Fear of a Red Planet | The Big Movie [1/2]

The Big Movie

"Our Indians are no longer dangerous. We understand today better than ever that we have wronged them much and often, that we have misjudged and slandered them in the past. Now the reaction has set in, and it is surely a curious phase of the white man's civilization that his latest invention is helping to set the red man right in history. All of the more artistic Indian films exalt the Indian, depict the noble traits in his character and challenge for him and his views and his manner of life the belated admiration of his white brother."

-- The Moving Picture World, August 1911

Hey, thanks.
What happened is this: about five years ago I realized that I had no memories of seeing Indians at the movies or on television when I was growing up.
Even now I recall nothing of the thousands of hours of Hollywood Westerns I must have watched during the late 50s and 60s, in Oklahoma and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It certainly wasn't because I found the medium lacking. I love television and always have. To this day I learn from it constantly, but somehow the thousands of flickering Indians that must have entered my consciousness disappeared without a trace.
There was no shortage of hardware, either. We had multiple televisions, my family being the kind of consumers that advertising agencies classify as "early adapters." Televisions were in the kitchen, the den and later, a portable black and white set I often smuggled into my room and watched late into the night, using earphones to subvert curfew.
The amnesia is selective. I remember The Twilight Zone, Mayberry RFD, Lost in Space, The Mod Squad, The Man from UNCLE and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I remember the assassinations, Apollo 8 and the night Lyndon Johnson told us he wouldn't run for reelection, peace being more important.
Indians, sure. Uncle Sly and Aunt Maude, Grandma telling us how glad she is not to live in a tipi, and the Comanche Reformed Church (a sign near the door proudly announces last week's take: $82.50) packed with the faithful, singing Indian hymns where the only words I could ever make out were Jesus Christ. As befits a people classified as prisoners of war and raised in a military fort, those of my grandparent's generation didn't talk much about the old days. I never heard them discuss The Searchers or Two Rode Together, tales of Comanche rape and kidnapping and murder that critics agree are among the best American films ever made.
Not that I remember, anyway.
The first moving pictures of Indians that anyone knows about were made by Thomas Edison in 1894. One was a little kinetoscope number called Sioux Ghost Dance, and even though it showed no such thing it was still a hit on the penny arcade peep show circuit. The modern cinema was still years in the future, but Indians were already establishing market share.
More than two thousand Hollywood features and hundreds of radio and television series later, the Western rocks on. Critics through the ages have pronounced it dead and buried, but most of them are the ones dead and buried while the Western is still here.
Cars replace horses, flying machines turn into 747s, communism rises and falls. Through it all the Western escaped obsolescence by brilliantly reinventing itself time and time again.
So adaptable is the Western, an art form as supremely American as jazz or baseball, that in the 1960s the Italians rode to its rescue, breathing new life into a format that seemed hopelessly old-fashioned by creating the spaghetti western: brutal, ironic and up-to-the-minute cool. Synonymous with Indian-bashing, the number one money-making Western of all time is Dances With Wolves.
We're coming up on the second century of Westerns, but even that understates their importance. They have always been with us and always will. Flip channels if you want, try self-induced amnesia, but these efforts are useless, because the Western is encoded in our cultural DNA. If you live in North America, Westerns are the Book of Genesis, the story of our lives.
Attention must be paid.
Investigations of the Western begin with a man named William F. Cody. He's our Moses, a self-made legend, partly fact and partly fiction, the genius who shaped the myth. In 1869 Ned Buntline, whose given name was Edward Z. C. Judson, famed writer of dime novels, traveled to Nebraska in search of a hero. He found the 23-year old William Cody, already a veteran of gold rushes, the Pony Express, the Union Army. His nickname was a result of employment as a hunter-supplier for the Union Pacific Railroad.
Cody became a national figure through reports of his exploits in the New York Weekly. He appeared in stage productions based on his life, but it was a part time affair. Mostly, he continued with being Buffalo Bill.
In 1883 he created Buffalo Bill's Wild West (the word show was never part of the name) and hired out-of-work Indians and cowboys. Troupe members included such all-star veterans of the Indian Wars as Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Gall, and Gabriel Dumont.
Why'd they do it? Here's one explanation, from a 1980 essay by Ward Churchill, Mary Anne Hill and Norbert S. Hill: "Sitting Bull and other plainsmen who participated in spectacles such as Cody's and those of Pawnee Bill and Colonel Frederick T. Cummins had their reasons. There was a pressing need for revenue for their impoverished peoples, an ingrained desire for mobility, perhaps a hope of communicating some sense of their cultural identity to an ignorant and overbearing race of conquerors. But surely if the latter is the case they failed. . . before the prejudgemental myopia of their land- and mineral- hungry hosts."
Well, could be. Maybe they felt Bill's Circus was a chance for cross-cultural exchange and went for it. Maybe they had to just keep moving, although this "ingrained desire for mobility" business sounds to me a bit like saying All God's Chillun Got Happy Feet. Some believe that Indians would never in their right mind choose to participate in kitsch like Buffalo Bill's Wild West. However, I speak from personal experience in arguing that Indians are as likely to have bad taste as everyone else.
Most accounts indicate Cody was liked and respected by his Indian employees, who knew exactly what they were doing. Like Cody, the Indians were part-time entertainers and full-time legends. They made history, then recreated the history they made in popular entertainments that toured America and Europe.
Just as art critic Philip Monk makes the case that Canadian contemporary art "passed from pre-modernism to so-called post-modernism without a history of modernism," so too can it be argued that our leaders anticipated the impact of the information age. Never given much of a chance with industrialism, we moved straight into ironic, cartoonish media experiments. If some prefer to see them as gullible dupes (let's see, Sitting Bull was a brilliant leader who forced the U.S. to sue for peace, and definitely nobody's fool, except of course for that embarrassing business with Cody), I see them as pioneers, our first explorers of the information age.
Unlike in the movies everything was fabulous confusion. Here's an example: it's December, 1890 on Pine Ridge. The Ghost Dance Religion was sweeping Indian Country. Wovoka, the Paiute some called Messiah, promised to vanquish the whites and return the buffaloes. Indians were leaving the reservation for the Black Hills. The government was spooked, and sent thousands of soldiers to put down a possible uprising.
They worried most about Sitting Bull, now back on the reservation after his vacation in Canada. General Nelson Miles called up Sitting Bull's friend and sometime boss William Cody. He was on staff with the Governor of Nebraska and just back from another boffo European tour. In a bizarre confluence of show biz and diplomacy, General Miles asked Cody to talk some sense into Sitting Bull.
The meeting never happened. It's said Cody stayed up late the night before drinking with cavalry officers. Instead of Cody, an Indian agent with agendas of his own sent Indian cops to arrest Sitting Bull. The cops were terrified, and when the Sioux leader refused to submit he was shot. Sitting Bull's white horse, a gift from Cody, was trained to kneel at the sound of gunfire. This the horse did as his master lay dying.
Two weeks later, the massacre at Wounded Knee.
And twenty-three years after Wounded Knee, General Miles, Cody and dozens of Indians who were there the first time recreated the events of that unfortunate December. The government cooperated in the film, hoping it would help with recruitment in a possible war with Mexico. Miles played himself and served as the film's technical advisor, which drove everyone nuts because he insisted on complete authenticity. This meant that because eleven thousand troops participated in a review after the hostiles surrendered, eleven thousand troops were going to be used in the movie. His demands that the Badlands sequence be shot in the Badlands, despite the enormous cost of moving the camp, caused so much bitterness that it finally ended his friendship with Cody.
General Miles also worked as a press agent for the movie, saying in one interview "the idea is to give the whole thing from the start -- the Indian dissatisfaction, their starving condition, the coming of the false 'Messiah' who stirred them to revolt, the massing of the troops, the death of Sitting Bull and, finally, the surrender. All of these incidents will be gone over, just as they happened. Some of the Indians will be there who fought against us. They will fight again, but there will be no bullets. All that is over."
They shot Sitting Bull again, and General Miles insisted on shooting the Battle of Wounded Knee just where it had originally happened, on the mass grave of Big Foot's band.
The night before, rumors swept the camp that some of the Indian extras were going to use live ammunition. Cody called a midnight meeting, and told the Indians that the movie would celebrate their resistance. The next morning, although both sides were extremely reluctant to begin firing, they managed to reenact the Battle/Massacre. Many Indians broke into tears.
After filming was completed, they spent six months editing. This was during a time studios turned out movies by the week. (This project really was the Heaven's Gate of its day.) Finally it was shown before the Secretary of the Interior and other top officials of the Wilson Administration, who said they loved it.
Other reviews were mixed. One critic called the film "war itself, grim, unpitying and terrible . . . no boy or girl should be allowed to miss these pictures. If you are a lonely man or woman pick up some equally lonely kiddie and take him for an afternoon with the great leaders of our army, with the great chiefs of our Indian tribes and two hours in the open world that has been made sacred by heroic blood of the nation's fighting heroes." A Lakota named Chauncy Yellow Robe trashed the movie in a speech to the Society of American Indians, reserving particular scorn for Miles and Cody "who were not even there when it happened, went back and became heroes for a moving picture machine."
After a few screenings it mysteriously disappeared. Cody died in 1917, and today the film is nowhere to be found. Even the title isn't known for sure: at various times Buffalo Bill's lost masterpiece was called The Indian Wars Refought, The Last Indian Battles or From the Warpath to the Peace Pipe, The Wars for Civilization in America, and Buffalo Bill's Indian Wars.
The most expensive, elaborate Western of its day was the victim of its own identity crisis. For Cody, it was the most spectacular movie ever made, the triumph of a fabled career. For Miles, it was part documentary, part training film. For the government, it was a recruiting device. For the critics, it was a battle showing the victory of Western Civilization.
The final result must have been too close, too real. Critical distance could not be established when original combatants were actors, and when the set was the site of battle and massacre. It was a movie, but it was no Western. (next page)

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	The Big Movie
	"Our Indians are no longer dangerous. We understand today better than ever that we have wronged them much and often, that we have misjudged and slandered them in the past. Now the reaction has set in, and it is surely a curious phase of the white man's civilization that his latest invention is helping to set the red man right in history. All of the more artistic Indian films exalt the Indian, depict the noble traits in his character and challenge for him and his views and his manner of life the belated admiration of his white brother." -- The Moving Picture World, August 1911
	Hey, thanks. What happened is this: about five years ago I realized that I had no memories of seeing Indians at the movies or on television when I was growing up. Even now I recall nothing of the thousands of hours of Hollywood Westerns I must have watched during the late 50s and 60s, in Oklahoma and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It certainly wasn't because I found the medium lacking. I love television and always have. To this day I learn from it constantly, but somehow the thousands of flickering Indians that must have entered my consciousness disappeared without a trace. There was no shortage of hardware, either. We had multiple televisions, my family being the kind of consumers that advertising agencies classify as "early adapters." Televisions were in the kitchen, the den and later, a portable black and white set I often smuggled into my room and watched late into the night, using earphones to subvert curfew. The amnesia is selective. I remember The Twilight Zone, Mayberry RFD, Lost in Space, The Mod Squad, The Man from UNCLE and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I remember the assassinations, Apollo 8 and the night Lyndon Johnson told us he wouldn't run for reelection, peace being more important. Indians, sure. Uncle Sly and Aunt Maude, Grandma telling us how glad she is not to live in a tipi, and the Comanche Reformed Church (a sign near the door proudly announces last week's take: $82.50) packed with the faithful, singing Indian hymns where the only words I could ever make out were Jesus Christ. As befits a people classified as prisoners of war and raised in a military fort, those of my grandparent's generation didn't talk much about the old days. I never heard them discuss The Searchers or Two Rode Together, tales of Comanche rape and kidnapping and murder that critics agree are among the best American films ever made. Not that I remember, anyway. The first moving pictures of Indians that anyone knows about were made by Thomas Edison in 1894. One was a little kinetoscope number called Sioux Ghost Dance, and even though it showed no such thing it was still a hit on the penny arcade peep show circuit. The modern cinema was still years in the future, but Indians were already establishing market share. More than two thousand Hollywood features and hundreds of radio and television series later, the Western rocks on. Critics through the ages have pronounced it dead and buried, but most of them are the ones dead and buried while the Western is still here. Cars replace horses, flying machines turn into 747s, communism rises and falls. Through it all the Western escaped obsolescence by brilliantly reinventing itself time and time again. So adaptable is the Western, an art form as supremely American as jazz or baseball, that in the 1960s the Italians rode to its rescue, breathing new life into a format that seemed hopelessly old-fashioned by creating the spaghetti western: brutal, ironic and up-to-the-minute cool. Synonymous with Indian-bashing, the number one money-making Western of all time is Dances With Wolves. We're coming up on the second century of Westerns, but even that understates their importance. They have always been with us and always will. Flip channels if you want, try self-induced amnesia, but these efforts are useless, because the Western is encoded in our cultural DNA. If you live in North America, Westerns are the Book of Genesis, the story of our lives. Attention must be paid. Investigations of the Western begin with a man named William F. Cody. He's our Moses, a self-made legend, partly fact and partly fiction, the genius who shaped the myth. In 1869 Ned Buntline, whose given name was Edward Z. C. Judson, famed writer of dime novels, traveled to Nebraska in search of a hero. He found the 23-year old William Cody, already a veteran of gold rushes, the Pony Express, the Union Army. His nickname was a result of employment as a hunter-supplier for the Union Pacific Railroad. Cody became a national figure through reports of his exploits in the New York Weekly. He appeared in stage productions based on his life, but it was a part time affair. Mostly, he continued with being Buffalo Bill. In 1883 he created Buffalo Bill's Wild West (the word show was never part of the name) and hired out-of-work Indians and cowboys. Troupe members included such all-star veterans of the Indian Wars as Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Gall, and Gabriel Dumont. Why'd they do it? Here's one explanation, from a 1980 essay by Ward Churchill, Mary Anne Hill and Norbert S. Hill: "Sitting Bull and other plainsmen who participated in spectacles such as Cody's and those of Pawnee Bill and Colonel Frederick T. Cummins had their reasons. There was a pressing need for revenue for their impoverished peoples, an ingrained desire for mobility, perhaps a hope of communicating some sense of their cultural identity to an ignorant and overbearing race of conquerors. But surely if the latter is the case they failed. . . before the prejudgemental myopia of their land- and mineral- hungry hosts." Well, could be. Maybe they felt Bill's Circus was a chance for cross-cultural exchange and went for it. Maybe they had to just keep moving, although this "ingrained desire for mobility" business sounds to me a bit like saying All God's Chillun Got Happy Feet. Some believe that Indians would never in their right mind choose to participate in kitsch like Buffalo Bill's Wild West. However, I speak from personal experience in arguing that Indians are as likely to have bad taste as everyone else. Most accounts indicate Cody was liked and respected by his Indian employees, who knew exactly what they were doing. Like Cody, the Indians were part-time entertainers and full-time legends. They made history, then recreated the history they made in popular entertainments that toured America and Europe. Just as art critic Philip Monk makes the case that Canadian contemporary art "passed from pre-modernism to so-called post-modernism without a history of modernism," so too can it be argued that our leaders anticipated the impact of the information age. Never given much of a chance with industrialism, we moved straight into ironic, cartoonish media experiments. If some prefer to see them as gullible dupes (let's see, Sitting Bull was a brilliant leader who forced the U.S. to sue for peace, and definitely nobody's fool, except of course for that embarrassing business with Cody), I see them as pioneers, our first explorers of the information age. Unlike in the movies everything was fabulous confusion. Here's an example: it's December, 1890 on Pine Ridge. The Ghost Dance Religion was sweeping Indian Country. Wovoka, the Paiute some called Messiah, promised to vanquish the whites and return the buffaloes. Indians were leaving the reservation for the Black Hills. The government was spooked, and sent thousands of soldiers to put down a possible uprising. They worried most about Sitting Bull, now back on the reservation after his vacation in Canada. General Nelson Miles called up Sitting Bull's friend and sometime boss William Cody. He was on staff with the Governor of Nebraska and just back from another boffo European tour. In a bizarre confluence of show biz and diplomacy, General Miles asked Cody to talk some sense into Sitting Bull. The meeting never happened. It's said Cody stayed up late the night before drinking with cavalry officers. Instead of Cody, an Indian agent with agendas of his own sent Indian cops to arrest Sitting Bull. The cops were terrified, and when the Sioux leader refused to submit he was shot. Sitting Bull's white horse, a gift from Cody, was trained to kneel at the sound of gunfire. This the horse did as his master lay dying. Two weeks later, the massacre at Wounded Knee. And twenty-three years after Wounded Knee, General Miles, Cody and dozens of Indians who were there the first time recreated the events of that unfortunate December. The government cooperated in the film, hoping it would help with recruitment in a possible war with Mexico. Miles played himself and served as the film's technical advisor, which drove everyone nuts because he insisted on complete authenticity. This meant that because eleven thousand troops participated in a review after the hostiles surrendered, eleven thousand troops were going to be used in the movie. His demands that the Badlands sequence be shot in the Badlands, despite the enormous cost of moving the camp, caused so much bitterness that it finally ended his friendship with Cody. General Miles also worked as a press agent for the movie, saying in one interview "the idea is to give the whole thing from the start -- the Indian dissatisfaction, their starving condition, the coming of the false 'Messiah' who stirred them to revolt, the massing of the troops, the death of Sitting Bull and, finally, the surrender. All of these incidents will be gone over, just as they happened. Some of the Indians will be there who fought against us. They will fight again, but there will be no bullets. All that is over." They shot Sitting Bull again, and General Miles insisted on shooting the Battle of Wounded Knee just where it had originally happened, on the mass grave of Big Foot's band. The night before, rumors swept the camp that some of the Indian extras were going to use live ammunition. Cody called a midnight meeting, and told the Indians that the movie would celebrate their resistance. The next morning, although both sides were extremely reluctant to begin firing, they managed to reenact the Battle/Massacre. Many Indians broke into tears. After filming was completed, they spent six months editing. This was during a time studios turned out movies by the week. (This project really was the Heaven's Gate of its day.) Finally it was shown before the Secretary of the Interior and other top officials of the Wilson Administration, who said they loved it. Other reviews were mixed. One critic called the film "war itself, grim, unpitying and terrible . . . no boy or girl should be allowed to miss these pictures. If you are a lonely man or woman pick up some equally lonely kiddie and take him for an afternoon with the great leaders of our army, with the great chiefs of our Indian tribes and two hours in the open world that has been made sacred by heroic blood of the nation's fighting heroes." A Lakota named Chauncy Yellow Robe trashed the movie in a speech to the Society of American Indians, reserving particular scorn for Miles and Cody "who were not even there when it happened, went back and became heroes for a moving picture machine." After a few screenings it mysteriously disappeared. Cody died in 1917, and today the film is nowhere to be found. Even the title isn't known for sure: at various times Buffalo Bill's lost masterpiece was called The Indian Wars Refought, The Last Indian Battles or From the Warpath to the Peace Pipe, The Wars for Civilization in America, and Buffalo Bill's Indian Wars. The most expensive, elaborate Western of its day was the victim of its own identity crisis. For Cody, it was the most spectacular movie ever made, the triumph of a fabled career. For Miles, it was part documentary, part training film. For the government, it was a recruiting device. For the critics, it was a battle showing the victory of Western Civilization. The final result must have been too close, too real. Critical distance could not be established when original combatants were actors, and when the set was the site of battle and massacre. It was a movie, but it was no Western. (next page)
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