No study of Arizona in Western film would be complete without discussing how Native Americans have been portrayed in Hollywood media often to their detriment. This was another important topic of our class discussion board. This is what I posted back then:
The chief reason why depictions of Native Americans in the media (especially in Hollywood Western films) and were unflattering and damaging to them for so long was based on who controls various media forms. It should be kept in mind that through much of the 20th century that white audiences made up the bulk of the movie going public. Racial and ethnic prejudices so deeply engrained through much of that period were difficult to shake. These negative stereotypes most assuredly determined how minority groups were likely to be depicted in film and television narratives. Political correctness and sensitivity towards disadvantaged groups was unknown.
Also, as the lecture quite simply pointed out — Native Americans had no film industry of their own and therefore no ability to present themselves in a more favorable light. As they were such a small percentage of the total US population, they had no political clout and little voice or other influence to protest how they were being treated in entertainment media. As I’ve been studying in History 325: Immigration & Ethnicity course (much of this ties in well with our class) the “Manifest Destiny” doctrine touted Anglo-Saxon culture and expansion as being superior to that of other peoples. While that ideology was most prominent during American expansion across the continent during the 19th century, those views were still complicating and skewering views of ethnicity, nationality, and race well into the 20th century.
While many people involved in the various facets of film production may or may not have been overtly racist and discriminatory, the first thing that should always be clearly understood about the studio system era of the 1920s through the 1950s is the profit motive. That is the main reason why the industry is called show business NOT show art. Whatever the perceived audience tastes were (and still are) determines largely determines what types of pictures are going to be produced. From various items I’ve read over the years, it seems that the Hollywood studios were particularly worried about offending the sensibilities of white audiences in the southern states — and this apparently had much to do with how minorities were presented as well.
While thinking about the above painting American Progress added for this post, I wanted to add more comments here, although it’s been over ten years since I took this course! While the Wikipedia article about “Manifest Destiny“ discusses the figure of the woman -“Columbia” as leading the westward charge of progress and technology, it wasn’t only the Native Americans who were displaced from their ancestral lands. Although this is somewhat off topic, it bears pointing out that this movement also caused considerable disruption to the natural world.
The overgrazing of the Great Plains along with degraded farming practices, mass killing of buffalo and other wildlife, open pit strip mining, intrusive railroads across the landscape, are to mention a few of the highly negative effects caused by “Manifest Destiny” on the natural world. All of these, of course, in turn changed the lives of Native Americans throughout the West forever whose way of life was very integrated with the natural world.
