American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The release of Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow in 1950 represented a turning point in Hollywood’s portrayal of American Indians. Often cited as Hollywood’s first sound film to depict the American Indian sympathetically, Broken Arrow appealed to an ideal of tolerance and racial equality that became prominent in later Westerns. The film took a major step in the breakdown of conventional stereotypes, and in doing so made an emphatic statement about America’s racial attitudes. The motion picture industry has traditionally portrayed Native Americans in a variety of stereotyped roles. The silent films offered both positive and negative images, since movie stereotypes were still forming and there was more diversity among tribes depicted and roles of Indians in the story. Titles such as Attack on Fort Boonesboro (1906) and The Renegades (1912) suggest that negative stereotypes began early. The silent film era, however, showed a significant number of pro-Indian movies: during the early 1900s, the noble Indian often preceded the cowboy as the Western screen hero. Some of the silents were especially sympathetic to Indians, and while their depictions had a childlike simplicity, they touched upon crucial issues in race relations and government policies. D. W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) pointed toward white hostilities and injustice; Heart of an lndian (1913) depicted an Indian woman’s grief over her deceased child; and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914) showed the tragic fate of an Indian/white marriage, These films, as well as later silent features like The Vanishing American (1925) and Redskin (1929) acknowledged the Native American’s social plight but demarcated differences between Indian and white cultures.