"Indian Pictures":
Film Portrayals of Native Americans in the Silent Era
representation
Nophaie's people are presented as Indians who are caught in between their traditional ways and modernity and who are ultimately too static in their development to catch up with white society. This inability to adapt dooms them to extinction. All evil portrayed in the movie is caused by whites and all harm coming to the Indians is equally of white causation. There are no bad or savage Indians and most of the time goes to the warrior types (Fig. 14). Indians are depicted as a warlike, proud, warrior people who have been oppressed by the reservation system and heartless whites. Nophaie fulfills every element of the 'good' Indian: He is noble, loyal, in love with a white woman, and willing to sacrifice himself for her and her people. The affection or love between Nophaie and Miss Warner is acceptable, mostly because of his usefulness for her (Hearne 2012, 133). The depiction of the close relationship between Nophaie and Nasja, a boy of about seven or eight years, and their joking around and playing is in stark opposition for later decades, in which Indian kids and smiling Indians rarely found their way onto the screen. As Joanna Hearne points out, women and domestic scenes and places are almost completely obliterated from The Vanishing Indian (Hearne 2012, 131).
The Vanishing American (1925)
The Vanishing American is a 1925 epic film directed by George B. Seitz for Paramount. It is an adaption of Zane Grey's series of the same name which was first published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1922 and 1923 and later appeared as a novel. Depicting contemporary Indians, the films is considered to be one of the most popular and influential Indian-centered movies of the time.
summary
With heavy references to Darwinian theory, The Vanishing American tells the tale of the races in the Southwest of the United States. The main body of the story takes place before, during, and after WWI, making it a depiction of contemporary Indian life. The protagonist is Nophaie – obviously a member of the Navaho nation – who lives on the reservation and is one of the leaders of his people. He is in love white white school teacher Miss Warner. The reservation is administered by Amos Halliday, a hopeless bureaucrat, and Henry Booker, a mean and greedy man who does not shy away from humiliating the Indians. After Nophaie rescues Miss Warner from unwelcome advances by Booker, he has to flee into the mountains after a fight. When WWI breaks out, he returns to bring the people's horses together and eventually to enlist in the army. When he and the other Indian soldiers return from the war they fought for the whites, the reservation is in miserable condition: Booker has replaced Halliday as the Indian Agent and has taken many of their fields, resulting in poverty and death. The other clan leaders plan an uprising against Nophaie's advice and will. He rides to Mesa to warn the whites and finds Miss Warner there, who he believed married. They indirectly declare their love for each other. Nophaie pleads with Booker not to use his machine gun. Booker gets killed in the first onslaught of the Indian attack. Nophaie leaves the shelter to stop the attack and is accidentally shot by one of the clan leaders. He dies, declaring that now he understands the Bible and Christianity. The last title card reads, blended over an image of Monument Valley: “...for races of men come – and go. But the mighty stage remains.”
tone
The tone of the movie is sympathetic. The audience is invited to regret the fate that Nophaie and his people will inevitably face: extinction. Since white civilization is the ultimate goal of the reservation system and also shown as the superior way of life, the Indians are bound to lose this contest of the races, and – as the title suggests already – bound to vanish. The sympathetic tone cannot hide the fact that the movie portrays Indians as a vanishing race and shows a strong preference for white civilization (Aleiss 1991, 470; Riley 1998 67). The attack on the whites in Mesa is justified by the injustice done to the Indians by Booker and other whites, who are shown almost exclusively as bad men.