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Chapter 1. Forget Columbus
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Inconvenient Indian, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
History and Mythology
Racism and Systemic Oppression
Land
Sovereignty
Summary
Analysis
King begins an anecdote about playing “cowboys and Indians” with his brother and some neighborhood friends when he was a young boy. He remembers how nobody—himself included—wanted to be an Indian. King compares his childhood self to Straight Arrow, a character from a popular radio show of the same name that ran from 1942 to 1952. Straight Arrow was a Comanche man who was adopted by a White family and acted as a White man named Steve Adams. When danger arose, Straight Arrow would don “traditional” Comanche clothing, a golden bow and arrow, and ride a Palomino stallion named Fury to fight evil. Like Straight Arrow, King donned a cowboy outfit to “hide [his] secret identity.”
King recalls this anecdote to show how the broader culture of North America teaches Native people to reject and feel ashamed of their indigenous roots. Even Straight Arrow, a heroic indigenous character in popular culture, was compelled to only display his indigenous identity on rare, special occasions. King thus learned from a young age the unfortunate and damaging lesson that, in North America, having indigenous heritage is often framed as undesirable.
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King commences a broad overview of White-Indian interactions in North America over the past few centuries. Since the establishment of colonies in Plymouth, Jamestown, and Quebec, among other places, Indians became a significant part of life for European settlers and appeared throughout their art, literature, and pop culture. During this period, while disease had greatly diminished Indian populations, survivors were not yet relegated to reservations. For this reason, they were “more difficult to ignore,” states King.
King’s remark that Indians were “more difficult to ignore” before they were moved to reservations speaks to the idea he proposed in the previous passage: that mainstream American culture thinks that indigenous people are best hidden from public view. The idea here is that Indians are a problem that needs to be pushed to the side if they cannot be gotten rid of entirely.
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While explorers who were simply passing through and relied on Indians to navigate untraversed lands had mostly positive interactions with Indians, settlers who lived in close proximity to Indians had more negative perceptions of them and resented having to share land they had mistakenly believed would be entirely free for their taking. Additionally, settlers’ Christian worldview equipped them with logic that persuaded them to form a dual image of the world, differentiating only between “light or dark, good or evil, civilized or savage.” King sees the “cowboys and Indians” games of his youth as a distilled version of this duality.
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King frames the years between the early 17th century and the late 19th as a period of “continuous[] ‘not sharing’” between colonists and Indians. This “not sharing” led to a series of wars over land disputes, including the 1622–1644 war between the Powhatan Confederacy and the Virginia Colonists, and the 1637 Pequot War fought in Connecticut and Rhode Island, for example. The years in which battles weren’t actively ongoing weren’t peaceful, either, and saw the U.S. government repeatedly make and break treaties and peace agreements with its Indian neighbors.
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Five years after the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, the New York Times published an article (which was first published in England’s Westminster Review) that claimed that Canada had never engaged in an Indian War. King argues that this logic is misleading, citing a number of conflicts, such as Duck Lake and Cut Knife, that, perhaps, aren’t considered “proper ‘Indian’ conflicts,” since they involved the Métis. Though the Westminster Review’s claim isn’t technically false, King argues that it purposefully disguises Canadian aggression against its Aboriginal people.
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King segues into a discussion of race. The concept of race has been in existence at least as far back as the Egyptians, who established racial categories for “Egyptians,” “Asiatics,” “Libyans,” and “Nubians.” In 1775, German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach put forth five categories of race: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American, Indian, and Malayan. In the late 19th century, Charles Darwin argued for the superiority of Europeans over other races. In James Fenimore Cooper’s 1841 novel The Deerslayer, he argues that Indians and White men both had “gifts” from God: the White man, Christianity, and the Indian, “wilderness.” While Cooper’s ideas sound almost “progressive,” they imply that Indians lacked the pre-frontal cortex necessary to understand God, and White men, with their Christianity, were intellectually superior.
Cooper’s logic establishes a clear boundary between the Indians and Whites, explained and justified by “divine sanction.” Adding to this boundary were commonly held beliefs about certain attributes that Indians possessed as a racial group. For example, some early North American literature characterized Indians as “pagans” and savages. Other works, such as Lydia Marie Child’s Hobomek (1824) reimagined Indians as romantic, tragic figures: as “noble, honest, and trustworthy,” but only at the level of the individual, which did little to negate the racism directed toward Indians in North America.
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King describes the painting of George Catlin, Charles Bird King, and Paul Kane, who traveled west and painted the Indians they encountered along the way. Such paintings were the basis of later cinematographic renderings of Indians in the Western films of John Ford, D.W. Griffiths, and Kevin Costner, among others. King also cites the Wild West shows of the 19th century as influencing the popular culture view of Indians. Shows such as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show performed across the country and abroad. Initially “Indians” were played by White men in redface, but later, actual Indians, such as Jack Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Red Shirt joined them often. Although these shows were often commercialized and crass, showrunners treated Indian performers well and paid them for their work.
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Wild West shows culminated in James Earle Fraser’s 1915 sculpture The End of the Trail, the most well-known Indian image of the 20th century. The sculpture depicts a dejected Indian man atop his resisting horse. Today, variations on the original work exist all across the U.S., pasted on the sides of motels, restaurants, and rest stations.
Next, King delves into an overview of Indian representation in Hollywood. Between 1894 and 1930, Hollywood made over 100 films depicting “real” Indian people and their “authentic” culture. After 1930, it produced an additional 300 films. “Indians were made for film,” King contends wryly, noting the “exotic and erotic” visual features of Indians favored by filmmakers, such as the feathers, face paint, and loincloths.
King establishes three categories of Indians in film: the “bloodthirsty savage,” who was most common, the “noble savage,” who assisted Whites in their struggles against the savage Indians; and the “dying Indian,” who was a product of a bygone era that existed before White settlers’ arrival. Regardless of which type of Indian a film featured, the inevitable moral put forth was a yielding of the Native people to “Christianity and Commerce.” Early directors like D.W. Griffiths and Jay Hunt cast White actors in Indian roles. However, early films featured a number of Indian actors, too, such as William Eagle Shirt, a Lakota. James Young Deer and his wife Lillian St. Cyr, Nebraska Ho-Chunks who worked with Griffith, even had their own film company, though they’ve largely fallen into obscurity over the years.
Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Lakota who played Indian roles in various films, including 1930’s Silent Enemy, spoke at the conference of the Society of American Indians in 1913 about the film industry’s inhumane representation of Indians as savages, which Yellow Robe saw as representative of the country’s broader view of Indians.
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King continues his analysis of historical stereotypes of Indian peoples, describing the illustration of an Indian on horseback seen on paper currency in circulation in the U.S. from 1899 to 1914. King notes how the headdress that Running Antelope, the Lakota who served as the model for the illustration, was wearing might not have been an authentic Lakota headdress but a Pawnee headdress instead (the Lakota and Pawnee were enemies during this time.) There have been a number of other commemorative Indian images put forth by the U.S. and Canada over the century, including various stamps depicting Indians.
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King reveals which famous Indian he’d like to see depicted on currency: Will Rogers. Rogers was a Cherokee who performed as a vaudeville player and appeared in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. He made his first film appearance in Laughing Bill Hyde in 1918 and went on to act in 50 films, becoming one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood by the 1930s. Rogers was also a renowned social commentator and humorist who wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, and he was even nominated as the Anti Bunk Party candidate for president.
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Rogers was never cast as an Indian, since he “didn’t look Indian enough” to Hollywood. Still, he’s one of two Indian actors to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The other Indian actor with a star is Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk, who apparently did look “Indian enough” and played Indians. His most famous role was Tonto in the Lone Ranger TV series. King describes Tonto as “North America’s Indian.” He was “trustworthy, loyal, [and] helpful” to his White counterparts. Tonto was proof that Natives had learned the civilized behavior settlers had “shared” with them. While Silverheels has been criticized for playing a “Stepin Fetchit role,” it was a job, and one of the first that depicted an Indian as nearly equal to his White sidekick.
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King wonders whether Indian representation in film and television really has an impact on North America’s perception of the Indian. He considers the controversy of non-Indian actors being cast in Indian roles before coming to the conclusion that, regardless of whether Indian roles are played by Indians or non-Indians, the “truth” Hollywood depicts about Indians is rarely truthful.
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King breaks down typical Indian film roles into two categories: historical Indians and contemporary Indians. Most Indian actors play historical Indians, though directors seem to have no problem filling these roles with racially ambiguous Italians, Mexicans, and Greeks. However, directors are more likely to cast real Indians in contemporary Indian roles. In the past 20 years, such films as Powwow Highway (1989) and Smoke Signals (1998) have offered less stereotypical visions of contemporary Indian life. Additionally, Native filmmakers, such as Phil Lucas and Alanis Obomsawin, are changing the way Indians are depicted on-screen with documentaries depicting contemporary Native life. Unfortunately, not many people watch documentaries, nor are documentaries an accurate depiction of reality, merely “an approximation.”
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