Native Americans in popular culture

Native Americans in popular culture

The portrayal of Native Americans in popular culture has traditionally oscillated between the fascination with the noble savage who lives in harmony with nature and their depiction as uncivilized "bad guys" in the traditional Western genre.

In 1851 Charles Dickens wrote a scathingly sarcastic review in his weekly magazine Household Words of painter George Catlin's show of American Indians when it visited England. In his essay, entitled "The Noble Savage", Dickens expressed repugnance for Indians and their way of life in no uncertain terms, recommending that they ought to be "civilized out of existence". (Dickens's essay refers back to Dryden's well-known use of the term, not to Rousseau.) Dickens's scorn for those unnamed individuals, who, like Catlin, he alleged, misguidedly exalted the so-called "noble savage", was limitless. In reality, Dickens maintained, Indians were dirty, cruel, and constantly fighting among themselves. Dickens's satire on Catlin and others like him who might find something to admire in the American Indians or African bushmen is a notable turning point in the history of the use of the phrase.[1]

Eastern-European-produced Westerns were popular in Communist Eastern European countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin. "Red Western" or "Ostern" films usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, as oppressed people fighting for their rights, in contrast to American Westerns of the time, which frequently portrayed the Indians as villains. They frequently featured Gypsies or Turkic people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe.

The concept of Native Americans living in harmony with nature was taken up in the 1960s by the Hippie subculture and played a certain role in the formative phase of the environmentalist movement, notably the so-called Legend of Rainbow Warriors, an alleged Hopi prophecy foretelling environmental activism. In the US cultural mainstream, the negative depiction of Native Americans came to be seen as politically incorrect in the 1980s, as reflected in the production of western films emphasizing the "noble savage" such as Dances with Wolves (1990). In 1989 (reprinted 1993), Viesti Associates produced a poster listing "The Ten Indian Commandments", a purported Native American counterpart of the biblical Ten Commandments. The ten points listed echo the cliché of the native living in ecological harmony.

References

  1. ^ For an account of Dickens's article see Grace Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian 98:458 (2002): 236-243. Moore speculates that Dickens, although himself an abolitionist, was motivated by a wish to differentiate himself from what he believed was the feminine sentimentality and bad writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom he, as a reformist writer, was often associated.

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