On Firefly the space western Reavers are space Indians.
In what sense? I can’t see anything in common at all.
Well obviously they aren’t literally a indigenous people being pushed out by colonists, it is how the crew views them. They are crazed berserkers, a nebulous threat that could be encountered at any time and if you are lucky they will kill you before raping and eating you. They fulfill basically the same role in story.
But they actually are crazed berserkers who will rape, eat and kill you. I didn’t even know that that was a stereotype of American Indians even back in the old West. None of the Westerns I’ve seen have that happening or talked about having happened, apart from the killing.
I get where you’re coming from in a way, since the Firefly crew are definitely cowboys, but I really can’t see any other similarities.
I’ve seen Westerns where the Indians tortured captives. And it wasn’t just a stereotype either–the Plains Indians were brutal toward captured enemy fighters. (No idea about Firefly, though.)
Eating and raping them, though?
Even in a western very sympathetic to American Indians like Little Big Man the protag’s sister tells him what she THINKS will happen when she is discovered to be a girl(rape).
Last Of The Mohicans goes into the rape and murder thing too. Scalping and mutilation is also commonly mentioned.
On the real life side check out the period art in this wiki article:
I know I have seen real life propaganda of the period as well showing that fear of raiding parties was a common concern.
Or, when one is getting a degree in history, one has to read first hand accounts - written in letters home - about the torture and rape of adults and children who were captured by some bands of Native Americans during travel west.
That’s not to say that all NA peoples were like that. But to say that none were makes the same mistake with the signs reversed.
Have the three of you seen Firefly and know what the Indians are being compared to? This is not even ordinary rape and torture. And I guess maybe there’s a Western or two with grossly violent Indians, but that’s not the usual stereotype they use.
The Reavers are also not a tribe, not of the same race, not disposessed of their land, don’t have any similarities to American Indians in clothing, don’t hunt with futuristic bows and arrows, don’t speak a different language, don’t worship nature, basically don’t have anything in common with the American Indians of Westerns except being the enemies of cowboys.
The point isn’t that actual American tribes were like Firefly Reavers, the point is that the Reavers fill the same narrative role in Firefly that Indians filled in the popular fiction of the American frontier. They represent the same fears and dangers within the narrative.
The stereotypes of the indigenous tribes during the colonial and westward expansion periods of American history go well beyond the Hollywood western. Cannibal natives, in particular, were a fairly common trope during the early colonial period. Torture and physical mutilation of enemies, and the taking of body parts as trophies, is a much more common trope - surely you’ve seen westerns where people worry about being scalped by Indians? That’s the sanitized Hayes Code version of the trope - much more gruesome depictions were common in dime store novels and horror comics up through the 1950s. And being ravished by savages remained a constant source of horror stories (and not a few erotic fantasies) throughout the period.
Actually, I think you’re wrong about most of those. You’re right about the dress (but not everyone in Firefly dresses like a cowboy, either - Wash is fond of Hawaiian shirts) and the race - although historically, Native American tribes were not monoracial, we’re talking about the popular stereotype, not the historical reality. Other than those two, I think you’re wrong across the board. The Reavers are a tribe by any definition of the term. While they weren’t dispossesed of their land by the government, they were dispossesed of their sanity, which is a reasonable narrative substitution. I’d say that giant spike that killed Wash works as a “futuristic bow and arrow.” As for language, again, in the popular media, natives didn’t talk, they just suddenly showed up and started killing people. And “worship nature” is a rather simplistic description of native American belief systems, but is also irrelevant, because the stereotype we’re working with doesn’t include a belief system.
The most important similarities, however, are that they are a group of near-mindless savages, who appear out of the wilderness to torture, rape, and murder for the sheer joy of it, before vanishing back to wherever they came from.
I know we’re talking about Indians as in Westerns, not real Indians - I said that each time. Indians in Westerns are rarely vicious - no more so than the cowboys they’re up against, anyway.
I also completely disagree about your description of the Reavers. I could go through it point by point, but I’d just be saying “no it’s not; please provide examples” to every item.
Firefly is not a Western in every sense of the word and doesn’t stick to Western tropes all the time - like with the clothes, as you point out. So it’s not necessary to find a counterpart to Indians.
This disagreement is also partly because I found the Reavers absolutely terrifying and not human and could never imagine comparing any group of humans to them. Westerns never portrayed Indians as as inhuman as the Reavers are. If you disagree with that, I never want to see the Westerns you’ve been watching!
As I said, I never watched Firefly. I was just pointing out how American Indians might have been regarded at one point, and not without justification (from the white people’s narrow point of view).
Actually, I’m not talking about Indians in westerns, I’m talking about Indians in the larger American frontier myth, which predates Hollywood entirely by a couple centuries. The invention of cinema coincided fairly closely with the closing of the American frontier, and by the time Hollywood was in full swing, the process of revising the history of Westward Expansion was already in full swing, as society moved towards less and less acceptance of overtly racist charactures. That being said, the idea that Hollywood was particularly even handed in its depiction of native peoples is… difficult to defend, at best. Particularly if you’re talking about films from before the 1960s.
I’m honestly stumped as to what part of my post this is referring to. Are you saying that the Reavers in Firefly were not “a group of near-mindless savages, who appear out of the wilderness to torture, rape, and murder for the sheer joy of it, before vanishing back to wherever they came from”? Because if you want examples of that, I’d point to pretty much every scene from the TV series and movie that featured a Reaver in it.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the Reavers have to be Indians, because Firefly is a space western. We’re just observing that the way Reavers function in the narrative is identical to how Indians functioned in the folklore and popular culture of the frontier.
Well, again, I’m not talking specifically about movies, here. The Western genre has been around a long time, and the concept of the frontier longer than that. Hell, the Western literary genre was being created literally at the same time as the events it was mythologizing. When the official policy of the US government was that Native Americans were subhumans with no rights to the lands on which they were born, are you really surprised that that view was echoed in the popular culture of the day? Or that those attitudes carried on into the 20th century and the birth of the film industry?
I’ve never even seen *Firefly *so I have no idea what the Reavers are like, but Westerns did frequently depict Native Americans as vicious savages whose only role in the narrative was to show up and attack white people.
Another thread inspired me to look again at a scene from The Right Stuff. Yeager is about to fly the X-1 and attempt to break the sound barrier, but has broken a couple ribs and can’t use his right arm. He confides to his mechanic, Jack Ridley, that he needs some kind of handle so he can close the hatch with his left arm. (From what I’ve read, this is an absolutely true story.) Ridley takes a broom from the janitor and cuts a piece off the handle, and as he’s thanking the janitor he twirls the piece of broomstick between his fingers like a drummer twirling a drumstick.
Ridley was played by Levon Helm, drummer for The Band.
Hmm, perhaps I haven’t seen enough Westerns. I’ve certainly never read any, though I’m not sure how relevant books are in this comparison; the real-life frontier definitely isn’t relevant.
The Westerns I’ve seen have all been major ones and, like I said, the Indians were no more vicious than the cowboys, who were far from Angelic.
Miller, I mean when you outlined the ways you think the Reavers are like American Indians. That was what I disagreed with.
Hopefully you guys, including the ones who haven’t even seen Firefly but for some reason are defending a claim about it, will at least admit that this claim is not “obvious.”
Both of those things are certainly relevant, in terms of tracing themes and cultural tropes throughout the show. Whedon, as always, borrowed liberally from a wide variety of sources, not just movies. Hell, one of the episodes was directly inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea - it’s not much of a stretch to expect at least an equal influence from Lous L’Amour and Zane Grey.
I’m more than happy to expand on each point, with direct references to the TV show and movie as necessary, but I suspect you’re not really that interested in the subject. If you want me to go into it, though, say the word.
It seems really obvious to me. Possibly it’s more apparent to American audiences?
SciFiSam, are you questioning that Indians have been regarded in literature as the evil, bloodthirsty savages? There’s even a TVtropes page on it.
Or how about this passage from The Last of the Mohicans:
That never occurred to me (Miles Vorkosigan being Richard III), but now it all makes sense!!
When I was a kid in 68, the sign/brand was “31 Flavors” and Baskin Robbins was just the company name.
… I also remember a real Jack-In-The-Box building, and another fast food outlet where the brand image was the huge Golden Arches out in front of the building.