identity theories of hybridity and mimicry. This study employed the literary criticism method, particularly postcolonial studies, to analyze the representation of hybridity and mimicry. The primary data source for this investigation was the collection of short stories, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," by Sherman Alexie. The data was gathered from the text, identifying words or sentences that illustrate the representation of hybridity and mimicry in the stories. The data collection techniques include reading and note-taking strategies. This study revealed two main aspects of Indian cultural identity: Hybridity, characterized by a blend of Indian and white culture, evident in language, behavior, ways of thinking, and lifestyles. Then Mimicry, seen in Indian behavior, lifestyle, and ways of thinking that resemble those of white people. In conclusion, the research highlighted how Indian cultural identity in Sherman Alexie's work reflects both hybridity and mimicry, shedding light on the complexities of cultural assimilation and adaptation in American Indian communities.

Prejudice toward Indian Characters in Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger Film

Prejudice toward Indian Characters in Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger Film

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera (review)

On Earth and in My House

On Earth and in My House

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera

ПОШУКИ ВЛАСНОЇ ІДЕНТИЧНОСТІ ЯК ПОСТМОДЕРНА ГРА У ТВОРЧОСТІ ШЕРМАНА АЛЕКСІ

The article is devoted to the analysis of the texts by Sherman Alexie, a writer of indigenous origin, who is known as an author who seeks to rewrite the history of the American continent with the help of irony. The purpose of the article is to determine the peculiarities of the interpretation of Native American humour since this phenomenon has played an important role in the survival of the Indigenous nations of North America. The task of the research is to find out the basis of ironic humour in the collections “The Toughest Indian in the World”, “The Lone Ranger”, and “Tonto Fistfighting in Heaven.” The research was conducted using historical-cultural, receptive-interpretive and structural methodological approaches. Humour and irony are presented even in the most tragic stories of Sherman Alexie. Thus he was destroying the stereotype of a red-skinned person with an impenetrable face. The writer repeatedly ridiculed various features of white culture. He seeks to seduce the reader with a historical game to get him/her confused in the labyrinth of historical events. Explaining the time chosen to describe the events, Sherman Alexie resorts to playing with many significant events of the 20th century. Although, they are only an allusion to the events of the Indigenous history of the creation of Indian reservation times. The dilemma faced by Alexie’s reader is an attempt to understand what exactly the author is trying to convey to him. Alexie is prone to self-reflection, so he is well aware of the reader’s problems in distinguishing between facts and fiction in his works. The writer densely decorates the texts with various allusions, which are difficult to recognize at first times. The most shocking is his attempt to argue his ideas, which are provocative and frank. He frequently uses semantic speculations around the idea of “Indianness” in the modern world. With his works, the writer challenges the restrictions imposed by the Western paradigm on representatives of indigenous peoples through specific methodologies inherent in the Western European worldview, which is actively imposed by the value system of mainstream society. Conclusion. The system of imposed rules in Alexie’s texts creates a specific game space, and models reality, supplementing it with tense emotional components. In the process of the postmodern game, a “different view” emerges, which deprives the aura of sacredness in the customary ideology for the mainstream consciousness, paradoxically reproducing cultural stereotypes with their “game” reinterpretation. His play is a sphere of emotional communication between the writer and readers. Thanks to emotional symbols that refer to the historical realities of the past and partly to the presence of Native Americans the author conveys the feeling of humiliation and restlessness. Thereby striving to free the consciousness of the average American from the stereotypes of oppression in understanding Indigenous history and culture. Alexie’s pastiche is devoid of positive content and aims to re-read the history of the United States as an unpredictable narrative, which explains the writer’s desire to reinterpret the events of the 20th century as an image of late capitalism. The postcolonial discourse of Sherman Alexie’s works stimulates a wave of resistance among indigenous readers not so much because of a new attempt to create a literary image of a culture that was once part of their colonial periphery. The writer’s protests attempt to introduce the idea that colonialism is over.

The Terra Comica between Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie

Abstract Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie are at once an unlikely and a likely duo. A vast gulf of time, culture, and heritage separates them. What likens them is their shared celebrity status and iconic, irreverent humor. This paper undertakes a comparison between Twain and Alexie, not to diminish the important and idiosyncratic role of Native American humor, but rather to bring it into conversation with white humor, perhaps approaching a multiplex American humor. A comparison of two of their early works, Roughing It for Twain and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for Alexie, to illuminate the ways in which both authors eschew the physical terrain of the West, instead monumentalizing a cacophonous, comical verbal landscape. Both authors, as public figures, also raise questions of what it means to monumentalize authors, and this paper gestures toward that dual pitfall and potential.

Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera

Reviewed by: Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands by Dustin Tahmahkera Kerry Fine Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands. By Dustin Tahmahkera. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 288 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, filmography, index. $35.00 paper. In his new study of Indigenous representation, Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche), the Wick Cary Endowed Chair in Native American Cultural Studies, builds a complex and nuanced study of Comanche presence in film and other types of media. Tahmahkera raises important questions of representational agency and power: “who represents whom, and in effect, who lays claim to Comanche significations” (11). In so doing, he engages with “Comanche” as a signifier in order to capture that power of representation to present Comanches as a living, breathing, contemporary peoples, rather than as a group frozen in the past, particularly the past as represented by the supposed fall of the Comanche empire, while also resisting a monolithic construction of Comanche representation and of the Comanche as a people. Tahmahkera grounds the project in the Comanchería, both in the traditional territory and reach of the Comanche and in their continued presence as the Comanche Nation, currently headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma. The introduction and chapter 1 establish Tahmahkera’s guiding concepts and provide an informative, in-depth, and Comanche-centric examination of Comanches (both real and fictional) as cast, crew, and creators in film, including Tahmahkera’s great-great-great-grandfather, Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Importantly, Tahmahkera’s concepts, including the media borderlands, cinematic Comanches, and representational jurisdiction, serve as the ground for the rest of the book, which focuses on Disney’s The Lone Ranger (2013) and actor Johnny Depp’s notorious performance as [End Page 362] Tonto, a Comanche character. Though the book focuses on the film at length, it is not a study of the film, but rather an examination of the film positioned inside the Comanche-centered concepts and cinematic history. Chapter 2 provides an especially interesting and developed analysis of Johnny Depp’s controversial adoption by Comanche elder LaDonna Harris, which Tahmahkera positions as a contemporary captivity narrative that opens a space for Comanche influence in the production of the film. Importantly, the “capture” of Johnny Depp reveals important moves by Comanche elders and leaders to gain agency in the production of The Lone Ranger. Playing on the idea of capture/adoption as a way to replenish the tribe and establish networks of relationship, Harris’s savvy move presents a type of intervention that allowed the tribe to have more input than they otherwise might have had in the creation of the film and created actual benefits to the peoples represented in the film. Chapter 3 engages with the film in a more conventional, but still Comanche-centered, textual analysis, and chapter 4 presents a textured and focused Comanche-centered reception studies–type examination. Cinematic Comanches presents an important conjunction of Native American studies and film and media studies. Additionally, it illuminates both past and present Comanche participation in the representation of Comanche people across representative media, raising important conversations about the futurity of this representation and resisting the so-called fall of the Comanches by depicting them as a people very much participating in their culture, past, present, and future. Kerry Fine Department of English Arizona State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America— Jim Rasenberger (New York, NY, USA: Scribner, 2020, 436 pp.)

Samuel Colt (1814–1862) is a legendary figure in American history. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, he is best known for his invention of “Colts Patent Repeating Pistols,” handguns that became famous for their role in the settlement and development of the American West. Made even more famous by cowboy movie stars like John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and the Lone Ranger, all of whom invariably “packed” Colt “Peacemaker” revolvers in their heroic screen roles, the Colt name came to dominate American popular culture as an inherently “American” artifact. Despite the debate that currently rages about the Second Amendment, Colt pistols are commonly displayed in museums around the country that celebrate the rugged individualism associated with role of the frontier in American history.

Responding to Fiester’s Critique of a Bioethical Consensus Project

We respond to Autumn Fiester's critique that our proposed bioethical consensus project amounts to "ethical hegemony," and evaluate her claim that ethicists should restrict themselves to "mere process" recommendations. We argue that content recommendations are an inescapable aspect of clinical ethics consultation, and our primary concern is that, without standardization of bioethical consensus, our field will vacillate among appeals to the disparate claims in the 22 "Core References," unsustainable efforts to defend value-neutral process recommendations, or become a practice of Lone Ranger clinical ethicists. We contend that a consensus document that captures the basic moral commitments of patients and careproviders is the next step in the professional evolution of our field.

Mücadele burada mı, ebediyette mi? Sherman Alexie'nin The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven romanı

Confined within the borders of reservations Native identity suffers not only from the traumatic experiences of poverty, unemployment, broken families, alcoholism and oppression but also from systematic racist practices and stereotyping, which reduce the American Indian identity to noble savages, bloodthirsty warriors, prophetic shamans, or drunken outcasts. In resistance to Anglo-American attempts to erase Native identity many American Indian writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor tried to preserve Native American tribal culture and history, and remedy the traumatized Native identity. This paper focuses on how Sherman Alexie in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, standing apart from other Native American writers, portrays the Spokane Indian reservation life with a critical and cynical viewpoint on contemporary Native American’s problems such as poverty, unemployment, hunger, drug addiction, alcoholism, and violence. The paper also discusses the insight Alexie brings to the Native identity problem through his critical reading of both the Native history/tradition and the white culture, and his critique of both the ‘positive’ and the negative stereotyping of the American Indian. The study is based on the premise that Sherman Alexie creates, borrowing from Homi Bhabha’s terms, an ‘interstitial space’ in his answer to the question: how will the Native identity be constructed, based on the American Indian tribal culture, or the dominant Anglo culture, or is there an alternative way?

Colonial Epidermalization: A Thematic Study of Sherman Alexis's ‘The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven'

Colonialism led to the fabrication of certain inferiority complexes on the part of the colonized subjects.The colonizers succeeded in doing so through the inclusive diffusion of racial stereotypes. This perpetuation made colonized nations like Native Americans lose their indigenous voices, and they soon assimilated themselves into the Euro-American world and its identities. The articles crutinises how the colonized subjects were not only physically persecuted, but their identities were also distorted, disfigured, and then misrepresented to the world. The colonisers shaped and sculpted these identities through an exploitive mechanism which Franz Fanontermed 'Epidermalization' in one of his famous works,Black Skin White Masks. The paper employs the conceptualization of Epidermalization with reference to' The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven' by Sherman Alexie. While using the concepts of Epidermalization of inferiority and internalization, the paper highlights how the continuous confrontation of binaries and inferiority during the process of Colonialism caused a heightened sense of desperation and frustration among the Native Americans along with the internalization of white supremacy.

Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen, by Flavia Brizio-Skov

Flavia Brizio-Skov’s Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen comes at a crucial time for the western. It is no secret that the genre has suffered a loss in popularity in recent years, compared to its ubiquity in the Hollywood golden era—also due, for instance, to high-profile critical and commercial failures such as Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) and The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013), the latter of which is examined in this book’s final chapter. The conventions of classical westerns have been reappraised many times before. Cahiers du cinéma critics like André Bazin had high regard for the films of Howard Hawks, whereas Laura Mulvey, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, discussed how the western hero was often split between nostalgic narcissism and social integration.