Noble Savage Research Articles

Образ шотландского горца в творчестве Вальтера Скотта

The period of the middle of the 18th century and the early 19th century was notable for the extraordinary development of archaeology, antiquarianism explosion and primitivism domination, which contributed significantly to raising the interest in history and culture of Celtic nations; those were seen as indigenous people of the British Isles and were highly idealized. However, within official colonial discourse of the Crown of England the other side of primitivism was inculcated. Namely, they were stereotypically considered as ‘noble savages', who forewent any opportunity for growth. During this time, The Highlands of Scotland still remained a stronghold of wildness and barbarity. In this study the author made an afford, from one hand, to identify and trace how extrinsic ethos of Highlanders has transformed in the estimation of the public on the basis of visual sources of information. On the other hand, comparison of this notion with Walter Scott's Highlanders characters forms a significant part of the research. In the course of thy study the following conclusions were reached: despite the fact that the writer endorsed some of the stereotypes, that were common among Englishmen, he established a romantic and heroic image of a native of the Highlands of Scotland as a symbol of freedom and the personification of Scottish cultural identity.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

Anticipating Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the state of nature in the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” by Madame de Graffigny (1747)

The article deals with the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (Lettres d'une Péruvienne, 1747) by Madame de Graffigny, which anticipates many ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including the notion of state of nature. The main character, a young Peruvian woman, who was taken away to France, embodies the concept of the ‟noble savage”. Unlike civilised Europeans she has high moral qualities, critically evaluates the institutions and customs of her time, and she aspires to the state of nature, though knowledge about this world did not make her happy. Madame de Graffigny uses the Peruvian theme according to the general interest in the age of Enlightenment in the Inca Empire, which was considered as idyllic society, organised under the laws of nature. She tries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to display merits of savages and demerits of civilised Europeans. The intellectual influence of Madame de Graffigny and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on each other is confirmed by their personal contacts. As a result, we claim that the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” was influenced by advanced philosophical ideas of the mid-18thcentury – this text stands at the origins of the concept of the ‟state of nature”, which eventually became one of the main terms of Rousseauism.

Troops and Tribes: Masculinity, Playing Indian, and the Social Politics of Ernest Thompson Seton's Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America

Troops and Tribes: Masculinity, Playing Indian, and the Social Politics of Ernest Thompson Seton's Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America

The Indians of the U.S. Midwest in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

The article examines the book Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 written by Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), an outstanding American romantic writer, about her journey to the Great Lakes; the book was based on her experience in the Midwest and a study of relevant works in the Harvard college library. The life of American Indians confronting the expansion of white immigrants and removal is in the focus of attention in the book. The article offers an analysis and interpretation of Fuller’s views on the matter; methodologically it is based on a close reading of the book in its cultural and historical context and is to show the cultural forms Fuller describes, define her perspective as an observer and characterize her position as a thinker and publicist. The analysis demonstrates that Fuller’s ethnographic observations and descriptions have important innovative features: her perspective is a woman’s view, her eye is keen, she is attentive to the details of women’s lives and the behavior of women of different ages; she points out common features in the age and gender aspects of the life of the Indians, as well as their individual, personal traits; the Indians appear in her description not only as objects of her observation but as subjects — persons who participate in the interaction with white settlers and travelers, including Fuller herself; she points out their delicacy, courteousness, and the good manners they show in her contacts with them. The analysis proves that the romantic worldview forms the matrix for Fuller’s observations and deliberations but she rejects the poeticized view of the Indians and the concept of the noble savage introduced in the Enlightenment and elaborated in early romanticism. Creatively absorbing the ideas of Herder and Goethe Fuller wants to understand the culture of the Indians in its wholeness as an original, organic expression of the spirit of the people. The author draws attention to the contradictions in Fuller’s cultural approach: sharing to a great extent the dominant concept of history as a linear progression (the concept that was part of the colonial discourse) Fuller believed that, with the onward progress of civilization, the Indians were doomed to removal and extinction; at the same time she had her doubts concerning the linear concept of history and sympathized with the Indians, was convinced that the attitude of the white people towards the Indians contradicted Christian values.

ЯЗЫК ИМПЕРИИ И ОБРАЗ «БЛАГОРОДНОГО ДИКАРЯ» ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКИХ ОЧЕРКАХ О КРУГОСВЕТНЫХ ПУТЕШЕСТВИЯХ ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XVIII ВЕКА

В статье рассмотрен образ «благородного дикаря» на примере очерков о кругосветных плаваниях – «Кругосветном путешествии на фрегате “Будёз” и транспорте “Этуаль”» Луи Антуана де Бугенвиля и «Путешествии по всему миру на “Буссоли” и “Астролябии”» Жан-Франсуа де Лаперуза. Показано, как межкультурный контакт привел к возникновению шаблонов восприятия европейцами «других» народов. Отмечено, что эти очерки способствовали определению места и роли европейцев в мире. Данный шаблон включал как положительные, так и отрицательные элементы. Империя могла извлекать пользу из романтизированного образа «благородного дикаря», тем самым стимулируя новые колониальные захваты. В то же время на практике европейцы находили варваров агрессивными, лживыми и недалекими. Автор приходит к выводу, что межкультурный диалог, показанный во французских очерках о кругосветных путешествиях второй половины XVIII в., вряд ли можно назвать успешным, так как эти травелоги привели к возникновению очередного шаблона, рассматривающего «других» сквозь высоту европейского знания, основанного на привычной для европейского мира системе ценностей. In the article we use the round-the-world travel essays "Around-the-world trip on the frigate "Boudez" and the transport" Etoile" by Louis Antoine de Bougainville and "Travel all over the world to "Bussoli" and "Astrolabe" by Jean- Francois de La Perouse to show the image of the "noble savage". These travelogues show that the intercultural contact led to the emergence of patterns of perception of "Others" by Europeans. It is noted that travelogues contributed to self-examination and determined the place and the role of Europeans in the world. Moreover, this pattern includes positive and negative elements as well. The empire could have a benefit from a romanticized image of the "noble savage" thereby stimulating new colonial conquests. At the same time, travel essays could contradict the Enlightenment ideas, when Europeans found barbarians to be aggressive, deceitful and dimwitted. The purpose of this study is to consider the problematic aspects of describing "Others" and to define the role of travelogues in imperial politics. We will argue that the intercultural dialogue shown in French round-the-world travel essays of the second half of the 18th century can hardly be called successful. These travelogues led to the appearance of fascinating pattern of "other". That pattern looked at the “others” through the European knowledge based on system of values typical for the European world.

Editorial Introduction

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Quest of Data Colonialism and Cyber Sovereignty: India’s Strategic Position in Cyberspace

The dawn of the neocolonial project has seen the emergence of a new space: data. Data is a raw material that can be stitched, processed and marketed in the same way as the East India Company (EIC) used to do with India’s cotton. EIC, which started as one of the world’s first joint-stock companies, turned into a wild beast, building a corporate lobby with the help of lawyers and MP shareholders to amend legislation in its favor. The EIC became a particularly atrocious and innovative colonial project that directly or indirectly controlled continents, thanks to an army larger than the army of any nation-state at the time. The Drain Theory of Dadabhai Naroji have opened India’s eyes to how the EIC was taking raw material from the country and converting it into a finished product that was marketed in India again in the same way as raw data is being processed outside India and then marketed here today. In today’s digital era, big corporations need not own big armies, as companies are protected by nation-states and bailed out when required. Today, one does not need to travel overseas to explore and conquer Gold, God and Glory; instead, they are a click away. The neocolonial project runs on digital platforms, while the popular narrative of bridging the digital divide and giving internet access to millions of people resembles the idea of the “white savior” liberating the “noble savage” through modern Western education. Facebook’s grand plan of providing free internet to all can be best understood as a neocolonial strategy to mine the data of billions by equating it with water and land. Similarly, the Cambridge Analytica scandal provides an example of how neocolonial forces can influence the fundamental democratic process of electing a government. Therefore, nations endorsing democratic values should be especially wary of the trap of neocolonialist forces, as such nations are particularly vulnerable to their project. This paper critically study the cyber security infrastructure and policies in India and analyze the India’s approach towards cyber sovereignty and data colonialism and thereafter examine the India’s strategic position in cyberspace and suggest policy recommendations.

Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833: Unsettling the Mythic West

Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833: Unsettling the Mythic West

To Reveal the Caucasus Cultures of XIX Century: Orientalism in Russian Caucasus War Period Travelogues

The paper is concerned with the issue of textual visualisation of Caucasus in Russian travelogues performed in 1820-1830th – the decades of the Caucasus War escalation. Taken as example entries from the travelogues of I.T. Radojitsky and V.B. Bronevsky published in Russian Empire in early XIX c., the authors show deep connections of the outlook on the region and people inhabited it with the foundation of the Orientalism as an approach to describing native people of the Imperial frontier.The research underlines the importance of scrutinised study of travellers experience they endured on voyages by the Caucasus in deep connection with the political course on “pacifying” the region, proclaimed by the Imperial authorities. Racy images of the Cossacks, Russian settlers, native peoples and “unpacified” highlanders were performed in order to legislate the Imperial annexation of lands and their acquisition by Russian civilisation. Together with the motives of showing huge contrast between the pastoral life of Russian peasants and towns dwellers with the backwardness of the natives, matched the common ideas of European colonialism, the authors show public awareness of the “unpacified” highlanders expressed by the travellers in the image of “a Circassian”. We traced features of Russian literature Romanticism in the travellers depicture of a Highlander as a “noble savage” did for a living by robs and plunders. The authors came to the conclusions that images, elaborated by Russian travellers and righters were utter vivid and influenced on the perception of the region by Russian layman until the early XX c.The paper is concerned with the issue of textual visualisation of Caucasus in Russian travelogues performed in 1820-1830-th. – the decades of the Caucasus War escalation. Taken as example entries from the travelogues of I.T. Radojitsky and V.B. Bronevsky published in Russian Empire in early XIX c., the authors show deep connections of the outlook on the region and people inhabited it with the foundation of the Orientalism as an approach to describing native people of the Imperial frontier. The research underlines the importance of scrutinised study of travellers experience they endured on voyages by the Caucasus in deep connection with the political course on “pacifying” the region, proclaimed by the Imperial authorities. Racy images of the Cossacks, Russian settlers, native peoples and “unpacified” highlanders were performed in order to legislate the Imperial annexation of lands and their acquisition by Russian civilisation. Together with the motives of showing huge contrast between the pastoral life of Russian peasants and towns dwellers with the backwardness of the natives, matched the common ideas of European colonialism, the authors show public awareness of the “unpacified” highlanders expressed by the travellers in the image of “a Circassian”. We traced features of Russian literature Romanticism in the travellers depicture of a Highlander as a “noble savage” did for a living by robs and plunders. The authors came to the conclusions that images, elaborated by Russian travellers and righters were utter vivid and influenced on the perception of the region by Russian layman until the early XX c.

Iz zgodovine slovenske poetike. Rokopisni osnutek prozodije Blaža Kumerdeja

The Slovenian educator and Enlightenment figure Blaž Kumerdej wrote a handwritten fragment in 1791 as the second part of his attempt at a Carniolan-Slavonic grammar. Written in German, this document consists of a preface that is a genuine “defence” of the Slavic/Slovenian language, while the main part is a fragment of a treatise on “Carniolan-Slovenian” prosody, as well as on rhymes and figures. This draft is as yet untranslated and unpublished. The present article provides a survey of the research done so far as well as a brief overview of the document. The focus is on the intentions of the Enlightenment scholar Kumerdej as discussed in the preface, in which he presents his arguments with the aid of the well-known example of the “noble savage”. The document can be interpreted as an example of the Enlightenment tradition of the “defence of language”.

Unheeded history: screening savage native Americans in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

ABSTRACT This article examines how historiographic metafiction challenges traditional narratives of history. The author argues that subverting conventions of narrating the past through irony and a plurality of truths, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) can be regarded as historiographic metafiction. Its narratives of the past challenge the traditional History, provide alternate ways of telling history and invite a more meaningful cognitive engagement with history. To explore how the Americanization of the Holocaust sheds light on American racism, the author focuses on the figure of the savage Native American in the film and examines how Native Americans are brought into play through a plot that mixes up the histories of American settlers, African-Americans, Jews, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians and how the film screens Native Americans in the sight of psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman’s terms of the look, the screen, and the gaze. I argue that the screening of savage Native Americans is in a constant process of renewal and the image of Native Americans is ironic rather than simply stereotypical, which contests dominant Hollywood representations of Native Americans either as ignoble savage or noble savage and reveals unheeded history.

Progression or Stagnancy? Portraying Native Americans in Michael Apted’s Thunderheart (1992)

Progression or Stagnancy? Portraying Native Americans in Michael Apted’s Thunderheart (1992) As argued by Wilcomb Washburn, no other ethnic group has been misrepresented in media and popular culture to such extent as the Native Americans (2010). Movies that shaped their image did so by crystallizing stereotypes and misconceptions, through which indigenous peoples have been perceived until the present day. Thomas Edison’s vignettes, early westerns, as well as subsequent motion pictures of the 1960s and 1970s strengthened the stereotypes of the vanishing Indians, bloodthirsty savages, and their noble alter ego. The 1990s brought about a revival of the western in its new, revisionist form, mainly due to the achievements of the American Indian Movement. This paper argues that the movie Thunderheart (1992) by Michael Apted — albeit belonging to that ostensibly revolutionary current — continues to reproduce various well established stereotypes in the portrayal of the Native Americans . It examines significantachievements of this partly liberal motion picture, as well as its failures and faults. Thisarticle argues that Thunderheart departs from traditional, dualistic portrayals of Native Americans as bloodthirsty and noble savages and manages to present a revisionist version of historical events; at the same time, it fails to omit numerous Hollywood clichés, such as stereotypical representation of native spirituality, formation of an “Indian identity”, and “othering” of the Native Americans, which contributes to their further alienation and cultural appropriation. This paper provides an insightful analysis of the movie, drawing on scholarship in the field of cultural and indigenous studies in order to lay bare the ambivalence towards indigenous people in the United States, that is reflected in the movie industry. Moreover, it indicates towards the commodification of native culture, as well as the perception of Native Americans as primitive and inferior, allowing to classify Thunderheartas an unfortunate product of colonialism.

Before the “Ecologically Noble Savage”: Gendered Representations of Amazonia in the Global Media in the 1970s

An analysis of media representations of the Amazon and indigenous peoples reveals how media producers and filmmakers foregrounded discourses naturalizing gendered and racialized differences that distinguished the Amazon from the West in the 1970s, a decade during which the Brazilian military dictatorship promoted development projects in Amazonia. These representations often sexualized indigenous peoples and the Amazon itself, portraying them as primitive, cannibal savages, animals or part of nature, or victims of exploitation. The “Othering” of the Amazon and Amazonians was further elaborated through a discourse of binary oppositions that portrayed Western white men as explorers and exploiters who dominated the screen, scripts, studies, and development projects even if they were doomed to fail. By relying on a symbolic system of difference, global media coverage and films about Amazonia in the 1970s were complicit in legitimizing authoritarian decrees promoting large-scale development that depicted indigenous peoples and the environment as obstacles. Un análisis de las representaciones mediáticas de la Amazonía y sus pueblos indígenas revela cómo, en la década de 1970, productores y cineastas mediáticos resaltaron discursos que naturalizaron las diferencias de género y racializadas con las que se distinguían a la Amazonía del Occidente en una época durante la cual la dictadura militar brasileña promovió proyectos de desarrollo en la región. Dichas representaciones a menudo sexualizaban a los pueblos indígenas y a la Amazonía misma, retratándolos como primitivos, caníbales salvajes, animales o elementos naturales, o víctimas de explotación. La “otredad” de la Amazonía y los amazónicos se elaboró a través de un discurso de oposiciones binarias que retrataba a los hombres blancos occidentales como exploradores y explotadores que dominaban la pantalla, los guiones, los estudios y los proyectos de desarrollo, incluso si estos estaban condenados al fracaso. Al confiar en un sistema simbólico de diferencia basado en oposiciones binarias y estereotipos, la cobertura mediática global y las películas sobre la Amazonía en la década de 1970 fungieron como cómplices en la legitimación de los tipos de proyectos y políticas llevados a cabo en la región.

Operationalizing Peirce’s Syllabus in terms of icons and stereotypes

Abstract Peirce’s Syllabus is examined and used to interpret metaphoric iconic stereotypes applied to Indigenous people: “noble savage,” “bloodthirsty savage,” “domestic dependent nation,” “vanishing race,” “Indian tribe,” and “ecological Indian.” Efforts on the part of the Indigenous to replace the these stereotypes with different icons such as “Native American,” “First Nations,” and, most recently, “water protectors,” are also examined. The usefulness of representamen categories from Peirce’s Syllabus, “rhematic,” “Argument,” “dicent,” “indexical,” “qualisign,” “legisign,” and “sinsign,” is demonstrated. Greimas’ observations about the functions of modalities are brought in to explain how graphic images and portraiture, fictional and memoir narratives, legal discourses, and popular media representations implement various sections of the Syllabus. Putting Peirce’s Syllabus into action confirms its ability to perform dynamic, diachronic, and diagrammatic functions.

To Fathom His Very Roots: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and "Evidence" of His Literary Racial Passing

During the latter part of the long nineteenth century, actor and author Sylvester Clark "Chief Buffalo Child" Long Lance completely discarded his African American ancestry to assert a composite Native American identity. He did so in hopes of escaping anti-Black violence. His writings suggest that he believed that performing the racialized stereotype of the "noble savage" would better position him to achieve inclusion in US society, which was otherwise denied to him in his legal "colored" (read: Black) racial identity. His complex and problematic approach to his ancestry and racial identity invites scholars to critically consider how some authors simultaneously challenged yet adhered to social expectations regarding racial identification when reflecting on their personal lives and asserting their racial identities in literature. Long Lance's life and writings invite scholars to question what counts as "evidence" to prove so-called racial passing when authors or their characters reflect on certain aspects of their ancestry and racial identity. In this essay, I examine the complexities of racial passing in nineteenth and twentieth century literatures with attention to Long Lance's unique perspective of his racial identity and shows how he used literary and legal racial passing to challenge racial binarism.

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell

Reviewed by: The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell John Majewski (bio) Keywords Inequality, Economic equality, Capitalism, Egalitarianism The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870. By Daniel R. Mandell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Historians seeking to more explicitly link the past to current economic and political debates can choose between two basic strategies. One strategy—which the 1619 Project used to such great effect—is to expose [End Page 681] the injustices of the past and trace their impact to the present. The other strategy—which Daniel R. Mandell employs in this thought-provoking synthesis—is to recover ideas and movements from the past that can inspire change and reform in the present. Mandell argues that from its colonial origins, a series of thinkers and activists believed that economic equality—whether achieved through universal education, land reform, or government regulation of market activity—was an important value that profoundly influenced government policy. Mandell seamlessly analyzes a number of different egalitarian traditions with nuance and sophistication. He begins in early modern England, where groups such as the Levelers called for the end of great estates and the redistribution of property. Powerful landlords violently crushed the Levelers, but echoes of the movement survived in a republican commonwealth tradition that that linked economic inequality with political inequality and corruption. That tradition took root in colonial North America, where far higher percentage of households owned land. North American Indians—often portrayed in Enlightenment discourse as noble savages— came to symbolize full economic and social equality. As inequality grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, a revolutionary tradition developed that linked economic inequality with British corruption and aristocracy that influenced the anti-Federalists as well as the opponents of Hamiltonian economic policies. Mandell proceeds to show how diff erent movements in the early republic grappled with inequality through the expansion of schooling, the removal of property requirements for voting, and the rise of workingmen parties that supported higher pay for journeymen workers and a ten-hour work day. While these reform movements achieved some significant political successes, they did not halt the advance of capitalism. The movement to expand education, which received strong support from farmers and workers, often resulted in a curriculum that tacitly endorsed inequality and social hierarchies. Political reformers successfully eliminated property requirements in a number of states, but universal white male suffrage did little to remove the influence of the wealthy and well connected. The workingmen parties sometimes put forth socialist ideas, but the Democratic Party successfully incorporated their attacks on wealth and privilege without “fundamental restructuring of the American economy” (119). In the aftermath of financial panics and economic depression in the late 1830s and early 1840s, more radical critiques found significant traction. [End Page 682] Some focused on developing communal alternatives to capitalism. Albert Brisbane found initial success in organizing cooperative communities founded on the ideas of the French socialists Charles Fourier. The communal enterprises ultimately failed, but managed to attract significant support from political and intellectual elites such as Horace Greeley, giving hope that a message of cooperation over competition might find traction. Founded in 1844, the National Reform Association (NRA) fused land reform, anti-rent rhetoric, and support for a ten-hour workday to put forward a political platform explicitly critical of great concentrations of wealth. The NRA could not find political traction as an independent movement, but its central idea that all government land should become free and open to ordinary farm families eventually found a home in the Republican Party. The failure to redistribute land to formerly enslaved families during Reconstruction marked the limits of the land reform movement. Liberal conceptions of private property triumphed throughout the Gilded Age. Mandell successfully demonstrates that a number of vibrant egalitarian traditions offered important critiques of economic inequality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book represents a deep engagement with a broad array of thinkers, all of whom are put into specific political, cultural, and social contexts. Specialists and researchers will find Man-dell’s sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book’s writing is so...

Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

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...

First Miles Philips, and Then Tony Last: The Noble Savage Myth in Hakluyt and in Waugh's A Handful of Dust

First Miles Philips, and Then Tony Last: The Noble Savage Myth in Hakluyt and in Waugh's A Handful of Dust