San Jose State University Communications Essay

Literature Review:

What is a literature review?

A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area, and sometimes information in a particular subject area within a certain time period.

A literature review can be just a simple summary of the sources, but it usually has an organizational pattern and combines both summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling, of that information. It might give a new interpretation of old material or combine new with old interpretations. Or it might trace the intellectual progression of the field, including major debates. And depending on the situation, the literature review may evaluate the sources and advise the reader on the most pertinent or relevant.

But how is a literature review different from an academic research paper?

The main focus of an academic research paper is to develop a new argument, and a research paper is likely to contain a literature review as one of its parts. In a research paper, you use the literature as a foundation and as support for a new insight that you contribute. The focus of a literature review, however, is to summarize and synthesize the arguments and ideas of others without adding new contributions.

Instructions:

Evaluate the research that has already been done on this genre of films. This step assumes that you are starting to conduct your own study. Your research does not need to match your findings. This will allow you to see the far reaching comprehensive understanding of what other scholars are saying.

Find 4-6 peer reviewed scholarly journal articles. For each article briefly summarize the important findings of the study.  (Start with the library databases Academic Search Premiere and Omnifile)

Annotate and discuss the importance. Are you finding different things as you approach your own study? Is the research confirming some of the ideas you are finding? Why is the research important?

Examine where there are still areas of this genre left unexplored? If you were to continue your study where would you do with your analysis and research?

Include a Works Cited of all your sources

The literature review should be about 3 pages double spaced.

After you complete your Literature Review add an “addendum” section:

In this section please take a paragraph or two to explain how your research and study will be different than the scholarly research that already exists. How will you be original? Please also include any changes to your research question and/or any changes to artifacts, guiding questions or theories.

Your literature will be assessed on:

– Ability to find 4-6 scholarly journal sources

– Ability to summarize important information from the sources

– Ability to evaluate and add discussion to the sources

– Ability to compare source findings to your own study

– Ability to offer critical evaluation and new thoughts to the genre

Comm 145I Case Study Topic Choice Worksheet
Step 1:
Write question here: How does representation of Native Americans differ in mainstream
white- produced Hollywood movies as compared to Native American-produced films of
the 1990s?
Step 2:
Artifact names:
1. Pocahontas (1995)
2. Dance with wolves (1990)
3. Smoke Signals (1998)
4. Naturally Native (1998)
Step 3:
Guiding Question1: What is the general depiction of Native Americans in the Pocahontas? How
does it differ from the foreign Englishmen arriving in America?
Guiding Question 2: How is the idea of using a “white voice” in telling stories preponderant to
the Pocahontas?
Guiding Question 3: Would you say that Pocahantas was a progressive movie in terms of
representation?
Guiding Question 4: What historical inaccuracies can be seen in the Pocahontas and Dancing
with wolves?
Guiding Question 5: What are the similarities and differences in depicting Native Americans in
the Pocahontas and Dancing with wolves?
Guiding Question 6: What are some of the evident and drastic differences in the representation
of Native Americans in the white-produced Pocahontas and Dancing with wolves, and Native
American-produced Smoke Signals and Naturally Native?
Guiding Question 7; What are the similarities between Native American Portrays in Smoke
Signals and Naturally Native with that of Natives in contemporary America?
Step 4:
Check the two theories you will be using:
•
Narrative
•
Cultural Identity
Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film,
Television, & History ed. by Peter C. Rollins, John E.
O’Connor, and Making the White Man’s Indian: Native
Americans and Hollywood Movies by Angela Aleiss (review)
Robert Murray Davis
Western American Literature, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp.
104-106 (Review)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2007.0001
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/535181/summary
[ Access provided at 16 Nov 2022 19:35 GMT from San Jose State University ]
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laugh at their credulity, their propensity to overreact, and their ill will toward
the feline killer they so gleefully insist on seeing everywhere. Indeed, Wingfield
uses humor and small gestures to tell what could have been a darker, more
turbulent story. In addition to mountain lion hunters, he affectionately comments on computer gadgets, new-age advice books and self-styled gurus, and
the middle-class, midlife anxieties that make people think they need them.
Wingfield has surrounded Charlie with the most understanding women (his
ex-wife, daughter, current lover, and fantasy crush) this side of a Dickens novel,
who recommend books and a guru to ease the distress that Charlie denies.
We never forget that Charlie is working out his midlife reckoning in the con­
temporary West. The novel is permeated with his observations about sprawl, traf­
fic, vistas shut off, subtle signs of changing seasons where seasons supposedly do
not change, subtle gradations of belonging where long term is measured in years
instead of generations. And of course the plot traces the collision of an animal
native to California— the mountain lion— and one typical of California— the
transplanted human. Though Charlie’s personal problems are resolved happily
enough, the issues that Charlie confronts remain. New people still pour into
Sacramento. A zoo, however generous its appointments, is no home for a moun­
tain lion. Andrew Wingfield has captured a sense of the pressures we live with in
the West and our various responses— grim, funny, self-deluding, sometimes gal­
lant. His novel adds another angle to classic musings over the fate of California.
Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in F ilm , Television,
& History. Edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O ’Connor.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. 392 pages, $40.00.
M aking the White M a n ’s Indian: Native Americans
and Hollywood Movies. By Angela Aleiss.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 211 pages, $44.95.
Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma, Professor Emeritus
Though not unprecedented, it is unusual to discover a collection of essays, how­
ever tightly themed and carefully chosen, that is superior to a single-authored
book on a single subject. But anyone who wants to learn about film and has time
to read only one of these books should definitely choose Hollywood’s West.
Not that Aleiss’s book is badly written or incompetent. She screened an
impressive number of films— four-and-a-half pages, double-columned— dug into
archives across North America to read production files and other materials,
and interviewed as many people involved with the films as she could reach.
Moreover, her conclusions are honestly, even painstakingly, arrived at: treat­
ments of Indians have followed cycles; audiences prefer nostalgic portraits to
examinations of contemporary Indian problems; many pseudo-Indians, includ­
Book
R e v ie w s
ing Iron Eyes Cody and Jay X Brands, have passed as Indians; Hollywood has
been uneasy about miscegenation.
However, Aleiss spends far more time discussing archival material, reviews,
and responses in the press than she does in analyzing the films themselves, so
that we learn what people intended to do or thought they had done rather
than what they actually did. Most films get a few paragraphs of plot summary
connected to her arguments. Sometimes a star’s demands for changes— Richard
Harris in A Man Called Horse, Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson— explain
changes in fictional or historical narratives. Sometimes governmental objections— the Marine Corps to a planned production of the Ira Hayes story that
became The Outsider; Army sensitivity to portrayals of Custer and Geronimo;
Office of War Information directives about the treatment of minorities in
World War II— influenced the ways in which films were made.
But films as films are almost ignored. The Fast Runner gets one paragraph.
Smoke Signals gets four, but most of them deal with director Chris Eyre’s com­
ments on what he had done. Aleiss whips through dozens of films in “Hollywood
and the Silent American,” a chapter anticipated and in most ways superseded
by Andrew Brodie Smith’s Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films,
American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (2003). She does spend four pages
on Dances with Wolves, but again the novelist Michael Blake’s comments—
including the characterization of Kevin Costner as “a ‘frat boy’ with a taste for
adventure”— hold center stage (144).
Compared to Alexandra Keller’s more extended comparison of Dances
with Wolves in “Historical Discourse and American Identity in Westerns since
the Reagan Era” in Peter Rollins and John O ’Connor’s collection, Aleiss seems
almost simplistic. Paraphrasing Hayden White, Keller maintains that history
“is not separate from or, in its alleged objectivity, opposed to cultural produc­
tion; it is a cultural production.” She contrasts the method of classic Westerns
that use “a realist aesthetic” to make material seem accurate. “Despite— indeed
because of—this exterior appeal to apparently genuine detail and the mono­
lithic, inviolate discourse of History itself, the Western is the bearer of its own
seamless authenticity” (241). In the terms of this argument, Dances with Wolves
is “revisionist in content” but formally nostalgic “because it never problematizes
historiophotic method” and “attempts to recuperate the category of Individual
Anglos” so that John Dunbar can “speak in place of [the Sioux] while seeming
to speak for and even with them” (243).
While Keller applies theory to film quite subtly, J. E. Smyth is perhaps the
most accomplished research scholar among the thirteen contributors (eight
of them women) to Hollywood’s West. Using screenwriter Howard Estabrook’s
notes, correspondence, and annotated copy of Edna Ferber’s novel, she argues
in “The New Western History in 1931: RKO and the Challenge of Cimarron”
that Estabrook “confronted the tradition of written history, placing the struc­
ture and rhetoric of historiography in counterpoint with the cinema’s potential
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visual history of the West” (38). Smyth points out the obstacles to filming the
novel at all: such as RK O ’s financial instability and the recent failures of other
epic treatments of the West. She also goes into some detail about the way
that the actual film embodied Estabrook’s vision, and she argues that students
of Westerns have ignored or disparaged Cimarron because it does not support
dominant expansionist ideology.
Kathleen A. McDonough takes a comparative approach in “Wee Willie
Winkie Goes West: The Influence of the British Empire Genre on Ford’s
Cavalry Trilogy.” The empire genre was popular in the 1930s when American
filmmakers began to recognize the dangers of fascism and England as a line of
defense. After World War II, America replaced Britain as the dominant force in
world affairs, and the cavalry films emphasized the spread of civilization (versus
the Western’s emphasis on the individual) and the positive role of women as
civilizing forces in the goal of assimilating former enemies. Unlike the “adult”
Westerns, which were pessimistic about the viability of social institutions (see
also Matthew J. Costello’s “Rewriting High Noon” in this collection), these
films held hope for society as well as the individual.
These essays are more equal than some others in the collection— most of
which are workmanlike; a few smell of the seminar room; one or two seem, in
Lucky Jim’s words, to be “a pseudo-investigation of non-problems.” But as a
whole the collection justifies Ray Merlock’s view that “rethinking, reimagining, and realigning the Western with contemporary issues of race, class, gender,
and violence will lead to newly refined … critical, cultural, and historical
analysis” (xi).
Students will also be grateful for the extensive filmography and bibliogra­
phy, though some may wonder at a writer who feels compelled to describe what
Hereford cattle look like, or the reliability of the editors, who regard Blazing
Saddles as “the most mindless” Western comedy (20).
A W oman’s Place: Women W riting New Mexico. By Maureen E. Reed.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 355 pages, $21.95.
Reviewed by Marta Lysik
Humboldt-Universität, Berlin
A Woman’s Place: Women Writing New Mexico by Maureen Reed spotlights the
lives of six twentieth-century New Mexican women through the prism of what
Reed dubs “homesickness,” a term denoting the irreconcilability of the imagined
and the real homeland. The romanticized image of “The Land of Enchantment,”
a multicultural paradise promised by travel guidebooks, clashes with the quotid­
ian effort of border crossing. The trailblazing activism of these women, informed
by both tradition and modernity, was aimed at preserving the cultural heritage
and contributing to the ideal of a multicultural state.
Book Reviews
Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood
Movies. Angela Aleiss. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
As far back as 1894, kinetoscope users marveled at the staged image
of exotic, feather-adorned American Indian warriors stamping about in
Edison’s The Sioux Ghost Dance. Ever since, Native American images
have been an important part of celluloid history and popular culture in
the United States.
In her book Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and
Hollywood Movies, Angela Aleiss provides a succinct exploration of this
extensive history. Relying heavily on archived studio production
materials, correspondence, trade papers, reviews, and on the hundreds
of films that she viewed for the book, Aleiss traces the cyclical
reoccurrences of filmic representations of Native Americans, including
stereotypes such as the treacherous primitive, the innocent child of
nature, and the noble savage, all while acknowledging the complexities
and ambivalences that exist within these images. Aleiss also explores
the roles played by real-life Native Americans in the history of US film
production as directors, actors, and crewmembers. Of particular value
is her discussion of Native Americans’ continual struggles to improve
their representations and increase their participation in Hollywood
through the formation of trade organizations and through activists’
critiques of Hollywood fare.
Aleiss’ book is strongest in its examination of the production history
of individual films, especially in terms of studio and director influence
over the finished product. Her ample research is the most compelling
when she factors in the influences of larger socio-political forces and
trends. Particularly effective are her discussions of the impact of the
Great Depression and the New Deal on the changing Native American
image and the influence of the Office of War Information (OWI),
which, wishing to elide racial tensions in the United States during
World War II, required Hollywood’s American Indian characters to be
submerged into America’s melting pot, allowing little cultural
difference to shine through.
In addition, this book is quite useful as a reference for plot
information about scores of Westerns and other films featuring Native
American characters. Sometimes, however, when assessing images in
individual film texts, Aleiss seems to depend too much on synopsis
15405931, 2007, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00399.x by San Jose State University, Wiley Online Library on [16/11/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
404
405
rather than providing in-depth analysis. Although she does analytically
engage with the content of some films, many times this discussion is
too dependent upon the statements of the filmmakers and critics from
the time of the movie’s production and release, as opposed to her own
contemporary critical viewing eye.
Her scrutiny of individual films also could benefit from incorporating ideas from other scholars of film studies. For instance, Aleiss
sometimes alludes to similar tropes between Native American and
African American on-screen images, particularly during the period of
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She might be able
to offer additional insights into these similarities by drawing upon the
large body of theoretical and historical work completed by African
American film scholars. Her treatment of John Ford’s The Searchers
(1956) similarly might be bolstered by engaging more with scholarly
works about this film and about the Western genre. Widening the
book’s scope in this way would further enhance Aleiss’ already
considerable research into the production of, and critical response to,
these films.
Given the small number of books that deal specifically with Native
American images in cinema, Making the White Man’s Indian is a
valuable contribution to Native American scholarship that should
especially appeal to individuals new to the topic of American Indian
images in film. Aleiss covers a vast amount of Native American
cinematic history, and she provides a clear and understandable overview
of many of the films and figures that played a prominent role in this
history. Although this book has limitations, these limitations highlight a myriad of possibilities for future research on the subject of
Native American representations in Hollywood.
Brian J. Woodman
University of Kansas
15405931, 2007, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00399.x by San Jose State University, Wiley Online Library on [16/11/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Book Reviews
Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films
to the Present by Michael Hilger (review)
Mª Elena Serrano Moya
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 48, Number 1,
Summer 2018, pp. 68-69 (Review)
Published by Center for the Study of Film and History
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/701459
[ Access provided at 16 Nov 2022 19:28 GMT from San Jose State University ]
Film & History 48.1
Hilger begins by presenting and
explaining the two traditional stereotypes of
Native Americans in movies, the Noble Red
Man and the Savage, and how they have
become tools for the white establishment to
reflect and address the issues of their times.
Thus, films with Native Americans characters
have generally been concerned with white
issues and have failed to fully represent or
develop their native characters. In this
introductory chapter, Hilger also comments
briefly on Native American females and ends
with some comments about the importance of
editing and how it shapes our perceptions of
these characters. Thus, a close-up of a Native
American character with the appropriate
lighting and low-angle shot will make him
threatening, such as the first time Scar or
Geronimo appears in The Searchers .
The following chapter takes us on a
visual tour from the Silent Period to the
Present. In this edition, instead of writing
individual chapters for each decade finishing
with a comprehensive list of films from that
decade as the author did in his previous
edition, he has now opted to gather all the
information in a unique chapter. I find this
grouping more clear and effective as readers
are offered a visual account of how the films
and the depictions of Native Americans were
embedded in social and historical events in
those decades. For instance, the celebration of
the arrival of Columbus not only brought a
renewed interest in and image of Native
Americans but it also brought attention to
Native Americans directors like Chris Eyre or
Sterlin Harjo, who are constructing a new
visual portrayal of Native Americans with
their own voices and words.
The titles from the late 1990s and
early 21st century are welcome, for there aren’t
many books that cover more current films.
(An exception is M. Elise Marubbio’s Killing
the Indian Maiden (2006), with its analysis of
images of Native American women in movies,
which takes us to 2005). It is true that we
encounter individual articles about specific
movies but I believe that researchers, students
Native Americans in the Movies:
Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present
Michael Hilger
Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015,
464 pages, ISBN 978-1-4422-4001-8
When Michael Hilger published From Savage to
Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film in
1995, the United States of America was still
recovering from the post-celebration blues of
the quincentenary of the arrival of
Christopher Columbus to the American
continent. The first years of the decade
witnessed a resurgence of Native protests
about the American Holocaust, as some
Native scholars have called it, and its
problematic celebration. The film industry,
which is always a measure of the social
temperature, released several key Indianthemed movies with huge success. Thus, at
that time, Hilger’s book was a necessary
shout-out to those who had suddenly
discovered Native Americans in movies.
Twenty years later it was necessary to
continue with that work, as the portrayal of
Native Americans in movies has not ended
and the participation of Native American
actors and directors in the movie industry has
increased. Therefore, not only does Hilger add
more titles from last decade of the 20th
century and from the first two decades of 21st
but he has also updated some of the
information from the first edition,
reorganized the book, corrected and changed
some information and added a valuable index
of movies. This update has made it a ‘must’
for scholars concerned with depictions of
Native Americans in films or film history.
The book is composed of three main
chapters: a filmography chapter in which
movies are organized in alphabetical order,
and several appendixes organizing the titles
according to the nation the native characters
belong to; a chapter on the portrayal of
Native Americans; and a classification of TV
movies with a useful presentation of movies
in chronological order.
68
Film & History 48.1
For researchers looking for films
dealing with specific tribes, Hilger has
included a chapter classifying films according
to the tribe the native character belongs to.
Even more, Hilger classifies the movies
according to image portrayal. One of the most
significant changes from the previous edition
is the inclusion of a chapter with an inventory
of TV movies, which recognizes that
television reaches a greater audience than
films and represents an important factor in
shaping the attitudes and opinions of society.
In my view, the inclusion of this chapter is
one of the book’s great achievements. Finally,
in the last chapter, Hilger presents a complete
listing of titles classified in chronological
order.
Hilger accomplishes the goals he sets
in the first pages of the book. He has made
this book an essential tool for students and
scholars who work on portrayals of Native
Americans. I look forward to further editions
of this book when more titles of movies and
new productions for widescreen cinema or
TV become available.
and historians need more comprehensive and
thorough works like Hilger’s. Even more,
Hilger’s book comments on some movies that
rarely appear in the analysis of Native
American depictions such as Imprint (2007),
Christmas in the Clouds (2005) or some Native
American productions apart from the widelycommented on Smoke Signals (1998), a film
directed by Chris Eyre and based on Sherman
Alexie’s stories. However, I find Hilger’s final
analysis of the 2000s a bit misleading as he
mixes white and Native Americans
productions. The latter would be more visible
if they were included in a specific chapter,
which might underscore how Native
Americans are defying traditional stereotypes,
speaking for themselves and about
themselves. Also, Hilger leaves out analysis of
key movies in the 1990s that include
important Native American characters such as
Dead Man (1995) and Pocahontas (1995), and in
the 2000s such as Windtalkers (2002) and Flags
of our Fathers (2006).
The last content chapter includes an
analysis of new images of contemporary
Native Americans, not in Westerns and not as
vehicles for white society but as characters
able to stand on their own and offer us images
of life in reservations and in cities, and of
Indian traditions, ceremonies, and religion–in
other words, characters completely distinct
from the two stereotypes traditionally
assigned to Native Americans.
The following chapter must be
considered one of the most comprehensive
and detailed classification of movies in which
Native Americans have a ‘significant role’,
using Hilger’s own words. Firstly, the movies
are presented in chronological order, giving us
information about the date of the release, the
director, the cast, length, its availability, the
nation of the Native American character, the
image portrayal, a brief summary of the plot
and, when available, some brief comments by
critics. In the previous editions of the book,
the listing was included after each decadechapter but I find this approach more useful
and effective.
Mª Elena Serrano Moya
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
69
288
Book Reviews
of the attack. During this time, the site at Pearl Harbor
shifted from a memorial of the men who died on
December 7, 1941, to the World War II Valor in the
Pacific Monument, created in 2008, which now encompasses four museums and is operated partly by the US
Navy and partly by the National Park Service.
The book examines the multiple narratives connected
with Pearl Harbor, including the military men who died
there, those who survived the bombing, civilians living
in the vicinity, including native Hawaiians, and Japanese
veterans. Over time, as the memory of World War II
recedes and the survivors who provided a human face
for the terrible tragedy that took place there pass away,
the site and its purposes have evolved. The tensions and
political infighting that took place over what the site
should become are the focus of White’s narrative.
White discusses the voices of the survivors and how
their personal narratives are being saved as a central
part of one of the museums. As examples, he focuses
on three people who made numerous presentations at
Pearl Harbor for visitors: an American chaplain who
was an enlisted Navy man at Pearl Harbor on December 7 and who later reconciled with Japanese veterans,
a Japanese-American man from California who
enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor even though his
family was interned in Wyoming, and a Hawaiian
woman whose family was caught up in the bombing.
Technology has preserved these reminiscences,
although the difference between the embodied encounters that visitors have had with real people and the electronic encounters that the next generation will have
alter the dynamics, as living history with all its complexity and the interaction with an audience are
reduced to short videos that never vary.
The chapter on cultures of commemoration examines the transformations in memorializing the victims
through the evolving nature of the December 7th ceremonies. He compares the US Navy ceremonies from
1962 and 2013, both of which contain many of the
same rituals, although the later ceremonies have
Hawaiian and Japanese elements. Since 1980, with the
opening of the visitor center, the National Park Service
has sponsored anniversary events as well.
The least successful chapter may be on films that
memorialize the attack, since only two are connected
with the visitor center. The most interesting part is the
comparison of the two orientation films that were
made for the visitor center, the first in 1980 and the
new version completed in 1992, and how they differ in
tone and intent. One of the major changes was the
deletion of a scene that implied Japanese-American
complicity in the attack. White also discusses the 1943
film December 7, directed by John Ford, the first
attempt to present the attack in a narrative film.
Although a longer version was filmed, it was edited to
a thirty-seven minute short that was used for wartime
fundraising and morale-boosting campaigns and won
the 1943 Academy Award for Documentary (Short
Subject). There are also brief discussions of the welldone joint American-Japanese 1970 film Tora! Tora!
Tora! and the 2001 spectacle Pearl Harbor, which was
mostly special effects and a love triangle rather than a
serious presentation of the attack.
The tensions that exist across the entire landscape
of museum and memorial spaces at Pearl Harbor end
the book. In creating the new museum, there were various stakeholders whose views had to be consulted,
appeased, and incorporated, including the American
military, the US government, veterans, and community
members. The last question as one leaves the exhibit,
“How did December 7 affect you and your family?,”
tries for a sense of inclusion for visitors who reflect
colliding narratives.
This ethnographic study of Pearl Harbor considers
the very public nature of national history in national
spaces and how the range of voices represented
expands as the historical events become more distanced. White writes, “From the time the memorial
was constructed as a visitor center, it has transformed
from an architectural memorial and location for military remembrance to a complex social institution telling the history of the Pearl Harbor attack and the
Pacific War to world audiences” (125). Overall,
White’s presentation of the transformation of the landscape of Pearl Harbor from a single memorial to a
monument with multiple museums is both fascinating
and sobering.
–-Sally E. Parry
Illinois State University
Native Americans in the Movies:
Portrayals from Silent Films to the
Present
Michael Hilger. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
It has been frustrating over the past thirty-five
years, answering and re-answering the same questions
regarding American Indians and the American Indian
Book Reviews
experience from students ranging in age from six to
forty-five. “Do Indians live in tipis? Why are Indians
so mystical? What is in that ‘peacepipe’ they smoke?
What’s so bad about the ‘Redskins’ and other Indian
mascots?” And so on, ad nauseam. The age group
really does not matter; I get the same litany of questions. Mindful of my promise to myself and to my
American Indian friends to remain patient and to avoid
overly sarcastic responses, I answer the mind-numbing
questions with measured language delivered in sincerity-dipped tones. When I have asked non-Indian
students what they think of American Indians, the sixyear-olds respond, “They are mean!” and the older
students say, “They love nature.” So, through all we
have been through as a pluralistic and multicultural
nation, it is not a stretch to conclude that with regard
to American Indians and their American experience,
non-Indians remain, as a group, pretty clueless. To
what can we attribute this condition? We can blame
school curricula that omit and distort the American
Indian experience, and we can blame schoolteachers,
prekindergarten through graduate school levels, who seldom speak of American Indians in the present tense.
We can blame museum curators and scientists whose
fascination with American Indian bones (just the
bones) seems boundless. We can blame governmental
policymakers who patronize in repetitive cycles,
deciding whether to “help” American Indians or to
“allow” American Indians to help themselves. To the
extent that the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal governments are run by American Indians, we can blame
American Indians themselves. Throughout my academic career, I have focused my attention on television
and movie portrayals of American Indians for their
complicit roles. As a father, I grew frustrated during
my kids’ most impressionable years with having to
explain Disney’s (and other cartoonists’) racist portrayals of American Indians. And I am not alone in this
frustration with Hollywood. Over the years, researchers have detailed how films, television shows, and
images in popular culture propagate and perpetuate
this collective ignorance. From Robert F. Berkhofer,
Jr.’s seminal 1978 The White Man’s Indian to Michael
Ray FitzGerald’s 2014 Native Americans on Network
TV, a steady stream of studies analyzes this phenomenon from multiple angles—photographic images,
images in popular culture (TV, film, advertisements,
etc.), and school textbook treatment of the American
Indian experience.
289
To this flood of evidence, we can now add Michael
Hilger’s Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals
from Silent Films to the Present. Hilger divides this
very enlightening and useful study into two parts—a
ninety-one-page critical examination of film portrayals
of American Indians/First Nation peoples and a 337page encyclopedic listing, arranged alphabetically, “a
new canon of most sound films [and television films]
and a solid representation of silent films (and the rare
animated short) in which Native Americans and First
Nation characters play a significant role” (93). This
listing is subdivided further in three appendices
—“Films by Nation” (seventy-one different Nations/
Tribes listed), “Image Portrayals of Native Americans”
(e.g., “attack on a fort,” “homosexuality,” “Native
American activist,” “romance between mixed-blood
Native American man and a white woman,” “vengeance,” etc.), and television films.
The essence of Hilger’s critical examination of cinematic portrayals of Native Americans is a reiteration
of the well-documented dichotomous depiction of
American Indians in films as either the Savage Savages
or the Noble Savages. As Hilger succinctly states,
“With only minor variations. . . all Native American
characters have been reduced to the extremes of the
Noble Red Man or the Savage. The repetition of these
images encodes or programs audiences, depending on
their individual backgrounds, to believe they really
know Native Americans as mistreated noblemen or
dangerous enemies” (7). Hilger provides more specific
and nuanced analysis, however, in discussing the contributory role of film techniques (shot distance, shot
angle, framing, editing, and casting of American Indians to play American Indian roles) in expressing attitudes toward Native American characters (8). To those
unfamiliar with such techniques, this is very helpful
analysis. It goes some distance in helping to explain
how the stereotypes and the distortions keep manifesting themselves in film and television.
Of course, the “minor variations” to which Hilger
alludes are of interest in and of themselves. Dances
with Wolves is instructive. With all its historical and
cultural verisimilitude (details associated with language, living conditions, even minute details in beadwork, quillwork, and hairstyles), the film does not
avoid typical Hollywood thematic pitfalls. Dunbar,
the white frontiersmen, falls in love with a “Lakota”
woman who just so happens to actually be white
(What are the odds?). Dunbar’s consensual sexual
encounter is with a white woman; thus, a cinematic
290
Book Reviews
taboo—consensual miscegenistic sex—is avoided. And
what should one make of an “all Indian” dichotomous
treatment of images of self? In Dances with Wolves,
the Lakota are the nobles, and the Pawnee are the savages. Upon its release (and absent its first forty-five
minutes) everyone loved Dances with Wolves—everyone, that is, but the Pawnees!
Teachers, other academicians, and researchers will
find the encyclopedic entries helpful in identifying
films featuring American Indian/First Nation portrayals for use in classrooms or for research purposes as the
author lists the title, year, director, screenplay author,
prominent cast members, length and other “specs”
(color, black & white, sound, silent, etc.), the tribe/nation portrayed and provides a brief description of the
“image portrayal” (some function of either the Savage
Indian or Noble Indian portrayals) and a very brief
“summary” of the film as well as the format in which
the film is available (“availability”).
In addition to including Canadian First Nations
films in his study, Hilger also contributes to the scholarship in film portrayals of Indigenous peoples by discussing recent films by American Indians themselves
as well as recent collaborative portrayals on film and
television. Unknown to many outside the realm of
Native/Indigenous Studies, these particular films offer
a more intimate and contemporary self-examination of
the American Indian/First Nations experience. Films
such as Harold of Orange, Smoke Signals, Skins, Dance
Me Outside, Three Warriors, Powwow Highway, and
Imprint go some distance in helping audiences better
understand the contemporary experiences of American
Indians and First Nations peoples. Just to see Native
peoples portrayed not wearing buckskins or “war
paint” is a refreshing change. And these contemporary
portrayals of Native peoples turn out to be more psychologically complex and emotionally nuanced than in
most prior portrayals. In other words, in these works
Indians are portrayed as more completely human—not
stereotypes from “column A (savage) or column B (noble savage).” Audiences experience humorous characters and humorous situations as well as troubled
characters and dire situations. (A group of First
Nations guys dupe a gullible white guy into participating in a concocted naming “ceremony” in one of the
funniest scenes in Native American film.) Seeing
Native Americans laugh on film and witnessing them
in contemporary situations are major positive developments in the portrayal of Native Americans on film
and television.
Michael Hilger’s Native Americans in the Movies:
Portrayals from Silent Films to Present broadens the
scope, analysis, and cataloging of cinematic portrayals of Native Americans. Hilger expands his treatment to cover films and television portrayals of not
only American Indians but also Canadian First
Nations peoples. He captures the breadth of these
portrayals, making sure to bring them up to the present to include not only recently produced films and
TV shows about Native North American peoples,
but also portrayals directed by Native Americans
and starring Native Americans depicted in contemporary settings, facing contemporary societal and
cultural issues. In all this he has done an excellent
job.
–-Jim Charles
University of South Carolina Upstate
Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in
the Age of Jim Crow
Cheryl Knott. University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.
On September 24, 2016, President Barack Obama
spoke at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture which was established in 2003 by an Act of Congress. It is the only
national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, art, history, and culture. The museum highlights both the achievements of
African Americans as well as the tragedies and injustices that they have suffered. One of these was the
denial of decent library service to African Americans
because of segregation and their lack of civil rights.
It is hard to imagine in the twenty-first century that
public libraries, which most readers associate as timehonored advocates of equitable access to information
for all, that it was not that many decades ago, throughout much of the twentieth century, in fact, that many
black Americans were denied access to public libraries
or even allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While much scholarship
has been done in many areas of civil rights, including
the history of school segregation, there has been much
less research published on the segregation of public
libraries in the Jim Crow South. In fact, much of the
writing on public library history has failed to note
these racial exclusions.
In Not Free, Not for All, Cheryl Knott, a professor
in the School of Information at the University of
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER AND THE OTHER DANCES WITH WOLVES: THE REFIGURED
INDIAN AND THE TEXTUAL SUPPLEMENT
Author(s): ARMANDO JOSÉ PRATS
Source: Journal of Film and Video , Spring 1998, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 3-19
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688165
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THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER AND THE OTHER
DANCES WITH WOLVES:
THE REFIGURED INDIAN AND THE
TEXTUAL SUPPLEMENT
ARMANDO JOS? PRATS
Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner)
Stores. The Lakotas refuse, however, and ride
and the teamster Tirnmons (Robert Pastorelli)
back dispirited. Cradling the buffalo robe
are already far along on their way to Fort
Sedgewick, on the Indian frontier, when Dun
bar asks, “How come we haven’t seen any buf
falo?” “You can’t figure the stinkin’ buffalo,”
appreciatively as he watches them, Dunbar
speaks as the voiceover narrator, whom we
Tirnmons answers, “you can’t. Sometimes
you won’t see any for days. Other times they
be thick?like curls on a whore.” Tirnmons
explodes with laughter at this crude simile, but
Dunbar registers only embarrassment and dis
have already learned to identify with the
entries in his journal: “Nothing I had been
told about these people is correct. They’re
not beggars and thieves. They’re not the
bogeymen they have been made out to be. On
the contrary, they are polite guests and have a
familiar humor I enjoy.”
appointment. Undeterred by this latest
instance of Timmons’s unregenerate boorish
ness, Dunbar asks, “What about Indians?”
Incredulous, as if stunned by an impertinence,
Tirnmons replies: “Indians? Goddamn Indi
ans! You’d just as soon not see ’em less’n the
bastards are dead. They’re nothing but thieves
and beggars!” Dunbar is downcast, and the
slow procession to Sedgewick continues in
silence.
Much later in Dances With Wolves (1990),
two of Dunbar’s new Lakota friends, Kicking
Bird (Graham Greene) and Wind In His Hair
(Rodney A. Grant), ride to the fort and pre
sent Dunbar with a buffalo robe. Then they
ask him if he has seen any buffalo. Dunbar
has not, but he realizes that his friends are
hungry and offers them food from the fort’s
Armando Jos? Prats teaches film and American
literature at the University of Kentucky. He is writ
ing a book-length study of the image of the Amer
ican Indian in the Hollywood western.
Copyright ? 1998 by A. J. Prats
Taken together, Timmons’s insult and Dun
bar’s tribute identify the dialectic whereby
Costner as the director presents his idea and
image of the raciocultural Other?”these peo
ple”?in Dances With Wolves, an Indian west
ern that recommended itself to the public on
the strength of its representation of Native
Americans. Until then, many maintained,
Hollywood Indians had been only useful foils
in the story of white mythocultural self-defin
ition. Yet here, seemingly unprecedented, was
an Indian western “both sweeping and
authentic in its finest particulars on Native
American themes” (Schmers 57). “For the
first time,” Marilou Awiakta wrote, “a highly
commercial film portrays Native Americans
as individuals?intelligent, complex, humor
ous. Civilized’ (70). Like no others before
them, these Indians were real in their ideal
humanity.
But had Costner been so unimpeachably clear
even as he developed this new image of the
Indian?this Indian presumably so authentic
and so admirable that the hero could think
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To Tirnmons (Robert Pastorelli), Indians are “nothing but thieves and beggars,” in striking
contrast to Dunbar, who comes to identify with them.
nothing of forswearing his own culture to be,
November 7 and 10, 1993. ABC’s edition ran
himself, just such an Indian? To what extent
are Costner’s ideal Indians in truth so, and
approximately 50 minutes longer (excluding
commercials, of course) than the theatrical
release, which runs 181 minutes.1 I propose to
examine and evaluate the difference between
the two versions in the context of the canoni
how much do they exist principally to sanc
tion the Indianness of the white hero and to
justify the ways of Costner to white viewers?
Of more immediate relevance: what would
become of Costner’s Other if it were possible
to glimpse the process whereby Dunbar came
to be not only an apologist for the Indian but
himself the very image and issue of Costner’s
refigured Indian?
This essay calls into question Costner’s refig
uration of the Indian. My challenge originates
in the difference between the Dances With
Wolves released theatrically in late 1990 and
the edition (as I propose to call it) that ABC
television showed as a five-hour miniseries on
cal images and themes that Costner disputes.
These images and themes are present in both
the ABC edition and the theatrical release; and
although they may at times be present only
allusively, evocatively, they are unmistakably
there?and as unmistakably there to be
opposed?in Timmons’s invective against the
Indians. The two sources of canonical figura
tion implied in Timmons’s insult are (1) the
conquering perspective on the Indian and the
land in the post-Civil War West and (2) Hol
lywood’s canonical image of the Indian as
“Savage Reactionary” (Marsden and Nachbar
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609). The difference between the two ver
sions of Dances With Wolves makes possible
an evaluation of Costner’s sense of what it
means to deliver the cinematic Indian from
when Dunbar responds to the Lakotas with
canonical identity as an image conquered and
condemned.
Other, the ABC edition compromises the clar
ity of moral enunciation with which the the
The chief interest of the ABC edition lies in
the extent to which some of its additional
representations of the Indian. From ironies
such as these might we yet learn to question
footage tends to undercut the idealized figure
Costner’s revisionist project, perhaps to
of the Other developed in the theatrical
release. The following proposition is there
fore crucial to my inquiry: the refigured
reserve, with reproof, and even with a hint of
disgust. Thus, if only because it complicates
the hero’s immersion in the culture of the
atrical release condemns the canonical
reimagine even such a “new” Indian as this
one of Costner’s was supposed to be.
Indian of the ABC edition shows ironic affini
In their unbridled enthusiasm, many who
ties with the historical and cinematic types
praised Dances With Wolves for its new Indian
that Costner disputes. The Lakotas of the
forgot that Hollywood had attempted to cre
ate such Indians before. George Seitz’s The
ABC edition, to be sure, are no less noble, no
less endearing or inspiring, than those of the
theatrical release. Yet in both versions Cost
Vanishing American (1925) and Victor
ner guides our perceptions of these Indians
(presumably in full possession of their cul
today’s viewer as maudlin and overwrought;
but their noble Indian, though begotten of
turn-of-the-century melodrama and the two
tural integrity) but by means of the white pro
reelers of the two previous decades, chal
not so much by means of what they say or do
tagonist’s responses to the Indians: Dunbar
becomes, or at least presents himself as, the
full measure of the refigured Indian. His cul
tural conversion is meant to be so complete as
to render him thoroughly and unambiguously
Lakota. It is to him that we look for the whole
image and expression of the new and refig
ured Indian.
In three scenes from the ABC edition (all
omitted from the theatrical release), Dun
bar/Dances With Wolves either exhibits
affinities with canonical types or invokes
Schertzinger’s Redskin (1929) may strike
lenged the degraded savage of contemporary
epics such as James Cruze’s The Covered
Wagon (1923) and John Ford’s The Iron
Horse (1924). Many of Costner’s votaries
also failed to note that Delmer Daves’s Bro
ken Arrow (1950) and Anthony Mann’s
Devil’s Doorway (1950) had claimed a refig
ured Indian four decades before Dances With
Wolves. Moreover, in 1957, Samuel Fuller’s
Run of the Arrow narrated the account of a
Civil War veteran who, for the sake of a new
start, goes west to live among the Sioux.
Lieutenant O’Meara (Rod Steiger) becomes a
those types as a means of separating himself
from the very same Lakotas with whom he
hero among the Indians, marries into the
tribe, and protects it against white incur
claims identity. To the extent that these scenes
present the hero as the very type that Costner
ner’s own.
sion?a story, then, in many particulars Cost
meant to oppose, the ABC edition subverts
the refigured Indian of the theatrical release.
It should be noted that in both versions Dun
Even John Ford paid tribute to the American
Indian, if belated and belabored: Cheyenne
bar’s praise for the Lakotas requires reference
to (and subsequent denial of) Timmons’s dec
Autumn (1964) was perhaps as close as
laration that Indians are “thieves and beg
pathos of the Cheyenne exodus of 1878. And
surprisingly few considered the claims to a
“new” Indian in Vietnam-era westerns?Lit
gars.” Thus, Costner’s mode of refiguration is
dialectical: it postulates the despised Indian
of history and film as the basis of revision.
The ABC edition?but not the theatrical
release?shows moments, both early and late,
Ford’s cinema of empire could get to the
tle Big Man (Penn, 1970), Soldier Blue (Nel
son, 1971), Ulzana’s Raid (Aldrich, 1972),
and even the infamous A Man Called Horse
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(Silverstein, 1971). If it had been easy to for
get or dismiss such precedents, was it not
because Costner’s Indians were more fash
ionable than they were “human”?
For the sake of his new image of the Indian,
Costner summoned all the zeal of the devout
believer. He had already won over a hard and
cynical world: he had built the field, and all
had come. Even the phantoms that had pro
faned the game emerged from the shadows of
shame to consecrate the national innocence.
Surely then we could all trust Costner’s
Indian. “I remember,” Costner told Rolling
Stone just before the opening of Dances With
Wolves, “that movies could always make me
cry if they were built right?if they could get
and persistent stuff and had been nurtured by
compromised motive. Such “true” Indians
enabled the white hero, among all whites, to
transcend (though perhaps merely to evade)
the darker consequences of conquest. Even as
Costner declared his oneness with the fast
disappearing Indians, he stood poised to
claim his exemption from the national guilt.
Three years after Costner’s triumph, the
enthusiasm still at white heat, ABC
announced that it had a longer and, by impli
cation, the true and complete version of
Dances With Wolves. The ABC edition calls
into question the thoroughness of Dunbar’s
conversion, that uncompromising surrender
to the Other wherein so many had seen the
me to understand right and wrong or if I
Indian they accounted new. Subversive
understood the dilemma of what a good man
though its edition may be, ABC aired it only
for the sake of ratings. Dances With Wolves
was part of the network’s sweeps line-up for
would do” (Schruers 60). Surely we did not
lack for reassurance. The evangel was at
hand, as was Oscar; and the Lakota, we were
continually reminded, adopted Costner.
November (Coe), and because a year earlier
McDonald’s had offered the film on VHS to
the ail-American gourmand for as little as
$5.99, ABC had little except the heretofore
In such avowals of Indian authenticity we saw
examples of what Fatima Tobing Rony calls
unseen footage with which to lure the public.2
“the hierarchy of othering,” which she
The network may have been challenging
explains as “the notion that these others are
more authentic than those” (24). Yet there was
viewer connoisseurship by implicitly declar
ing itself in sole possession of a version that
something to this Indian besides his unprece
dented status, or at least something besides
the fervor, that did not quite seem to wash the
hucksterism clean?something tendentious, a
little insincere, as is often the case when drum
rolls precede a proffered truth. Here, too, as in
not even the most avid fan had seen. (The
additional footage in the ABC edition consists
of more than the three scenes I examine
below. For example, included in the extra
footage is an account of the fate of Fort
Sedgewick, already abandoned when Tirn
the centuries of white representation of the
Indian, the fully “human” Other doubled as
the white man’s censure of his own culture.
mons and Dunbar arrive, and of the doomed
Three years before Dances With Wolves,
Patricia Nelson Limerick identified this
scene with the deranged Major Fambrough
[Maury Chaykin].)
command of Captain Cargill [Michael Hor
ton]. Also included of interest is an extended
motive in the art of George Catlin, who
painted North American Indians during his
sojourn in the West (1832-39). In Catlin’s
scheme of things, Limerick writes, “Indians
are most significant as their existence spot
lights the flaws and failures of white people.”
This “arrangement,” she adds prophetically,
“persists with undiminished vigor” (186).
Costner’s refigured Indian, seemingly so new,
so “first,” had been wrought of more familiar
ABC’s advertising said nothing of footage
that might alter the public’s perception of
Costner’s authentic Indian. As with most
things commercial, where more is better and
most ever best, Dances With Wolves, the pro
mos suggested, could only stand to be more
satisfying for being longer. Crassness has
ironies of its own: network TV could compli
cate Indian refiguration merely by offering
more to the least demanding viewer.
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Although the ABC edition contains some
Indian figuration. Thus, peculiarly allusive, if
not intentionally vague (though perhaps sim
ply clumsy) in its rejection of all previous
characterizations of the Indian, Dunbar’s trib
footage that appears in a different order from
that of the theatrical release, no scene in the
theatrical release is missing from the ABC
edition. In other words, the ABC edition
ute already invokes otra-diegetic sources of
anti-Indian sentiment as the proper objects of
resistance and revision.
would seem to be a rough cut in relation to the
final cut?that is, then, to the theatrical
release. (The ABC edition may in fact be the
longer European version, which previously
had been unavailable in the United States.) For
If the praise of the Indian belongs not to
Dunbar but to Costner?or if it is Dunbar’s
the purposes of this essay, however, presenta
tion validates textuality: the additional footage
ceases to be mere excess the moment it is rein
only to the extent that it is primarily Cost
ner’s; and if, moreover, the origins of Tirn
mons’s censure lie deep in the near-century
of Hollywood’s dominant image of the
tegrated into the theatrical release for exhibi
tion. Here, then, the ABC edition is only a
supplemental text. The supplemental text sub
verts the ideological claims of the theatrical
release. It therefore generates an implied cri
tique of the more explicitly asserted dialectical
tensions in the theatrical release?a critique,
that is, of the theatrical release’s opposition to
canonical sources of Indian figuration.
Indian as degraded Other, and deeper still in
the 500 years of conquest?then that praise
itself establishes Costner’s intent to deliver
the Indian from the ages of reproach that so
clearly resonate in Tirnmons’s disdain. Here,
then, “Costner” (or Costner/Dunbar) desig
nates a theoretical construct at once charac
terized by and revealed through ideological
intention. This intent to oppose the canonical
Indian is almost exclusively vested in Cost
ner/Dunbar’s dual role as voiceover narrator
Ideological Intention and the
Emplotment of Opposition
and protagonist: he is both spokesman for the
Indian and himself a species of
Unequivocal though it may seem, Dunbar’s
synecdoche?an “Indian,” that is, in whom
praise for the Lakotas is puzzling in at least one
respect: except for Timmons, no one else who
we are to see, as if for the first time, Indians
has so far spoken to Dunbar has offered the
least opinion, favorable or not, about Indians.
Yet the denials (“nothing,” “not,” “on the con
trary”) that form part of Dunbar’s voiceover
tact” and as they never were in the western.
as they really were in the time before “con
Both the intention and the principal strategy
tribute would make it seem as if the Indian has
already been repeatedly, at any rate authorita
tively, denounced, so that Dunbar can now
frame his eulogy as an explicit challenge to a
universal white idea of the Indian. Yet there is
only, so far, Timmons; and Timmons is not
much more than a good-natured clod, hardly
therefore the authority that should compel Dun
bar to offer so righteous a remonstrance, to
for its articulation present their own
inescapable ironies: Costner’s master plan for
refiguring the Indian is to invest his own cin
ematic persona with virtually the whole sense
of what it is to be, or to have been, wild and
free?an Indian. The voiceover supports,
indeed enforces, that basic strategy. For we
never know any Indian in Dances With Wolves
as intimately as we know this white-man
become-Indian. Nor are we ever told so much
enunciate his eulogy in terms of contradictions,
about Indians as we are told about this
ner/Dunbar accords Timmons’s rebuke a
he is, and white as both his voice and his
dialectical status out of all plausible proportion
to the limitations of the character. Without a
“writing” reveal him to be, Dunbar is to be
Indian archetypally.
doubt, then, Timmons’s censure functions
metonymically, as an index of the long his
It is instructive to recall that the brutal white
tory?including the cinematic history?of
soldiers at Fort Sedgewick vent all their racial
or to intone it with such vehemence. Cost
“Indian” who does the telling. White though
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hatred against Dances With Wolves only. The
character that can most readily summon the
narrative wherewithal to identify, condemn,
and suppress white racism makes himself the
only actual “victim” of racism. Furthermore,
Dances With Wolves has but one battle
Dances With Wolves, as well as for inquiring
into its strategies of refiguration. The theatri
cal release contests Tirnmons’s scorn of the
Indian not only by opposing its terms (“beg
gars and thieves”) but by suggesting that such
scorn is a cultural trait of all white men on the
between whites and Indians, and the sole
frontier. Late in the action, Dunbar (now
object of the battle is the rescue, by the Lako
tas, of Dunbar/Dances With Wolves. Let us
Dances With Wolves) rides to Fort Sedgewick
to retrieve his journal. When the troopers see
him in the distance, they immediately take
him for an Indian (which in a way he is) and
fire wantonly, killing his horse, Cisco. Then
they beat him with the butts of their rifles.
Throughout his captivity at the fort, all the
contempt that the whites aim at Dunbar takes
the form of racist rancor, a rancor never so
not forget, then, the most obvious thing of all:
the film takes its title from the Lakota name
for the white hero; this is his story, and if it is
also the story of a particular band of Lakotas
at the time of “contact,” it is theirs only deriv
atively, because he encountered?dare one
say “discovered”??them.
succinctly?or so viciously?articulated as
Ward Churchill was right to include Dances
With Wolves among the “fantasies of the mas
ter race”: the white hero’s Indianness evokes
the figure and fantasy not of the human and
humane Indian but of the American Adam.
Moreover, the rescue produces the recovery?
rather, the restoration, for the moment carries
an ironic affirmation of the hero’s cultural ori
gins?by the boy Smiles A Lot of Dunbar’s
when Sergeant Bauer (Larry Joshua) snarls at
the badly beaten Dunbar: “[You] turned
Injun, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” These white
characters exist principally to establish the
pervasiveness of the racism that has so far
been Timmons’s alone. Even before the die
gesis makes racism plausibly pervasive, how
ever, Costner evokes the extra-diegetical
sources of Indian figuration that become his
journal. Cultural surrenders such as Dunbar’s
were never so complete as to dissolve the white
hero’s being in the Other’s own, or so convinc
ing as to render him ultimately silent and at
The Two Implied Sources of Canonical
peace before the end of his narrative authority.
Figuration in Dances With Wolves
true, if implied, antagonists.
For Dunbar must be made whole again: he
shall be Indian, but he must have his journal
back?his English-speaking voice, the one that
Timmons’s remark that one would just “as
requires no subtitles. Costner’s ideological
are dead” recalls?in just as crude a form?
intention therefore labors under the consider
able weight of having to reinvent the Indian
while continually calling attention to the trials
and triumphs and testimonies of the white
hero. In short, the intent to refigure depends
almost entirely on the image of Costner as
Indian, and if we should come to doubt the
conviction with which Dunbar becomes a
Lakota (as the ABC edition gives us reason to
do), then the ideological intention of Dances
With Wolves would be largely foiled.
This essay adheres to Dunbar’s (counter-)
assertion?that nothing he “had been told
about [the Indians] is correct”?as the basis
for identifying the ideological intention of
soon not see” any Indians “less’ the bastards
the declaration commonly attributed to Gen
eral Philip Sheridan: “The only good Indians
I ever saw were dead,” an assertion that (how
ever vehemently Sheridan might have denied
ever making it) would soon thereafter rever
berate through the frontier as the refrain of
greatest obloquy: “The only good Indian is a
dead Indian” (Hutton 180). To the extent that
Tirnmons may recall this calumny, to that
extent at least does Costner/Dunbar invoke
“the winning of the West,” and the image of
the Indian that it produced, as objects of his
denunciation.
Well before it presents white men who are of
a mind with Tirnmons and General Sheridan,
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^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^^ ^
^^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^”JB^^^B^^tf^M^r .CT
Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) accepts Dunbar’s Indian identit
that “now there is only a Sioux named Dances With Wolves.”
Costner
however, Dances With Wolves turns
to the understood the aesthetics of buff
hunting
great slaughter of the buffalo to develop
its as a subdiscipline of what Melvi
less
than
dialectic. The slaughter of the buffalo
was,
of a decade after Parkman, identified
“the
metaphysics of Indian-hating.”
course, a certain way of destroying the
culture
of the Plains Indians. Nor did it take a lout like
that Dunbar rides with the entire Lak
Timmons to heap the scorn in full Now
plenty:
village to meet the great buffalo herd that
“Except an elephant,” wrote Harvard-educated
Francis Parkman in 1849,
lier thundered by Fort Sedgewick, Kicki
Bird signals for him to ride ahead with
I have seen no animal that can surpass
a
scouting
party. Instead of coming upon
huge
buffalo bull in size and strength, and
theherd promised by the “gigantic swa
world may be searched in vain to
offind
torn ground that the buffalo have left
their path, Dunbar and the scouts come u
any thing of a more ugly and ferocious
the carcasses left behind by white hunte
aspect. At first sight of him, every feeling
who
kill the animals only for their tong
of sympathy vanishes. No man who
has
hides. A shot of a forlorn buffalo calf,
not experienced it, can understandand
with
what keen relish one inflicts his death
slaughter’s sole survivor, completes the im
of desecration and atrocity. As the voiceo
wound, with what profound contentment
of mind he beholds him fall. (306) earlier condemned the characterization of
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Indians as “thieves and beggars,” so does it
now articulate the Lakotas’ outrage. Over the
dirgelike strains of John Barry’s Journey to
the Buffalo Killing Ground, the entire village,
somber and stunned, rides through the field,
and then the voiceover, restrained yet less
outraged:
him Other to whites and Native Americans
alike. And yet, though unclaimed by ethnic
propinquity and disavowed by academic
authority, the cinematic Indian is, if not real
enough, then certainly distinct enough an
entity to constitute a clear subject of dis
course, and as clear therefore an object of
resistance. If, then, so much American history
Who would do such a thing? The field
was proof enough that it was a people
without value and without soul, with no
unfolds as a continual dispossession of the
indigenous people, what a surprise to see the
cinematic Indian debased. If the vast major
regard for Sioux rights. The wagon tracks
ity of Indian westerns are set in the apogee of
leading away left little doubt, and my
heart sank as I knew it could only be
American Manifest Destiny, what image of
the Indian can we hope to see there besides
white hunters. Voices that had been joy
ous all morning were now as silent as the
the one that has its origin in white ideas of the
Indian?in what Robert Berkhof er has termed
dead buffalo left to rot in this valley?
“the white man’s Indian”? Moreover, if the
killed only for their tongues and the price
of their hides.
movies belong to and emerge from the con
quering power?if they are, as they after all
are, the cultural inheritance of those who
In his first opportunity to refer to white men
other than Timmons, Costner/Dunbar renders
five centuries of Indian-white history in terms
of conflicting ethical identities. Nor does
Costner make much of an effort to confine this
condemnation to white buffalo hunters. All
history is the site of a Manichaean struggle:
On the one side are “these people,” with their
love of family and their wonderful sense of
humor ?all of it unknown to whites, except
for this particular one who is blessed with the
privilege of telling us so. Opposite them are “a
people without value and without soul.” The
voiceover, with its artless ethical suasion, pos
tures as due and full recompense?proffers at
the very least the lamentation?for the brute
and irreducible fact of conquest. The severe
dispensation whereby race decrees destiny
now restores the balance of things cultural,
things historical: the imperial power to dispos
sess the Indian and desecrate the land evolves
“won the West”?what privileged insight do
we account ourselves anointed by for so pious
an insistence that Hollywood misrepresents
Native Americans? Is the perceived misrepre
sentation not rather a starting point than the
conclusion? Is it not the case that strategies of
figuration that go unexamined reappear per
sistently, even in ostensibly refigured images
of the Indian? Inasmuch as history has always
been the possession of the conqueror?
always therefore in an elemental sense the
“master(‘s) narrative”?should we not rather
take it as axiomatic that the Hollywood
Indian, though misbegotten, is in a very
important way the Indian of history?
Even in its primitive forms, the western served
the aims of white constructions of the Indian,
almost as if it formed a seamless continuity
with the West of Euroamerican history: “The
motion picture,” writes Kevin Brownlow, “not
now into the power not only to exalt the Indian
only reconstructed Western history?it
but to perturb white conscience with the
became an extension of that history” (223). If,
account of devastation and genocide. Histori
cal remorse alone guaranteed the Costner of
as Richard Slotkin states, “mythic space is a
metaphor of history, and the heroes in a func
tioning mythological system represent models
of possible historical action” (88), then no sin
gle image, or rather icon, of the historical West
presents that continuity so compellingly?or
for the purposes of the present sketch so eco
nomically?as that of Buffalo Bill Cody.
the theatrical release his viewers’ acquies
cence in the judgments of the Dunbar
voiceover.
The Hollywood Indian has long suffered from
the representational deficiency that makes
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Filmed versions of Buffalo Bill’s “Wild
Wayne to be the believable Indian hater in The
West,” even those shot late in Cody’s career
as showman, seem primitive when compared
Searchers precisely because he knew the
with contemporary westerns by D. W. Griffith
Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
or Thomas Ince. Ince’s Ouster’s Last Fight
(1949), and Hondo (1953).
(1912) and The Deserter (1912) or Griffith’s
The Massacre (1912) and The Battle at Elder
bush Gulch (1914) exhibit a sophistication
unmatched by the extant Buffalo Bill films.
Yet, although it “involved the same admixture
of showmanship, stunts, and sentiments as the
regular Hollywood Western of later years”
(Brownlow 224), Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West”
could claim, through the historical experi
ences of its central figure, an authenticity that
Indian so thoroughly, as he had earlier in Fort
The western knows only too well how to justify
the protagonist’s hatred. For the Indian hater, as
perhaps only Roy Harvey Pearce could put it,
“is a man paradoxically kept by his hatred from
falling entirely into the very state which defines
it” (225). Usually his family, or the family of
those close to him, has been wiped out by the
Indians. In this way, the Indian hater could
stand for the Indian: his hatred emerged pre
was no mere filmmaker’s to claim. Thus, for
cisely from his Indianness, not as a conse
example, the films of the “Wild West”
quence of it or even simultaneously with it, but
inscribe Cody as the lone hunter, on horse
back, shooting his revolver at a disconsolate
lot of buffaloes in an act entitled “The Buf
convergent each upon the other, accursed and
exalted both, coeval and identical sources of
falo, and the Famous Huntsman in Pursuit of
dence-Man (1857)?if not indeed Robert
His Native Game.” The cinematic West,
though in its infancy, already served the
designs of empire?and not only because it
had conquest for its “subject matter” but
because it identified imperial history itself as
its cultural paternity.
To see Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the hero
of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), firing
ruthlessly into a herd of buffalo, thereby
depriving the Comanches of their winter suste
nance, is to come at once before the cultural
forfeiture and restoration. Melville’s The Confi
Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods, or the
Jibbenainosay (1837)?anticipated, and thus
already enabled, the paradox whereby we could
know the Indian completely through this white
man who hated in a paradoxically just propor
tion to his heroic stature. Yet the subtler and
therefore more insidious version of the same
paradox demands that what is truly Indian
about the Indian hater be only his hatred.
Once Ethan Edwards returns Debbie (his
niece, who has been captive for seven years)
to white society, he must take again to the
wilderness. There are now no Indians in the
type that Dunbar declares “without value and
without soul.” Yet this image of Ethan also
enables us to see just how formidable a mytho
logical type Costner proposes to resist. For no
single image in the western?which is to say,
then, no single Hollywood icon?has so firmly
stood for American “values,” has embodied the
white man in whom alone the Indian lives.
American “soul,” as John Wayne has. If Cody
bound western history to myth, Wayne evoked
the birth of the historical West out of mythic
wilderness. But there are forms of freedom
forces?in that time out of time when the muse
wilderness but this one last wild man?this
Ethan may not belong in white society;
indeed, his surrender to the ways of the
Other?consummated in his scalping of Chief
Scar?consigns him forever to the howling
yet to be lived even beyond such a compro
mised destiny?the freedom of the racial con
of Manifest Destiny had inspired national
science from guilt, perhaps, but also the
heroes. Ethan’s animus has nothing so mean
hero’s own freedom, one in which we may
glimpse his deliverance from his Indian hat
ing even as we witness his uncontested inher
itance of the open spaces. Where there are
now no more Indians, there is still this white
man, still wild and free.
for its purpose as the price of buffalo tongues
or hides. The tormented vision of Anglo
American racial dominance itself shapes his
labor of Indian hating. Besides, the natural
ironies of American mythology enabled
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Some sort of necessity would seem to require
Instead of cutting from the buffalo slaughter
the racial self-hatred of an Indian fighter who no
scene to the nighttime dance, the ABC edi
tion cuts to a daylight scene?the first of a
sequence omitted from the theatrical release.
As Dunbar and Stands With A Fist exchange
longer has Indians to fight: where there are no
more Indians, the hero can only hate himself.
But racial self-hatred has no story aside from the
story of heroic self-sacrifice that identifies the
mythic type: when Ethan rescues Debbie?
when he rescues her, that is, from himself?his
Indian hating is spent, and the rescue, as the
myth would have it, restores the hero’s “value,”
his “soul,” even as the hero restores the captive
woman to white society. What better Indian,
then, than this heroic white man in whom we
could now see a transfigured Indian?the Indian
not as Noble Savage?not, that is, as a native
type but as American Adam? Here was a good
“Indian”?alive and white and mythic?to belie
General Sheridan’s. To contest this type, as
Costner does, was to contest not racial hatred
but the form of that hatred, veiled and mystified,
in a fabulation well accustomed to the paradox
of this figure of the “Indian,” an “Indian” who
yet doubles as Indian hater, yet an “Indian” who
is, ambivalence and all, the very soul of Anglo
American values.
The Antitype and the Supplemental Text:
Three Sequences from the ABC Edition
Scene 1
After Dunbar and the entire Lakota village
ride through the field of slaughter, and follow
ing the voiceover denunciation (“Who would
do such a thing? . . .”), the theatrical release
cuts to the nighttime dance. In the fore
ground?apart and alone?Dunbar watches as
the Lakotas dance in the background. The
voiceover then reemerges:
As they celebrated into the night the
coming hunt, it was hard to know where
to be. I don’t know if they understood,
but I could not sleep among them. There
furtive glances, Kicking Bird calls upon
Dunbar to join him and the other Lakota
scouts. These scouts, Dunbar among them,
locate the buffalo herd. Here, as they behold
the buffalo from a high ridge, the ABC edi
tion matches briefly with the theatrical
release; but soon it breaks again with it,
showing now the return of the scouts to the
village. When the scouts reach the village, at
night, a dance has already begun. The dance,
according to the theatrical release, celebrates
“the coming hunt”; but the ABC edition
alters both the stated purpose of the dance
and the voiceover explanation of Dunbar’s
isolation (i.e., “As they celebrated . . .”).
According to the theatrical release, Dunbar’s
separation from the Lakotas has its source in
the white hunters’ slaughter of the buffalo.
The ABC edition, by contrast, explains that
separation as Dunbar’s censure of the Lakotas
because of what they have done to the white
hunters. What follows is the ABC edition’s
context for the hero’s separation from the
Lakotas, and for the corresponding voiceover
declaration that he “could not sleep among
them.”
As the buffalo scouts ride in, Dunbar, his
attention already engaged by an event off
screen, reins in his horse. Throughout the
scene he remains well outside the circle of
dancers, riding slowly around them as if in a
circle of his own. Now he looks screen left,
and the eyeline match is to the white hunters’
wagon, buffalo robes strewn over it and on the
ground next to it. The reaction shot of Dunbar
is a tighter close-up than before; he now looks
at the dancers with a clear understanding of
had been no looks, and there was no
what has happened. Cut to Dunbar via a
blame. There was only the confusion of a
people not able to predict the future.
zoom-in, held in extreme close-up; the match
on this point-of-view shot is a zoom-in, itself
held in close-up, of a hand, severed just above
the wrist, dangling from a pole above the fire.
Racial shame enforces cultural exile, even if
the Lakotas, as Dunbar assures us, have given
him no damning looks.
A subsequent point-of-view shot shows, in
close-up, a long, flowing blond scalp dangling
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from a pole above the fire. Following the shot
Scene 2
of the scalp, all the Dunbar point-of-view
Following a series of events that chart Dun
shots cut to the Lakotas dancing around the
fire. Kicking Bird himself has taken his place
among the dancers. Now the voiceover
reemerges not only to explain what Dunbar
sees but to justify, with an all-too-palpable
urgency, his distance?cultural and moral?
from the Lakotas.
bar’s cultural transformation?beginning
with the ritual eating of the buffalo liver and
culminating in his emergence as the hero of
the battle against the Pawnees?the ABC edi
tion shows Kicking Bird and Dunbar (now
more appropriately referred to as Dances
With Wolves) on a spiritual journey to the
deserved to die. But it was no use. I tried
Black Hills. The scene produces long shots as
breathtaking as the earlier ones in which Dun
bar and Tirnmons made their way from Fort
Hays to Fort Sedgewick. As they stop before
this grandeur, Kicking Bird instructs Dances
With Wolves: “It is said that all the animals
to believe that Wind In His Hair and
were born here, that from here they spread to
Kicking Bird and all the other people who
shared the killing were not so happy for
having done it, but they were. As I looked
at familiar faces, I realized that the gap
between us was greater than I could ever
have imagined, (emphasis added)
feed all the people.”
It was suddenly clear now, what had hap
pened, and my heart sank as I tried to
convince myself that the white men who
had been killed were bad people and
In the ABC edition, then, the dance celebrates
not “the coming hunt” but the victory of the
Lakotas over the white hunters. (The theatri
cal release, I might note, never shows the
Lakotas’ search for the hunters, not even their
desire to avenge this outrage.) The ABC edi
tion attributes Dunbar’s isolation to the cul
tural shock produced by the massacre of the
white hunters. Dunbar’s physical separation
is a necessary cultural response to the Lako
tas. He cannot “sleep among them” because
he is morally revolted by their actions.
Was the sequence cut because Dunbar’s
reproof of the Lakota would undermine Cost
ner’s intent to refigure the Indian? Is Dun
bar’s voiceover tribute to the Lakota
(“Nothing I had been told about these people
is correct. . . . “)?with its implied rejection
of the canonical Indian?as convincing in the
ABC edition as it is in the theatrical release,
which omits this moment of revulsion? Is
Dunbar’s shock an expression, however unin
tended, of affinity with the very type that
Costner meant to resist? Had the intricacies of
revisionist figuration subverted?if only here,
in the supplemental text?the ideological pur
pose that had begotten it?
No sooner have they entered the woods, how
ever, than Kicking Bird stops?as if in
response to a vague portent. As the two men
ride warily under the fall canopy, they come
upon the site of a desecration. In a clearing,
surrounded by felled timber, stands a tiny
shed, as much a cultural intrusion here?a
synecdoche of invasion?as the wagon tracks
were on the buffalo field, or the wagon itself
in the Lakota village. Close-ups of both Kick
ing Bird and Dances With Wolves match on a
medium shot of four carcasses, deer or ante
lope, hanging from the back legs and gutted,
but left there to rot. The men now notice the
skeleton of another crudely fashioned shelter
and, on the rough-hewn table within it, the
remains of some indescribable animal parts,
abuzz with flies. The doleful strains of Jour
ney to the Buffalo Killing Ground are heard
again, confirming the relation between the
earlier slaughter of the buffalo and this pre
sent profanation. The slow, sad ride through
the dismal waste reveals overturned barrels,
the rotted carcasses of a fox and of yet more
deer, discarded whiskey bottles, prospectors’
pans?tokens all, at once mocking and
melancholy, of white invasion. The close-ups
of Kicking Bird fully register the unspeakable
outrage, but Dances With Wolves cannot con
tain himself. Enraged, he says (in Lakota):
“We must wait for these people.” Yet Kicking
Bird notes that the criminals have been gone
for more than a week. With great sadness in
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his voice, he says, “We will water the horses
and go home.”
The sequence clearly alludes to the white
assault on the Black Hills following George
Armstrong Custer’s expedition in 1874,
which precipitated the Great Sioux War.
Despite its historicity, however, the scene
might well be superfluous, since the slaughter
of the buffalo has already elicited, through the
services of the voiceover, the intended denun
mentioned the taunts of the women, they
dropped their heads in shame; but when
he pointed out their means of vengeance,
he struck a chord which never failed to
thrill in the breast of an Indian. (592;
emphasis added)
The Black Hills sequence almost had to be
cut if the massacre of the white hunters was
also to be omitted. The hero might have
seemed much too eager to hack off a hand or
lift a scalp. He had earlier condemned the
ciation of white rapacity. The sequence seems
all the more unessential because we have still
mutilation of the white hunters as an act of
to witness (in both versions) the white sol
diers’ wanton shooting of Cisco and, later,
Two Socks (the wolf that befriends Dunbar).
unbridled savagery, yet he would now appear
to yield to the selfsame “savage” impulse?if
only as due stamp and seal of his complete
But the sequence, at least on the surface,
cultural metamorphosis. To have kept the
marks the extent of Dunbar’s cultural trans
sequence would have meant, moreover, that
the essential Otherness of the hero?as, by
formation?designates, at least, the intention
to declare that transformation complete. We
note, accordingly, that the phrase “these peo
extension, that of the Lakotas and, yet more,
that of Native Americans in the white man’s
ple,” ever so functional (not to say suspi
cious) in the designation of the Other?and
earlier invoked in Dunbar’s praise of the
Lakota (“Nothing I had been told about these
people . . . “)?now assigns cultural differ
ence, Otherness itself, to white men. Princi
pally, however, cultural transformation here
takes the form of the hero’s implicit sanction
of the impulse to avenge?an impulse that,
when he saw it satisfied in the massacre of
the white buffalo hunters, revolted him and
precipitated his voiceover meditation on the
“gap” between the cultures. Costner, intend
ing to refigure, defines his hero’s Indianness
by unintended yet clear reference to the time
less canonical demand that, of all possible
Indian Other?it is vengeance that most
constitutes the trait at once essential and
ineradicable. So, for example, Fenimore
Cooper’s Magua, in full possession of his
“red gift,” as he tries to set the Hurons against
his white captives:
canonical sources to equate difference with
savagery. To be sure, then, the Black Hills
sequence tends to cast Dances With Wolves
not as antitype but as the “Savage Reac
tionary” of the western’s typology. Yet it also
displays the complexity of cultural transfor
mation?even if in so messy a form?dis
closes, indeed, the slippage between intention
and figure.
Scene 3
traits?alone among all vices and virtues that
enable and empower the identification of the
exactly defines the Indian, vengeance that
history?could be confirmed by this one cus
tom that has time out of mind enabled the
Of all the soldiers at Fort Sedgewick, only
Lieutenant Elgin (Charles Rocket) shows
concern for Dances With Wolves. When the
soldiers bring the hero, bloody and manacled,
to the fort’s stable, it is Elgin who proffers the
wet handkerchief; Elgin, also, who restrains
Spivey and Bauer; Elgin who seems less
inclined than the Major (Wayne Grace) to
label the hero a “traitor.” Elgin’s compassion
is as much in evidence in the theatrical release
as in the ABC edition. In both versions Elgin
is the first to die in the rescue of Dances With
When [Magua] spoke of courage, [the
Hurons’] looks were firm and respon
Wolves. Omitted from the theatrical release,
however, is the following scene, in the imme
diate aftermath of the rescue. Wind In His
sive; when he alluded to their injuries,
their eyes kindled with fury; when he
Dances With Wolves stops him. Interpreting
Hair draws his knife to scalp Elgin, but
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this action to mean that his friend wants to
must save Wind In His Hair from?just how
scalp Elgin himself, Wind In His Hair offers
Dances With Wolves the knife. Dances with
does one put this??being too much the
Wolves declines the offer, and Wind In His
cannot possibly explain why the hero will not
Hair walks off, puzzled. As the Lakota earlier
distinguished between Dunbar and the white
buffalo hunters, so now the white hero distin
let Wind In His Hair take Elgin’s scalp?for
that culture, as we have been led to believe,
guishes between the only other humane white
man and the rest of the vicious soldiers.
Yet Wind In His Hair never needed Dunbar’s
conscience to distinguish between himself and
Indian. The canonical censure of scalping
has long since ceased to define the hero’s
humanity. The hero’s, of course, but not the
viewers’?for Costner could count on his
viewers to applaud this reassuring affirmation
of a “civilized” moral impulse. Yet here is
also, together with the approbation, an
In His Hair on the distinctions between indi
implied judgment of Wind In His Hair, and
the source of that judgment is the supposed
humanity of the white hero (or, again, the
vidual and race. Besides, Elgin is no less dead
for so nice a discernment. For whom was such
hero’s restraint). We must therefore distin
the white hunters, so that the arresting gesture
could hardly have been meant to instruct Wind
a gesture performed? Certainly we respond
with a measure of sympathy to the effort to
spare Elgin’s scalp, but just as certainly our
sympathy subverts any conviction we might
have had about the completeness of the hero’s
transformation. Elgin thus serves the purposes
of a stratagem whereby Costner avoids impli
cating his hero in a custom that would have
confirmed his Indianness even as it questioned
postulated viewership that commends the
guish not only good white men from bad?
Elgin from Spivey?but good Indian from
bad: Wind In His Hair must be different from
the Toughest Pawnee (Wes Studi), who
scalped Tirnmons alive. Such an irresolute
and back-handed deliverance of Wind In His
Hair from his own culture summons inevitably
the revulsion that Dunbar felt at the scalping
of the white buffalo hunters. Costner/Dances
his humanity. (The issue here is hardly
With Wolves would save Wind In His Hair
whether or not scalping is indigenous to the
Indians of North America. It was the conquer
ing culture that coded scalping as the mark of
the Other.) For in this sequence at least the
conquering culture?the very type to which
the hero would be antitype?defines “human
ity” by contesting and condemning scalping,
by confirming it as the mark of the Other, by
(and by extension “the Indian”) from his own
Indianness, even as he would implicitly
reestablish the cultural distance that earlier
kept him from the circle of dancers.
Typological Exigencies and the
Texts of Cultural Transformation
reassigning it to its place of prominence in the
age-old catalogue of “savagery.” The “human
ity” that prevents Elgin from being scalped
When Natty Bumppo sees Chingachgook
bearing “the reeking scalp” of a French sentry,
thus produces, no doubt despite itself, an
he reflects: ‘Twould have been a cruel and
implied condemnation of the Indian. Scalping
delimits the hero’s transformation; it marks
unhuman act for a white-skin; but ’tis the gift
the outer margins of his Indianness and identi
fies the threshold of inhumanity: he will there
fore be unequivocally Lakota?fully so, down
to the last ethnographically authentic detail?
but (for all we know alone among all Lakota
men) he will not take a scalp.
Moreover, Dances With Wolves’ eagerness to
save himself from “savagery” spills over into
a clear, and clearly ironic, conviction that he
and nature of an Indian, and I suppose it
should not be denied!” (628). Only an acute
and vigilant awareness of the difference
between red gifts and white could secure the
unblemished?the racially pure?paradise.
Natty was the original of the type that Richard
Slotkin considers central to the Myth of the
Frontier?”the man who knows Indians” (47).
To know Indians was hardly to be one of
them: it was to know them not only for their
“gifts”?for their wilderness wisdom, or even
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?it is the image of the white hero that bears
the chief burden (and also claims the high
privilege) of contesting the canonical sources
of figuration; we are to know the real Indian
for their fantasied freedom?but by the ele
mental Otherness that authorized and entitled
white mythocultural self-definition.
In Bird’s Nick of the Woods, Nathan Slaugh
ter, a Quaker whose family has been massa
principally through this white man who learns
to value, and in time claims to be, the Other.
cred by the Indians, possesses all the
And so the conviction with which we
woodcraft of Natty Bumppo and none of his
beatific wilderness wisdom. In the climactic
embrace the refigured Indian depends on the
completeness with which the hero becomes
Other. There is no doubt that Dunbar would
confrontation Nathan kills the evil Wenonga
and then scalps him. Thus, he surrenders for
be wholly Indian, without a trace of his for
ever the one essential “gift” of his race?
mer culture. In the aftermath of the battle with
vengeance, and the wilderness reclaims his
soul. If Cooper’s hero could be as the Indian
yet superior for the singular good fortune of
being white, Bird’s could be as the Indian in
the Indian’s unmitigated savagery and lose his
white soul in the unholy bargain. Thus, after
he secures the wilderness for the emergent
dynastic powers, he takes to the woods again,
there to be lost forever. ‘Thee would not have
exults: “I felt a pride that I had never felt
before. I had never really known who John
Dunbar was. Perhaps the name itself had no
meaning. But as I heard my Sioux name being
me back in the Settlements,” he says to the
high-born Roland Forrester by way of refus
ing conquest’s promised bounty, “to scandal
ize them that is of my faith? No, friend, my
lot is cast in the woods” (402).
that he will leave the village because the vin
dictive soldiers will hunt him down, and when
Christian forgiveness. He sates his
the Pawnees, for example, the voiceover
called over and over, I knew for the first time
who I really was.”
Later, following his captivity among the white
soldiers, Dances With Wolves tells Ten Bears
they find him they will also find the village
and destroy it. However exaggerated the
hero’s sense of his own importance, Costner
anoints him with a complete Indian identity:
“The man that the soldiers are looking for,”
More than a century later, John Ford (via Alan
LeMay’s novel) would reinvent Nathan
Ten Bears replies, “no longer exists. Now
there is only a Sioux named Dances With
Wolves.” No longer merely “the man who
Slaughter in the image of Ethan Edwards. The
near-miracle of Fordian economy would ren
der Nathan/Ethan the unregenerate hero in
two memorable images: (1) Ethan, horse and
knows Indians,” and certainly no Indian hater,
he renounces his typological inheritance.
all, emerges from the lodge of Chief Scar
Renunciation makes for an improbable strat
egy of opposition. If Costner comes to reject
the full range of canonical sources, he also
bearing Scar’s scalp; (2) at the threshold of
the Jorgensen home (which has become
America itself, “the fine, good place to be”),
Ethan turns and walks away into the open
rejects the dialectical imperatives through
spaces as the door closes on him.
which he had proposed to refigure the Indian,
beginning with Dunbar’s declaration that
Between Natty and Nathan/Ethan lies the
“nothing [he] had been told about these peo
range (far broader than the similarity of the
names would seem to render it) of types that
Costner intended to oppose. More than the
ple is correct.” The decisive moment of
renunciation precedes the battle with the
white soldiers. When the major offers him
ethnographic correctness of Dances With
clemency if he will lead them to the Lakota
Wolves, more than its casting of Native Amer
icans in the roles of Lakotas and Pawnees,
With Wolves responds defiantly?and in
more even than its almost fastidiously proper
Lakota (which is of course unintelligible to
camps and serve as “interpreter,” Dances
appeal to the Lakota language as a way of
the soldiers)? “I am Dances With Wolves. I
insisting on the cultural integrity of the Other
have nothing to say to you. You are not worth
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3
talking
those
makes evident?Costner/Dunbar’s
Otherness
to.”
He
now
ha
who
“told”
him
constitutes
rather a transparent surrender to
white fantasy,
one all the more dangerous
“thieves
and
beggars.”
because it is in part just such a fantasy that pro
duces the canonical types that
Costner meant to
We
acquiesce,
perhap
resist. The refigured
Indian of the theatrical
bar’s
Lakota
identity
suffers from the paradox whereby he is
ourselves release
repudiate
In
once exotic?outside (ex?) the range of tha
recognize, at
however,
canonical types for refusing toin
engage them?
already
its
tion
fails
ical
and the very source of thesePerhap
canonical types.
typology.
c
Not in his Indianness,
in his Adamicity?or
certain
way
to but resist
t
renounce
all
its
in his Indianness
only to the discurs
extent that we rec
not
what
Costner/Dunb
ognize in it die untainted, prelapsarian hero of
he
and beggar.
the conquering
culture?do we figure
behold Cost
challenged
the
ner’s refigured “Other.”
In the theatrical release, Costner’s refigured
The ABC edition subverts the theatrical release
Indian, vested almost entirely in the character of
not by contradicting it but by complicating it.
Its antitype?its own version of the theatrical
the white hero, fulfills his ideological intent
only under penalty of irony. If only because he
avoids the complications of cultural transforma
tion?the complications that the ABC edition
release’s Costner/Dunbar?seems so much
more reluctant to yield to the Other, so much
more disposed to emphasize the difficulty, even
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phosis. The three sequences from the ABC edi
tion underscore the hero’s difficulties?his
its manifestation in the plenitude of his
Adamic being. Do we then know Costner’s
Other to be other than what he has been
cultural aporia?on his way to becoming wholly
Other. The ABC edition therefore suggests that
Other ever but what the Other ever has been?
Costner glimpsed the incongruity between inten
the supplement of the Same?
to hint at the impossibility, of cultural metamor
before?in history or in film? Was such an
tion and figure. I emphasize one last time that the
ABC edition is no less insistent on the com
pleteness of the hero’s cultural transformation
than the theatrical release is. But where the the
atrical release leaves no trace of the hero’s for
Notes
visibly the erasure (to appeal to Derrida); it func
1 In the fall of 1994, Orion Home Video
released a version subtitled the “Widescreen
tions as the palimpsest that reimposes upon fig
ure and intention alike the marks of doubt and
Expanded Edition.” The three sequences that I
discuss in detail are almost identical in the
mer cultural self, this version reveals all too
distance, of reserve and revulsion. The ABC edi
“Expanded Edition” and the ABC edition. The
tion thus appears both as a discursive possibility
aspect ratio is, of course, different. I refer to the
longer version throughout as “the ABC edition,”
and a discursive possibility already abandoned,
or at least deferred. Even when the omitted
if only to avoid the confusions of polytextuality
sequences are reintegrated with the text of the
created by commercial motives that are largely
theatrical release, they function principally to
present an absence, to emphasize an omission.
The ABC edition is therefore a textual ‘Other” to
the textual “Same” of the theatrical release. We
irrelevant to this essay.
2 The Nielsen ratings for the week of Novem
ber 5-11, 1993, show that ABC did well on Sun
day the 7th (three hours) against Murder, She
Wrote and Ghost, both on runner-up CBS; it did
know these sequences as the erasures whereby
the Other of the theatrical release?that is, the
even better, however, on Wednesday the 10th
(two hours) against CBS’s In the Heat of the
Night and 48 Hours, NBC’s The Mystery of the
Sphinx and Law and Order, and Fox’s Me Irose
Place (Miller 22). ABC returned with Dances
With Wolves for its February 1995 sweeps, but
Indian refigured through the image of the white
hero?is made present not as a refigured Other
but as an ideal Same.
The ABC edition compels us to distrust the sim
this time it did not show the long version. Thus,
plicity of the theatrical release, to take the prof
fered cultural conversion of the hero?and thus
the total programming …