The noble Indian is good because he is a friend of the whites; his character traits usually include a strong sense for right and wrong, honor, loyalty, friendship, gratitude, courage, being pacifist, and a recognition of the superiority of white culture with a consequent willingness to give up Indian ways and to adapt to white society. The ignoble Indian is bad because he is an enemy to the whites; he is without scruples, treacherous, violent, indecent towards and dangerous for white women, static in his development, and he refuses to recognize whites as superior and rebels against assimilation (Kilpatrick 1999, 3-5; Marubbio 2006, 3-4; Hilger 1995, 3-8, 41).

 

In the analyzed movies the most obvious Indian villain is Magua, who betrays and abducts Alice and Cora Munro in The Last of the Mohicans. Together with the hostile Indians attacking the fort, he has almost fourteen minutes on screen – almost twenty percent of the entire movie. Interestingly enough the other five movies add less than two minutes to this category which I had mistakenly assumed to be more visible. Compared to the 'good' Indians, which Nophaie in The Vanishing American exemplifies the best, the villain occupies a small percentage of on-screen time (Fig. 2). This time is even more reduced when compared to not only 'good' Indians but also the total length of the movies: With only a quarter of an hour as opposed to more than four hours total running time for all movies combined, the 'bad' Indian has a screen-time percentage of under six percent (Fig. 3). The Western genre, which overtook the Indian-centered or Indian-themed films at the end of the silent era, promotes the stereotype of the bloodthirsty savage more insistently (Jay 2000, 9; Bowser 1990, 176). It can be assumed that the on-screen time for villains would have been a lot higher if this analysis included Westerns.