ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the premise that, not only were Native people engaged in modernity at a time when the settler imaginary still relegated them to the “primitive” margins of “the modern,” but that they also shaped modernity by challenging both expectations and anxieties about who could be(come) an American and by participating in national debates on Americanism and American citizenship. Examining several silent films, as well as archival footage, I argue that the Native actors and extras engaged in the silent film industry played no small part in negotiating modernity on Native terms, even when those terms were uneven. In silent feature, documentary, and ethnographic film at the turn into the twentieth century, the Indian on screen was both a racialized reminder of the absence of Indigenous peoples and their histories from the American settler-colonial imaginary and a visual document of their ongoing presence. Drawing on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous film historians’ and critics’ work, I also argue that silent films performed two simultaneous tasks at the time. On the one hand, they solidified American whiteness and served in the settler-colonial work of American nationalism, patriotism, and Americanization by offering audiences an ahistorical, idealized, and static version of American Indians. On the other hand, as Indian films became a widely recognizable, albeit problematic, genre, they paved the way for Native representation and self-representation, and provided opportunities for both upward mobility and a platform for the critique of federal Indian policy.
