One of the blogs i follow mentioned that an amazing film has been rediscovered. Back in 1920 there was a silent made where the entire cast was native american, and it didn’t involve any invading white men at all. I love the History Blog, always has interesting goodies for me =)
Back to the movie … The Daughter of Dawn had as I said an all native american cast, and they brought their own artifacts to serve as props, one of which was a teepee that was also just recently rediscovered in a museum collection. According to the post, there are plans to release the movie on DVD! I am hoping that it will have some good commentary added. There is also a short clip of the movie at the blog. Very spiffy.
I would love to be able to read their lips, especially if they were speaking their own language(s). I know the actors in silent movies sometimes used pretty racy lingo; I can just imagine what Native Americans would have had to say about their new paleface overlords.
As an aside, in A Distant Trumpet (Troy Donahue, Suzanne Pleshette, Diane McBain; WB, 1964) there’s a scene where the Indians are agreeing to a new treaty with Washington, and the English subtitles DO NOT match what they’re actually saying. This never failed to evoke laughter from Native Americans in the audience who could understand their compatriots on screen.
That holds for quite a few Westerns where the “Indians” (pleyed by Mexicans in the US or by Spaniards in Spain) speak Spanish; very often the English subtitles hold little relationship to the actual words.
Since those movies were getting dubbed into Spanish, leaving the “Indians” speaking as they did would have caused a problem, as the audience would have been able to understand them perfectly where the “Blue Boys” did not. They ended up speaking broken Spanish (unconjugated verbs and a bit of word order change).
I would love Native American movies that are either older myths and legends (I’ve seen some shorts about Coyote and some Haida stuff, but there must be much more) or else modern stuff like Smoke Signals.
That’s fantastic, aruqvan. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. A document of authentic American tribes, not through a white filter. Really valuable and interesting. I hope I get to see this sometime.
