Hide Article Text (OCR)
Racial sensitivity must be exploredHollywood has developed an interlocking mythology. The myth of the noble savage and the myth monster white male (MWM) — the notion that crazed Caucasians of the masculinegender are responsible for mostof the evil to befall humanity complement each other perfectly in the movie Dances With Wolves.Beautifully photographed,with strong performances, Dances is the fable of a U.S. cavalry officer who, after distinguishing himself on a Civil War battlefield, goes West and goes native.Assigned as the entire garrison of a frontier outpost, Lt.John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is adopted by a tribe of Sioux. Instead of the cavalry riding to the rescue, the hero has to be saved from the blue coats by Sioux braves.With the exception of Dunbar and a young lieutenant, in “Dances* the white man is uniformly vile: disgusting, stupid,brutal, cowardly, and rapacious. Meanwhile back at the tepee,our fine feathered friends areIndians were quite cruel to one another, worse to strangers. Torture, of a variety which would make your average S.S.officer blanch, was ubiquitous. Concerning the Fetterman mas sacre of 1866, in which over 80 soldiers died, Col. Henry B. Carrington writes of the horrors he witnessed: Eyes tom out and laid on rocks, noses cut off, ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out... The perpetrators were Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux warriors.In one scene in Wolves theleader of a Pawnee raiding partyringed bysituathe enemv would have beenthe embodiment of virtue: brave, captured and tortured to death.sagacious, kind, and humorous.At one point, Dunbar comments that the only way to describe these people is living in perfect harmony with nature — taking only what they need, and actually mourning the white man’s desolation of a buffalo herd.The heavies in this anti-Western are the men who settled the frontier. Absent their sacrifices, America would be a truncated nation, ending at the Mississippi.Dances is vintage noble savage — Chateau Lafite Rousseau. Which is not to say that there weren’t worthy Indians, simply that they were human. Man in a primal state isn’t necessarilybetter, usually the opposite.As author and University of Dallas Professor M E. Bradford explains, if the Indians didn’tsubstantially alter their environment, it wasn’t out of refinedsensibilities, but because theylacked the technology to do so.Far from being neolithic conservationists, they were frequently wasteful. Plains Indians would drive buffalo over a cliff for fun, Bradford discloses. “This stuff about how they'd only kill animals for food is humbug. They would often engage in mindless acts of slaughter.American Indians frequently kept slaves, captives taken in war. Women were treated as property. They had no voice in tribal affairs or rights within the family unit. The most cutting insult the culture could deliver was calling someone an oldwoman.Since the late ’60s, Hollywood has idealized Indians at theexpense of soldiers and settlers. Are they merely compensating for the villainization of the redman in earlier epics? But even inthe ’40s and ’50s, Indians were portrayed sympathetically, as basically noble if somewhatexcitable types.Movieland’s obsession with Indians is an Aquanan phenomenon. The Indians lived closer to nature, hence must have been virtuous, flower children cor\jectured. Besides, they were a primitive people we had robbed and murdered, and weren’t webombing another primitive people into oblivion in SoutheastAsia? The craze culminated in white, middle-class college kids mimicking barbarian behavior: in their dress, tonsonal style,speech, and manners.I was recently invited to appear on the Jesse Jackson Show, to discuss the stereotyping of blacks in the media Even at its worst, the entertainment industry portrayed blacks merely as benevolent fools, a la Amos’n’ Andy.This is nothing compared to the cinema’s stigmatization of white males — since white woman also were being oppressed by the MWM, presumably they’re cool whenever these fiends came into contact with backward cultures.Imagine a m^jor studio making a movie with a dozen black characters depicted as degenerate scum. Impossible you say? Quite so. Regrettably, Hollywood’s racial sensitivity runs in only one direction.(HertUure Feature* Syndicate*
Newspaper Details
Clovis News Journal
Clovis, New Mexico, US
Sun, Dec 16, 1990
Page 35
Full Page
Clipped by
Jon C.
NJ, USA 17 Jan 2020
Other Publications Near Clovis, New Mexico
The Clovis News
The Eastern New Mexico News
Clovis Evening News Journal
Clovis News Tribune
Clovis New Mexico Evening News Journal
