“I Guess Your Warrior Look Doesn't Work Every Time”

In literature and film, painting and photography, science and history, and sports and advertising, whites manipulate the symbolic Indian to perform innumerable tasks. ¹ The Indian—distinguished here from the Native American person—is a stock character in the non-Native psyche, a metaphor rather than a fully functioning human. Non-Natives historically have used the Indian as a symbol to make statements about themselves and their place in the world, letting it serve as a foil to critique or herald their own values and habits. The thousands of Indians in Hollywood films and TV series over the years have lacked key human traits, not to mention the many tribal characteristics that were absent. However, Native people—through growing political clout and direct participation in movie making—have begun to influence on-screen portrayals much more over the last thirty years than previously, which has led to the arrival of identifiably Native American images in several recent efforts. By directly challenging the hypermasculinity of the symbolic Indians, Native Americans have accomplished some of the most significant revisions of Indian representations to date.