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Writing about Indians

Writing and talking about Indians is very different than showing them. When the title cards of The Paleface inform the audience that a group of warriors only wearing loin cloths lost at playing strip poker, a seemingly customary clothing style becomes associated with gambling, which in turn might lead to the association of alcohol consumption and a general degradedness. Yet, without the title card all the attentive viewer can see are Indians in loin cloths. The terms in which we speak about the indigenous population of North America is still contested today. Being aware of the fact that none of the multiple terms for talking about this group is indisputably correct (Mihesuah 2002, 16), I have tried to use two terms for two different things in this project. Acknowledging the necessity to choose a consistent term, I use 'Native American' in preference to other terms such as 'First Nation' or 'American Indian'. In order to make a differentiation between these real-life contemporary or historical Native Americans and their screen-counterparts, I use the term 'Indian' (Woll and Miller 1987, 327) to recognize the fictionality and the constructedness of the Indian on screen.

The analysis of the title cards (Fig.7: Voyant word cloud and Voyant world frequency list) suggests that the term most frequently used for the fictional screen characters was 'Indian' (28 times) or 'Indians' (20 times), followed by the term chief (10 times). This correlates with data collected from Google Ngram Viewer, using publications currently in Google books, for the time range between 1910 and 1925 (Fig. 8). At this time, the singular form 'Indian' was used more frequently than

the plural 'Indians', and the terms 'Native American(s)' and 'American Indian(s)' seem to have been not used at all. Differing from the title cards, the term 'chief' is used in the print publications at a much higher rate than 'Indian'. A graphic difference to the silent films analyzed in the project is the use of derogatory phrasing, such as using the adjective "red" to describe Native Americans. Arguably the most negatively connotated term is "savage", which is not mentioned in the films at all, but is frequent enough in the print publications. Nevertheless, it is noticeably less frequent than the terms "chief" or "Indian". This evidence suggests that talking about Native Americans was a relatively "politically correct" endeavor between 1910 and 1925, and even more so in film than in print. The research is prelimary and should be treated with caution. Words such as "Indian" and "Indians" did not exclusively refer to Native Americans but also to citizens of India. The word 'chief' is used in other contexts, such as police chief etc., as well.

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