Abstract
Of all the cultural landscapes, we must start with Indian Country, for the simple fact that the land in question was originally foreign to white settlers, and so discourse about this cultural landscape structures America’s initial familiar/foreign dichotomy. In this sense, this first chapter is a sort of “prequel” to the rest of the book and its interest in the post-sixties era’s multicultural travel. The prominent cycle of Westerns that focus on Indian culture were made just before the book’s timeframe (in 1969–1971), and so they illustrate some of the structures of feeling that later feed into multiculturalism; they are also largely about nineteenth-century America, and so they reveal the way in which historical narratives attempted to incorporate an “other” race and landscape into the formation of the nation. The “Indian” may frequently be shown as vanishing, as many have noted, but “Indian Country” lingers and must continually be positioned in relation to the rest of America. By framing it as a pocket of authenticity and roots within the larger nation, its foreignness becomes both tamed and integrated by those who have more freedom of movement. Indian Country films are thus the necessary starting point for an examination of touristic American films.
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Notes
See Dan Georgakas, “They Have Not Spoken: American Indians in Film,” Film Quarterly 25, no. 3 (Spring 1972): 26–32; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York and Toronto: Atheneum; Maxwell Macmillan Canada; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992); Ralph E. Friar and Natasha A. Friar, The Only Good Indian: The Hollywood Gospel (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1972); Ted Jojola, “Absurd Reality II: Hollywood Goes to the Indians,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 12–26; James A. Sandos and Larry E. Burgess, “The Hollywood Indian versus the Native American: Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 107–20; Margo Kasdan and Susan Tavernetti, “Native Americans in a Revisionist Western: Little Big Man,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 121–36. Steve Neale argues that Indian-themed films of the 1960s and 1970s should actually be analyzed as reactions to contemporaneous federal Indian policy instead of as allegories for civil rights or Vietnam: Steve Neale, “Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation and Context of Post-War ‘Pro-Indian’ Western,” in Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western, ed. Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 8–28. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s analysis combines the two approaches: Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
See Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) as well as the works on Native American images in film cited earlier.
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London and Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990).
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1920); primary text is his 1893 essay, included in this book.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 115.
David R. Jansson, “Internal Orientalism in America: W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South and the Spatial Construction of American National Identity,” Political Geography 22 (2003): 293–316. Jansson also cites other terms (“domestic Orientalism,” “nesting Orientalisms”) that have been used to describe the conditions of minority domestic populations of other nations, populations that are culturally othered as well as politically and economically exploited. None of these phrases have found widespread use in American studies, but the concept seems to me to be fruitful.
Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 106.
Deloria, Playing Indian, 4. See also Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: The History of an Idea from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978); and Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
For a discussion of a similar pattern in white/Asian American romances, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Prats observes the number of films that end with the white hero leaving Indian Country despite his kinship with it: Armando J. Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 221.
See R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Jonathan Mitchell, Revisions of the American Adam: Innocence, Identity and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (London and New York: Continuum, 2011).
Classic definitions of tourism can be found in Jonathan Culler, “Semiotics of Tourism,” American Journal of Semiotics 1 (1981): 127–40; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989); Urry, The Tourist Gaze. This last quality is something that Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London and New York: Routledge, 1992]) also characterizes as a quality of the “sentimental” travel writing style, which has a lot in common with the touristic as I am defining it here.
These lines have only recently been questioned in feature film by Native American directors in the late 1990s and early 2000s who could make films at least partially for a Native audience—see films like Smoke Signals (1998), The Doe Boy (2001), Skins (2002), and The Business of Fancydancing (2002). Analysis of such films can be found in M. Elise Marubbio and Eric Buffalohead, eds., Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
See Prats, Invisible Natives; Owens, Mixedblood Messages; Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians; Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005); Robert Baird, “‘Going Indian’: Dances with Wolves,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 153–69.
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 205–206. See also brief comments by Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 180.
These terms are elaborated by Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Ellen Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys: Ethnography, Entertainment, and the Tourist Gaze (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 59.
As theorized by Tom Gunning in his essays “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62; and “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Films, ed. Linda Williams (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33.
MacCannell, The Tourist; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London and New York: Verso, 1990); Robert Zecker, Metropolis: The American City in Popular Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xix.
Quoted in ibid., 331.
Among those who discuss this are Strain, Public Places, Private Journeys; Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
Philip K. Scheuer, “Indian’s Culture Captured in Film,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1950, D1–2.
Frank Manchel, “Cultural Confusion: Broken Arrow,” in Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 100.
Edward Buscombe, “Injuns!”: Native Americans in the Movies (London: Reaktion, 2006); Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian; Prats, Invisible Natives.
Jennifer Peterson documents the post-World War II growth in domestic tourism in Jennifer Peterson, “The Front Lawn of Heaven: Landscape in Hollywood Melodrama circa 1945,” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 125.
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Jimmy Savage, “Tower Ticker,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 21, 1950, 17.
Ning Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1999): 349–70.
Jonathan D. Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, 1st ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 155.
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Vincent Canby, “Richard Harris in ‘Man Called Horse,’” New York Times, April 30, 1970, 46.
Murray Smith distinguishes between allegiance and alignment in order to be more precise about what we mean by character identification. Allegiance refers to an emotional feeling of affection or kinship felt by spectator toward character, while alignment refers to what narrative theorists often call “range of knowledge”: the extent to which the spectator is privy to only the same information as the protagonist, or whether she sees the sum total of more than any single character. Alignment may trigger empathy in that the spectator is feeling the same emotion as a character—the same fear of the unknown the character is feeling in a horror film, for example. Allegiance means feeling an emotion toward a character—if that character is grief-stricken, the spectator feels sorrow for her grief, but that is not the same as feeling the grief itself. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
For an extended analysis of this phenomenon, see M. Elise Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32–38; Trinh Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991); Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
Charles Champlin, “‘Man Called Horse’ Eyes Indian Culture,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1970, G13.
Charles Champlin, “Tragedy of Indian in ‘Man,’” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1970, J1.
Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), 3.
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© 2015 Amy Lynn Corbin
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Corbin, A.L. (2015). The Story of a Land: The Spatial Politics of Early Multiculturalism in Indian Country. In: Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47971-6_2
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