ABSTRACT
This chapter examines films featuring Native Americans that were made by three White producers—Thomas Edison, Joseph K. Dixon, and Edward Curtis—between 1901 and 1914. The touristic gaze by means of which early American cinematographers constructed the distant Other also characterized filmic depictions of racial and ethnic groups closer to home, particularly in representation of Native Americans. The diverse class strata films of dances, historical reconstructions, and fictional narratives are united by the complex negotiations of the tensions between science and popular entertainment and between the Native American as timeless tragic figure versus historical actor. Edison's films illustrate George Wharton James's fear of cultural rituals being reduced to ethnographic spectacle, whereas Dixon's film uses didactic intertitles to interpellate the spectator into the comfortable position of historical witness. However, filmmakers and other showmen-entrepreneurs often sought ratification of the ethnographical claims for their representations by establishing links with prominent anthropologists or institutions.
