American Indian Culture and Research Journal

No film director has created as enduring an image of the American West as has John Ford. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, Ford directed approximately 135 films, of which close to sixty were Westerns. His depiction of American Indians has been especially controversial: While his adversaries bemoan the savage portrayals of American Indians in The Searchers, his defenders counter with the sympathetic images presented in Wagon Master. Still others call attention to Ford’s so-called reversal of Indian portrayals, pointing to the ferocious Apaches of Stagecoach and then to the Indian martyrs of Cheyenne Autumn. Any compromise between the opposing factions appears impossible. Several scholars have attempted to explain the director’s seemingly contradictory Indian portrayals. A few object to the description of Ford as a “cinematic racist”: Jim Weigert’s essay “John Ford and the Indians” argues that Ford actually pioneered a sympathetic attitude toward Indians long before it was fashionable to do so. Weigert cites, in particular, the more ”humanizing” portrayals of Indians in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Michael Nathan Budd’s dissertation develops a similar argument; he describes Ford’s Indians as becoming more individualized from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn. Kirk Ellis’s article “On the Warpath: John Ford and the Indians” emphasizes the apparent intercultural conflict in Ford’s Westerns and the director’s inclusion of both noble and savage Indians.