Ethnic Cleansing, Homestyle

Abstract

It is a commonplace that all art tells more about the artist and the era in which he or she lives than about the subject or the period depicted. Nowhere is this more true than in popular entertainment forms. This article will examine images of the continent's indigenous peoples in the American musical, both stage and motion picture, from its inception to the present. In the process, it will examine both positive portrayals as well as the far more prevalent negative ones, reinforcing stereotypes acceptable to the dominant society. In discussing depiction of Natives in motion pictures. Vine Deloria, Jr. writes, Underneath all the conflicting images of the Indian, one fundamental truth emerges: the white man knows that he is alien and he knows that North America is and he will never let go of the image because he thinks by some clever manipulation he can achieve an authenticity which can never be his.1 As a result, in the popular imagination, real Indians cannot be permitted to survive into the 20th Century. Their very existence serves as a painful reminder of the illegitimacy of white claims to the continent. Indians must therefore be stereotyped, relegated to a fabulous 19th Century, an extinct breed, This is necessary if the myth of the frontier is to survive. In the musical, this is reflected in a form of ethnic cleansing, wherein Natives are either erased entirely from the landscape depicted or pushed to the periphery as stereotyped members of a vanishing race. In the collective American psyche, Euro-American pioneers conquered a vast, unsettled, primeval wilderness.2 They bent it to their plow and to their will. reality, however, is starkly different. Instead. European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land.3 Historian Francis Jennings puts it succinctly when he writes, The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find wilderness here; rather ... they made one ... so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers.4 Of course, Jennings fails to point out that a great many were simply slaughtered as well and that the land to which their mythology was intimately tied was stolen outright. Historian Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., an important analyst of the condition of 20th Century Natives, recapitulates two distinct stereotypes of American Indians in his book White Man's Both of these were inextricably bound up with White self-evaluations, describing Indians negatively in terms of what they were not or what they lacked in terms of Euro-American society. First is what might be called the Noble Savage or, for Berkhofer, the good Indian. These Indians lived in harmony with nature in a state of liberty, simplicity, and innocence. They were beautiful in physique and modest and regal in bearing. Brave in combat, they were tender and loyal in family and friendship relationships.5 Juxtaposed with this image is that of the bloodthirsty or bad Indian. Upon these Indians are heaped all the negative qualities of White society, many of them associated with sex. They are naked, lecherous, debauchers. They are lazy, deceitful, and treacherous.6 To Berkhofer's categories must be added a third, the stereotype of the ...real Indians cannot be permitted to survive into half-breed. An extension of the bad Indian image, half-breeds have no the 20th Century. Their very existence serves as redeeming virtues. They are neither White nor As such they are dea painful reminder of the illegitimacy of white generate products of miscegenation, distrusted by both cultures and fitting claims to the continent. in nowhere.

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