How early were movies/TV/Radio programs that showed sympathetic views of NAs–as being screwed over by settlers with legitimate complaints against them–and not just as 1-dimensional enemy mooks to be resisted and shot? I know I have seen episodes of shows such as Wagon Train and Daniel Boone that did, but how far back do nuanced portrayals of conflicts go?
Individual portrayals of Indian characters can be found sporadically in many early films, but Broken Arrow in 1950 is usually credited for breaking with the stereotyped Indian and acknowledging the white man’s guilt as part of actual history. Think of it as Dances with Wolves with an all-white cast. It was based on Elliott Arnold’s 1947 novel Blood Brother, and was made into a tv series in 1956.
Karl May’s “Old Shatterhand” series of books goes back as far as the 1880s. The titular character is a white man who’s blood brother’s with Winnetou, an Apache chief.
I tweeted this about THE HALF-BREED (1916) with Douglas Fairbanks when I saw a restoration screening a couple of years ago.
This probably isn’t what you had in mind, but sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans go back before modern media of radio, movies, and TV.
Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha is his effort to create an American Epic by composing a poem based on the mythology of the Ojibwe (Chippewa) Indians. He got some material firsthand, and a lot from Schoolcraft’s book Algic Researches. Longfellow took a lot of flak for basing his work on NA culture. There are other reasons to be critical – he or his source altered the myths sometiomes, fused things together in an un-Indian way, and he used as the rhythmic basis the Finnish poem Kalevala (which lead to a lot of people thinking his rhythms were those of the Ametican Indian). It’s a complex situation, but I think he deserves a lot of credit for exposing people to American Indian culture. The poem was dramatized and turned into pageants.
James Fenimore Cooper also arguably portrayed Indians sympathetically in his “Leatherstocking” stories, most notably The Last of the Mohicans. It’s true that Magua and others were “heavies”, but Chingachgook and his son Uncas are sympathetic characters, and they discuss such things as the white men crowding them out of their lands. (It’s not surprising if the Hurons come off badly in the book – it’s based on the events surrounding the surrender of Fort William Henry, where the French’s Indian allies felt cheated out of their booty by the generous surrender terms the French offered the British, and massacred the British in revenge).
An awful lot of what has entered American culture about Indians – such as their saying “Ugh!” – comes from Longfellow and Cooper’s works.
There was always a certain amount of sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans in film, although it was often patronizing and often told from a non-Native-American point of view:
It’s generally pretty hopeless to answer questions like “When was the first example of media where attitude X is treated sympathetically, as opposed to attitude non-X?”. Even in cases where attitude non-X was almost universal in older times and now attitude X is now almost universal, there rarely was a single point when everything changed or even a single point where the majority opinion changed from non-X to X. Most of the time you could write a book (and somebody probably did) about the changing opinions about an issue, about how the opinions went back and forth, about how they were different in different societies, etc.
There is a long history of Indian captivity narratives dating back to the 1600s. While many if not most were anti-Indian, Mary Jemison’s, published in 1824, was not. She was captured at 15 in 1758 and lived with the Seneca (who adopted her) until she died at 90, refusing to be repatriated or return on her own and had nothing negative to say about the Seneca, especially her adoptive family and her two husbands (her first one died of disease).
John Ford often portrayed indians in a sympathetic light, even when they were attacking settlers. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), John Wayne was a friend of one of the chiefs and tried to get him to help prevent others in his tribe from attacking.
In Fort Apache (1948), the Indians are shown to be attacking because of mistreatment. The bad guys are Henry Fonda, as a martinet of a cavalry officer, and the Indian agent, who gives short weights and sell inferior goods, leading the Indians to rebel. Essentially, they are purely justified, and Fonda – who becomes a Custer-like hero – is the villain.
Ford also did Cheyenne Autumn (1964) documenting mistreatment of native Americans.
But the idea of the noble savage dates back to the 16th century.
I forgot: Edward Curtis wrote and directed In the Land of the Head Hunters in 1914. In the Land of the Head Hunters - Wikipedia
Pony That Walks was the very first character I thought of.
My first thought was The Light in the Forest, a 1953 Conrad Richter YA novel, which portrays Native Americans more sympathetically than the 1700s white settlers. It was filmed by Disney in 1958.
RealityChuck’s noble savage comment reminded me of Bartolomé de las Casas, whose writings in the early 1500s contrast the noble, gentle natives with the cruel Spaniards:
“A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Spanish: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias) is an account written by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542 (published in 1552) about the mistreatment of and atrocities committed against the indigenous peoples of the Americas in colonial times and sent to then Prince Philip II of Spain.”
“Before he was burned [at the stake], a priest asked [Taino chief] Hatuey if he would accept Jesus and go to heaven. Las Casas recalled the reaction of the chief:
[Hatuey], thinking a little, asked the religious man if Spaniards went to heaven. The religious man answered yes… The chief then said without further thought that he did not want to go there but to hell so as not to be where they were and where he would not see such cruel people. This is the name and honor that God and our faith have earned.”
Bartolomé de las Casas was an early slave owner and colonist, but started writing about Spanish atrocities around 1516.
Tonto was mine.
When Peter Fonda was asked what his father was like in real life he simply said “Watch Fort Apache.”
I disagree about simply stating he was the villain of the film. I feel it’s much more nuanced than that. One of my favorite films and one of Ford’s best.
I remember reading a book about her, a novelization of her early life with the Seneca, when I was a kid. I don’t know how much of that period of her life was fictionalized, but I do remember Mary must have been blonde, because the two sisters who took her called her Corn Tassel, for the color of her hair. Maybe I should look up more. Mary must have come from the deep end of the gene pool, to live to 90 in those days.
Certainly by the mid-1950s TV westerns were showing a lot of sympathy toward Native Americans.
Of course there were plenty of instances of plots with Indians as the villains, but based on my statistical analysis (made while sitting on the couch watching MeTV instead of doing something worthwhile), the majority of westerns* showed positive Native American portrayals.
*Have Gun Will Travel, Maverick, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Wanted Dead or Alive, The Rifleman, Big Valley, etc., etc.
Good point. Fonda isn’t actually a bad guy (he did call out the Indian agent), but he did make some very poor decisions due to his attitude and by ignoring Wayne, who understood the Indians far better than he did.
MeTV Westerns is what triggered my question.
This was Lois Lenski’s book; it was roughly accurate. In actuality Jemison’s hair was red or red-brown - June Namias in her excellent book White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier mentions this shift to blonde. It was at least partly started by a missionary’s wife who was anxious to claim that she and her husband had converted Jemison back to Christianity.
Positive portrayals of Native Americans have been the rule for so long on TV, the one negative portrayal on an episode of Hell on Wheels (2014, I think it was the third season) really stood out. There was also a season of The Killing that featured a shady Indian casino. Neither of these appeared to be a blood libel so much as “Anybody is capable of evil.”
Let me add that, when Fairbanks played Zorro in 1920 — well, look, it’s a silent film with brief title cards in lieu of spoken dialogue, and so they’re in a hurry to establish who the bad guys are and who the good guy is — and so The Mark Of Zorro opens with a guy who got said ‘Z’ carved into his cheek: why? Because of the beating he gave a native; and the hero we’ll be rooting for, a champion of the oppressed, is against that, punishing and protecting accordingly.
(The scene soon switches to “the hut of a native”, where a guy holds forth on the subject: “I tell you - Señor Zorro is our only friend”. We later see a reward poster, and a BOO HISS silent-movie villain announces that he shall have that reward by defeating Zorro; someone helpfully points out: “If you are so anxious to meet him, pick on a priest or a native and - presto! Zorro!” You can guess what the bad guy does in response. You can also guess what the good guy does right after that.)