Native Americans In Movie Essay

Have you ever seen a movie that came out in the last twenty years and thought that the

way a certain race was shown was very stereotypical and mostly inaccurate? Probably not

because not only would most films get in a lot of trouble for that, but people are not as prejudice

as they used to be. Since the early 1930’s, Native Americans have had to deal with the negative

way they were described in films. In particular, the way Native Americans were represented in

the movie, Stagecoach, is vastly different to the way they are represented in culture today.

Writers like Thomas King and Brian Dippie portray Native Americans much more respectably

than the way movies like Stagecoach did in the 1930’s.

Brian Dippie and Thomas King both point
Franki Webb is another writer who brings to light the issue of inaccurate

representation of Native Americans in film, and how over the years in film the portrayal of

Native Americans got much better. According to Webb, “There was a noticeable decline in

Western genre films. Therefore the depiction of the stereotypical ‘Indian’ was reduced” (2).

What Franki Webb is trying to explain is how over time movie makers stopped showing Native

Americans in stereotypical ways because the Western movie genre was declining. This is

important because it sparked the end of the misrepresentation of Native Americans in film. Webb writes about the difference in the representation of Indians from early films to more modern

films.

What does inaccurately representing Native Americans mean in early films? One of the

most common stereotypes in old movies about Native Americans is how violent and barbarous

they are. In many old westerns, Native Americans are seen as the either bandits or
Another common stereotype that

inaccurately portrays Native Americans is how they lived in small communities in the wild

feeding off the land to survive while in reality most Native Americans at this time