From savage to noble: The evolution of the portrayal of native americans in the western

Abstract

Since its inception, Hollywood cinema has had a great influence in the general public propagating views about a wide variety of subjects, and in particular, transmitting notions about diverse groups of individuals through their representation in movies. Native Americans have been one of said communities, whose depiction has been restricted to the Western, a genre that has a history of misrepresenting indigenous people. Nevertheless, in the more than a hundred years of the Western, society's outlook and treatment of individuals who belong to other ethnicity or colour has changed radically, especially after the rise of the counterculture and the Civil Rights Movement; a shift that has been mirrored by the movie industry. On this account, the aim of this paper is to examine whether this new viewpoint was adopted by the Western in its portrayal of Native Americans, by scrutinizing two emblematic movies of two distinct eras of the genre: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) as representative of the Classic Western, and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) exemplifying the Revisionist Western. In the framework of representation and stereotyping as concepts as well as the genre’s history, the approach was to observe in which features the movies correlate or differ in terms of their Indian characters. A thorough examination revealed that significant differences can be found between the motion pictures, in that the first relies on the Hollywood stereotype which characterizes Indians as the personification of savagery, while the second attempts to disengage from that narrative to a great extent by offering a more meticulous and liberal portrayal of Native Americans. I thus argue that the impact of the counterculture and Civil Rights Movement can be discerned in the Revisionist Western which, contrasting the Classic Western, incorporates the principles advocated in said movements into its renewed vision of indigenous people.