BOOK DATA. Liza Black, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. $65 cloth; $65 e-book. 354 pages.Recent studies of Native Americans’ participation in Hollywood cinema since its inception—as actors, directors, producers, and spectators—have revealed the often fraught but sometimes generative relationships between Indigenous people and the film industry. While filmic Native American images have often been considered peripheral, these studies have demonstrated that Indigenous participation has been critical in all periods of cinema history. Liza Black’s Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 extends the lively and vital conversation about Indigenous representations by focusing on Hollywood films produced between World War II and the middle of the Vietnam War—a period marked by both a rise in highly offensive cinematic images of Native American people and an increasing, yet still problematic, demand for Indigenous labor as actors, especially as extras.A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Black was struck by the dissonance she felt throughout her life between her viewing of Cherokee performers who practice sovereignty through their tribally grounded work and the stereotypical images of Native Americans in films that cater to non-Native spectators, even in those somewhat rare cases where Indigenous actors were hired to perform often uncredited film roles. Black’s Cherokee perspective shines through every chapter of the book as she documents and theorizes the ways in which non-Native filmmakers who wrote, directed, and produced such films during this historical period were in fact making extremely racist films during a low point in tribal sovereignty in the United States, as well as during nearly two decades of scant employment of Native actors, compared to the periods both preceding and following mid-twentieth-century Hollywood filmmaking. As she argues, “Hollywood mocked the historic and continued violence toward Native people” in ways that are still traumatizing to Native spectators (1). She intuits and underscores that these representations and the systemic racism they engendered have led to the continuation of multiple forms of discursive and physical violence against Native peoples.Picturing Indians is fresh and original. The first monograph of its kind to focus exclusively on the mode of production of films, particularly Western narrative films, with special attention to labor history, its insights are derived from meticulous and thorough archival research. Black investigates every single film produced and released in 1941–60 that features a Native plot or theme, and she provides extensive analysis of a rich and exhaustive archive of production-related material collected by Hollywood studios. Other scholars have made use of studio records, but none have done so as systematically and meticulously as Black has. While Picturing Indians does not provide the kinds of close film analysis found in other texts, Black’s volume is an essential companion to this growing body of work. Hers is the first to plumb the depths of the studio system’s creation of stereotypical Indian imagery as well as its attempts to produce “authentic” Indian characters.Another aspect of Picturing Indians that makes it a critical contribution to Indigenous, film, and labor studies is its indexing of the costuming studios used to “create” the nearly universal filmic Indian character (she employs the terms Indian and Native American interchangeably) through the use of wigs, elaborate makeup application, prosthetic facial features, and wardrobes that included generic beads and buckskins, none of which reference the vibrant and diverse regalia and cultural aesthetics of Indigenous people. Black notes that some studios “spent almost as much money on wigs” and other ways of transforming actors into stereotypical characters “as they did on wages for the extras playing Indians” (146).Picturing Indians also makes substantive contributions to the field by including interviews conducted with Native American actors who participated in some of the films she examines, providing crucial insights into the personal experiences of Indigenous people and their interactions with non-Native actors, directors, and producers. The results can be surprising. Dr. Cecil Meares, a Muscogee actor whom she interviewed, noted that he received wages for starring in Jim Thorpe, All American (Michael Curtiz, 1951) that were high by Oklahoma standards, and “used the word ‘pleasure’ to describe how he felt at the time of filming and how he felt looking back” (127). He even saved a copy of the film “for private viewing and reminiscing” (127). Meares’s experiences stand in stark opposition to those of other male actors interviewed for the book, who had less positive memories of their interactions with Hollywood studios, but Black’s archive of firsthand experiences demonstrates the complicated behind-the-scenes encounters that Native people faced while being recruited for and starring in films in the 1940s to 1960s.Although Black notes that even if some studios did indeed make serious attempts at historical and cultural accuracy and traveled to reservations to recruit Native actors, the films nevertheless “situate themselves in the settler colonial version of U.S. history in the most unthoughtful of ways” (219). They often capitalized on either the fantasy of the vanishing Indian or the putative savagery of Native people, both of which appealed to non-Native filmgoers. Some producers and directors even paid Native male actors and extras more than their white male counterparts, according to Black. Yet despite these important if infrequent anecdotes from her research, Black contends that studios overall ignored or dismissed Native consultation, were invested in casting actors from reservations who were deemed more authentic than professionally trained or college-educated urban actors, and understood that familiar, inaccurate, and offensive representations of Indigenous peoples would prove more popular with audiences and thus more profitable to investors.“Studios gave white Americans the Indians they expected,” Black argues, “but in a closed loop of reinforcement in that Hollywood images were at least partially responsible for the American public’s images and expectations of Indians” (161). Film scholars have made similar claims about the hegemonic power that Hollywood wielded in shaping how the world imagines Indians, delivering an image that was both inaccurate and detrimental to the health and well-being of Native people. Yet Black does so expansively, through an analysis of interviews and of the prolific materials studios collected and archived.Picturing Indians represents a critical contribution to the field of Native American representations in film with its study of labor history and analysis. Although the historical period Black examines is narrow, it is an important one as it characterizes two decades of redoubled racist film images of Native Americans during a time of decreased tribal sovereignty, increased tribal participation in the military, devastating policies of relocation and termination, and the ongoing compulsory machinations of the boarding-school system. Picturing Indians will be an important text in particular for scholars interesting in tracing a genealogy of Native American film representations in order to assess contemporary cinema created by Indigenous filmmakers.