ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of media portrayals of Native Americans, and contextualizes media representations and stereotypical representations by briefly discussing contemporary conditions of being Native in America. Native Americans were and are real, but the Indian was a White invention and remains largely a White image”. In the 1800s, stereotypical images of Native Americans were constructed in children’s games, magazines, and newspaper stories, on the covers of sheet music, and in theatrical performances. The population of Native Americans was at an all-time low (estimates of fewer than 250,000 individuals) and the idea of the vanishing Indian quite real. Several photographers and filmmakers made their own media and told different stories than their white counterparts. News coverage is situated in historical moments and yet the “official view of how Native Americans should be treated shifted from forced assimilation to cultural pluralism to termination to limited self-determination”.
