Another book from the same period was the fictional Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian by Clair Huffaker, later turned into the movie Flap, starring Anthony Quinn. Huffaker was a writer of westerns and western movies (like The War Wagon, previously about the cowboy types. NLADI is told from the point of view of the indians, and makes a lot of points about their present and past mistreatment, without whitewashing the Indians (I think Huffaker had a lot of Indian ancestry). It’s a weird and bawdy book. Tragicomic.
Originally Posted by chowder View Post
Breaking of treaties, land grabbing,killing thousands of buffalo just for their tongues and hides, herding the Indians onto reservations instead of allowing them to live their lives as they wanted to and had done for many years.
That would have been around 1830, with US Congressman David Crockett being one of the most vocal politicians.
Lots of people, and newspapers, and the public, sympathized with the indian by the 1830’s. We honored indians, faces of indians, on our coin money by the middle of the 1800’s (and we dont put “bad guys” faces on our money). Indians were hugely popular with the public in WF Cody’s wild west shows in the late 1800’s. Also, Geronimo made a good deal of money signing autographs.
For those of you who remember Leonard Peltier, he is still imprisoned.
Even earlier than that, Ford portrayed sympathetic Indians in Fort Apache (they attack, but due to being badly provoked) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (there is a bad Indian, but his own people don’t all agree with him).
Just 9 years after Custers Last Stand at the Little Big Horn, in 1885, Sitting Bull signed up with WF Cody for his wild west show, earning $50.00 a week (GREAT wages for anybody in 1885!!!), plus he could keep all the extra money he got from selling his autographs and photos. Everybody wanted to see and be seen with Sitting Bull.
Once the fighting with any particular tribe ended, I dont think there continued any animousity, nor that the other side was the “bad guy” (much like how we felt about the japanese or the german people after ww2)
A lot of the “noble indian/evil white man” attitudes sprouted after the 1971 movie Billy Jack hit the screen. Hippies picked up on the notion that it was cool to be Indian or even part Indian. It got to the point where all these blonde haired blue eyed kids were running around claiming kinship with Geronimo. :rolleyes:
The Comanche pop up pretty often as Wild West baddies too. I always notice this because, like practically everyone else from East Texas, my family is supposedly related to Comanche chief Quanah Parker. My own genealogical research shows that this isn’t really true, but the story has been in my family for four generations and I’d heard it ever since I was a little kid. I always notice when the Comanche are mentioned.
Hippie interest in Native American culture predated 1971. Time noted “Indian hippies” as a hippie subgroup in 1967. An article on hippies in Ebony (see p. 118) that same year mentioned American Indians as “spiritual heroes” of hippies. Wikipedia tells me that Billy Jack first appeared in the 1967 film The Born Losers, and I’d be pretty sure he was written as half Native American because hippies already thought that was cool.
Getting back to the OP, this hippie interest in/sympathy for Native Americans and distrust of authority figures like the police coincided with some major shifts in Hollywood. The Production Code (which forbid movies that were sympathetic to “bad guys”) was weakening in the 1960s and officially ended in 1968. There was also increased Native American activism in the late '60s/early '70s – Zoe has already mentioned Leonard Peltier.
Most young adults in the '60s and '70s would also have seen plenty of old Westerns on TV growing up and the whole Good Cowboys vs. Bad Indians thing must have seemed pretty cliched. And by the '50s if not before there had already been some films (most notably The Searchers) that questioned the idea that white settlers were plucky heroes who were just trying to defend themselves against the savage red man.
I’m confused by the question. It’s like saying why don’t we see any sympathetic portrayals of slave owners anymore. The reason is that society has progressed to the point that we think slavery and the way we dealt with the Indians were wrong. It’d be more surprising to see a movie that showed the white people in a sympathetic light as they take Indians’ land, break treaties, force a death march from Florida to Oklahoma, etc.
Does anyone think that this is a close call from the moral sense? “Well yeah, the white people killed a lot of Indians, but the Indians did fight back after all”.
I lived on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana for a couple of years and learned a bit about the traditional alliances between the various Plains Indian tribes. I was told (in a somewhat joking manner) that in the days before reservations, nobody was friends with the Pawnee.
Now, this could have only been the Cheyenne POV, or it could also be just a couple of people getting things wrong or having a joke with me, but for what it’s worth…
As an aside. Did any of the Indians who at one time were enemies with each other, form alliances against the white invader
Personally, I’d spend as many minutes with a re-make of Gone With The Wind as I have with the original: zero.
It’s not a sympathetic portrayal I’d be interested in, more like a realistic one; with Black overseers whipping errant slaves, glad to have that job instead of stoop labor in the fields.
The Indian agency of the Santee Siouix in Minnesota were clearly the bad guys by Hollywood standards, skimming the funds until the Santee were facing starvation.
They eventually revolted, and one atrocity was met with another:
“The daughter of Mr. Schwandt, enceinte, was cut open, as was learned afterward, the child taken alive from the mother, and nailed to a tree. The son of Mr. Schwandt, aged thirteen years, who had been beaten by the Indians, until dead, as was supposed, was present, and saw the entire tragedy. He saw the child taken alive from the body of his sister, Mrs. Waltz, and nailed to a tree in the yard. It struggled some time after the nails were driven through it! This occurred in the forenoon of Monday, 18th of August, 1862.”
Expecting history from the movies is like expecting music from a trained seal biting at a row of bicycle horns.
Hell yes. Since the very beginning of colonization, all around the country. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Battle of Little Bighorn, just for one. 
(That’s a very Anglo-centric take on the battle, btw.) I lived in that area, and the cultural effects of the battle were still felt among the local tribes – it was the Sioux/Cheyenne (with help from the Kiowa/Arapaho, IIRC) vs. US cavalry/Crow/(others?), and one of the reasons that the Northern Cheyenne and the Crow reservations are bordering each other today is because they were long-time enemies and the hope of the US govt was that they would destroy each other.
Red Cloud’s War was another set of battles between the Sioux/Cheyenne and the US cavalry in the area.
And then there’s the Sand Creek Massacre, which was a huge incident perpetrated by the US on the Cheyenne/Arapaho, which catalyzed a lot of retaliation…
Long story short, there’s tons of history in this area.
…And I totally missed that you were asking for enemies who allied against the US. Sorry, chowder. :o