By Angela Aleiss

COPYRIGHT Cineaste Publishers Inc. 1995. Used in the UCB Media Resources Web site with permission.

Some past, present, and future aspects of racism in American filmmaking are the subject of the three contributions to this installment of our continuing series on Race in Contemporary American Cinema. In "The Surprising Silents," Angela Aleiss indicates that many contemporary "reforms" involving Native Americans (the use of Native Americans to play themselves, the employment of Native Americans behind the camera, and the fashioning of positive images and storylines) were not uncommon in the silent era. Her survey raises the issue why the cinematic image of Native Americans deteriorated and suggests the long-term impact of present reforms may also prove fleeting. Rosa Linda Fregoso, author of the landmark The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, takes on the gender and ethnic problematics involved when a genuinely "breakthrough" treatment of an ethnic issue is attempted by someone outside of the group. And Jesse Rhines, a Cineaste Assistant Editor, looks at the economic underpinnings of the minicycles of African-American filmmaking in Hollywood. He also indicates where the present and future economic windows of opportunity might lie.

Every decade, Hollywood studios announce that they have 'reinvented' the Native American genre. Finally, studios say, Indians will be portrayed as accurately as possible; they will now play themselves in major roles and their non-Indian antagonists will be seen in a less than positive light. In short, the old saying that the only good Hollywood Indian is a dead Indian will no longer be valid.

This line of reasoning contains several faulty assumptions. During the silent era, the many 'reforms' so grandly proclaimed by contemporary filmmakers were commonplace. Unfortunately, these silent Indian-theme films failed to change dominant cultural values, and they could not withstand the demand for the cowboy-and-Indian attacks by the late 1930s in Westerns like The Plainsman (1937), Texas Rangers (1937), and Stagecoach (1939). While numerous books have already discussed these silent films, many have not been readily available to scholars, much less the general public. Now that situation has dramatically changed. The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress has recently identified more than two hundred fiction and nonfiction films with substantial Native American content.(*) This treasure trove allows us to rethink that early era and to speculate realistically on what later brought about more negative Indian images.

White Fawn's Devotion (1910) is a good example of an early Western without the cliches of hostile Indian warriors or wagon train attacks. The film is directed by James Young Deer (Winnebago), a Native American producer/director who headed up the Pathe Freres' West Coast studio in Los Angeles. It is the story of an Indian woman and a white man who are married and live with their young daughter in the Dakotas. One day, the husband receives a letter informing him of an inheritance back East, and he packs his bags. His distraught wife, who believes he will never return, grabs a knife and stabs herself.

Up to this point, the plot resembles Edwin Milton Royle's popular stage play, The Squaw Man (1905), upon which Cecil B. De Mille based three films. But where Royle and De Mille presented a tragic ending to an Indian/white marriage, White Fawn's Devotion offers a happier outcome. The daughter has seen her father pick up the knife, so she assumes he's murdered her mother. She then informs the Indian tribe, which takes the man captive. As the poor man's head is about to be severed, his Indian wife suddenly appears. She announces that the wound was not mortal after all, and the family is happily reunited.

The controversial D.W. Griffith has been rightly criticized for his savage Sioux warriors in The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914) and the intoxicated Mohawk Indians in America (1924). Less known, however, is Griffith's The Redman and the Child (1908), his first Western and arguably his best. A white boy and his Indian companion form an enduring friendship when the warrior saves the child from marauding outlaws and avenges the murder of the boy's grandfather. The Indian hero proudly paddles his canoe back to the campsite with the exhausted child asleep by his side. In a similar manner, Griffith's The Broken Doll (1910) features the sacrifice of an Indian girl, but Was He a Coward? (1911) deals with a white man who cares for an Indian stricken with smallpox. The man nurses the sick Indian back to health, and the final scene shows the white man's face bearing the fatal pock marks.

More ambiguous treatments are found in Griffith's A Romance of the Western Hills (1910) and The Chiefs Daughter (1911). In both films, a white man seduces an Indian woman and cruelly casts her aside. The men are callous in their behavior and their dishonesty immediately offends their white fiancees. When the white women learn of their lovers' unfaithfulness, they break off their own relationships.

One of Griffith's contemporaries, Thomas H. Ince, was celebrated for his treatment of Native Americans. In 1911, Ince and a troupe of cowboy riders and gunslingers from Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West Show camped along the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, just northwest of Los Angeles. This scenic oceanfront site, commonly referred to as "Inceville," was dotted with tipis belonging to the Oglala Sioux Indians from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Ince was responsible for the Indians' care, and he agreed to provide them with the required hours of schooling each day. "The Indians appeared in many of my two-reel pictures," Ince wrote in his memoirs, "and did some truly remarkably [sic] work."

Custer's Last Fight (1912; reissued in 1925) was produced by Thomas Ince and shows the events leading to the historic Battle of the Little Bighorn. The cast includes Francis Ford (director John Ford's brother) and William Eagleshirt (Oglala), one of Hollywood's first Indian actors. Introduced as the "actual reproduction of, and the incidents that led up to the reddest chapter in the Indian wars of the Western Plains," Custer's Last Fight takes a decidedly patriotic view of the Army officer's involvement in the controversial battle. The Sioux Indians are enemies who "bitterly opposed the advance of the white man and civilization," and the daring Custer is "one of the best Indian fighters the Army has ever produced."

But Ince would not neglect the Indians' side of American history. His more sympathetic portrayals include The Indian Massacre (1912; also known as The Heart of an Indian), which shows how white frontiers-men slaughtered the buffalo and shot at the Indians for mere sport. Angry Indians retaliate and kidnap a white child as a replacement for their own lost one. The final shot of an Indian mother grieving over her child's death powerfully illustrates the maternal bond.

Ince was not alone in exposing the evils of civilization. 'Serial king' George B. Seitz directed The Vanishing American (1925), a sweeping epic of mismanagement and corruption on modern-day reservations. Based upon a Zane Grey story and starring Richard Dix, The Vanishing American targets inept government agents as the real culprits who lie, cheat, and torment just about every Indian. So powerful was the movie's indictment that silent film historian Kevin Brownlow has concluded, "The problem of the Indian and his betrayal by the government was more clearly etched in this picture than in any other silent film."

Acclaimed director Allan Dwan (whose career in Hollywood spanned more than fifty years) exposed civilization's corrupting influence upon Alaskan Native life in Frozen Justice (1929). An attractive half-white, half-Inuit girl is torn between life with her Alaskan Native husband and the bustling excitement in the nearest town. An unscrupulous white trader mistreats and exploits the woman, who dies tragically in her husband's arms.

On the other hand, The Heart of Wetona (1919) concluded with the Blackfoot Indian woman happily married to a white man. Director Sidney A. Franklin (whose impressive credits would later include some of Metro- Goldwyn-ayer's most stylish epics) offered another variation of the 'squaw man' theme when Wetona chooses a life with her white lover, rather than remaining with her own tribe. Norma Talmadge, the silent screen heroine, portrayed the title role.

Occasionally, an oddity appeared with no Indian or white heroes. Dead Man's Claim (1912) featured the screen's first cowboy star, 'Broncho Billy' Anderson, and its pessimistic look at humanity foreshadows Erich von Stroheim's 1923 classic, Greed. Two cowboy friends embark upon a search for a gold mine, but while Broncho Billy is asleep, the friend steals his water and supplies. A scraggly Indian watches this treachery and pilfers the water for himself. Both cowboy and Indian die of thirst, and, in a startling move, Broncho Billy shoots himself.

On a more cheerful note is the Library's collection of Indian-theme comedies. Rarities like Biograph's A Midnight Phantasy (1903) satirize Victorian morality when a jealous warrior presents a ballerina with the bloody scalp of her pompous suitor. An Up-to-Date Squaw (1911), another farcical story, follows the adventures of a chief's wife as she parades about town in elegant clothing. The Paleface (1921), written and directed by Buster Keaton and Edward Cline and starring the comic genius himself, pokes fun at traditional cowboy-and-Indian Westerns by depicting Keaton as the Indians' hero. Max Fleischer's cartoon, Big Chief Koko (1925), predated Who Killed Roger Rabbit? by decades when he mixed real life and animated characters.

Among the more sympathetic and culturally sensitive films that capped this era was The Silent Enemy (1930), a feature about the Indians' struggle against hunger. The movie re-created Ojibwa lifestyle with painstaking detail: the carving of a birch-bark canoe, the hunting of a partridge, and the sounding of a wooden instrument to lure a hidden elk. Chauncy Yellow Robe (Sioux) introduced the silent film with a brief talking prologue, and many of the film's artifacts were borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History. Director Henry P. Carver filmed on location in Northern Ontario and cast members of the Ojibwa tribe to portray Indian lifestyle before Columbus arrived.

Silent movies, in fact, often incorporated authentic artifacts in many of their Indian-theme productions. Edward Curtis's In the Land of the Head-Hunters (1914) and John Maple's Before the White Man Cattle (1920) were two early films that boasted of cultural accuracy by using Indians in major roles and recreating traditional Native American (and Canadian) lifestyle. Prominent American Indians who played significant roles in the silent era included Lillian St. Cyr (Winnebago), known in Hollywood as 'Princess Redwing' and star of The Squaw Man (1914), and Chief Yowlache (Yakima), featured in With Sitting Bull at the 'Spirit Lake Massacre' (1927).

The cultural assumptions evident in these silent films raise a number of issues. Given that Native American actors and directors, authentic artifacts, and sympathetic images were integral to silent films, why did this pattern not continue? Are the assumptions in so-called revisionist films like Dances With Wolves mainly illusionary by simply being refined versions of the old noble savage concept? What finally determines cultural authenticity and historical accuracy? The rich diversity and innovative theme of these films held by the Library of Congress may provide some practical guidance to the further exploration of these sensitive issues.

* All films may be viewed at the Library of Congress by researchers with an advance appointment. A guide to the films, American Indians in Silent Film: Motion Pictures in the Library of Congress, compiled by Karen C. Lund, is free on request from the Reference Librarian, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540. Also available is a related research guide on some 150 contemporary documentaries, American Indians on Film and Video: Documentaries in the Library of Congress, compiled by Jennifer Brathovde.