An Act of Redemption: Conflicting Images of American Indians in Broken Arrow and The Searchers

Abstract

The golden age of Hollywood westerns produced a series of iconic images, from carriage caravans migrating westward to the blossoming romances between young American men and women trying to survive an unfamiliar landscape. The Hollywood western also functioned as a space for reproducing racialized stereotypes of Native Americans, in particular the Noble Savage or the Bloodthirsty Savage. The figure of Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick in the ABC television series, is just one of many stereotypical depictions of Native Americans from the 1950s. Each of these components in the 1950s western offered American audiences a visual dichotomy: although some directors still relied upon the pejorative images mentioned above, others like Delmer Daves and John Ford attempted to present a more positive representation of the American Indian. These directors’ efforts created a confused ideological system, one that both accepted and rejected stereotypical depictions of Native Americans. While Daves and Ford rely on stereotypes, they also disrupt these images by condoning an interracial marriage in Broken Arrow 1950 and by presenting a white anti-hero, Ethan Edwards, in The Searchers 1956 .past and, at the same time, make sense of race relations in the present international climate of the Cold War. Although scholars have examined stereotypes of Indians and Native subversion in western film, scholars have not compared the two films using the directors’ reinforcement and subversion of stereotypical images as a racially-based redemptive act. By reading the convoluted representations of Native Americans in Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow and John Ford’s The Searchers together, the search for a cohesive American national identity in the Cold War era emerges outside of the films