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The Squaw's Love (1911) 

summary

Gray Fox is beaten and exiled because he starts a quarrel with the chief because he will not allow him to marry the chief's daughter Wild Flower. His friend White Eagle helps him in exile and brings Wild Flower to his hiding place. The departure of White Eagle and Wild Flower is jealously witnessed by White Eagle's fiancé Silver Fawn, who thinks that Wild Flower is stealing her lover. She follows them, confronts Wild Flower, and eventually pushes her into the river from which she is rescued by Gray Fox. Both couples embark a canoe that Gray Fox had taken before, and a chase ensues with some tribal members who have noticed that Wild Flower is missing. They eventually escape because Wild Flower cut holes in the canoes of their pursuers while these where resting.

 

tone

Since Indians are the only people represented in this movie, there is no conflict between whites and Indians for once. The film belongs to the genre romance or romantic comedy and no really evil people are needed. The fact that Gray Fox is beaten for quarreling with the chief gives the impression of a mildly tyrannic and violent chief, but the episode is brief and does not condemn Indians in general.

The1911 film The Squaw's Love. An Indian Poem of Love in Pictures, directed by D.W. Griffith and distributed by Biograph, functions without title cards and is one of the few silent movies that deals exclusively with Indian content (Hilger 1995). In this it is similar to the 1910 Griffith-movie The Mended Lute.

representation

Because there are no non-Indian people in this movie, there is no category "other" in this film (Fig. 10) and Indians are the sole protagonists. In this function they display a lot of emotions that were as familiar to Indian as to white culture: love, joy, anger, frustration, pain, jealousy, remorse, triumph. A nice change to other movies and the persistent non-smiling Indians is the friendship between Gray Fox and White Eagle, who are shown joking around and perpetually grinning. Furthermore, it is remarkable that the two couples manage to escape thanks to a woman's actions: Wild Flower dives into the river to cut open the canoes while two males idly sit in their canoe. This depiction of an Indian maid as the heroine is as unusual as the depiction of the friendship between Gray Fox and White Eagle that entails jokes and lots of laughter. Furthermore, the screen time of the Indian women is the highest of all six movies (see chart).

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