James Young Deer, b. Dakota City, Nebraska, date unknown, d. April 1946
Lillian St. Cyr, b. Winnebago Reservation, Nebraska, 13 February 1873, d. 13 March 1974
This husband-and-wife team, both of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tribe, became an influential force in the production of silent one-reel westerns between 1908 and 1913. Though their American film careers were short-lived, they intervened in the industry at a particularly crucial moment in the formation of a genre that would dominate Hollywood production for decades.
Princess Red Wing (the stage name for Lillian St. Cyr) was a graduate of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and a professional actress. A recognizable presence in cinema, she starred in the first feature-length film—
Cecil B. DeMille’s western,The Squaw Man(1914)—and over thirty-five other films between 1909 and 1921, including Donald Crisp’sRamona(1916) and an early Tom Mix picture,In the Days of the Thundering Herd (1914). When James Young Deer took over the West Coast studio operations for the French-owned film company Pathe´ Fre`res, he was already a veteran entertainer. He had performed with the Barnum and Bailey circus and the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show and had acted, directed, and written scenarios for several film companies including Kalem, Lubin, Vitagraph, and Biograph. He also worked at one of the first independent film companies, the New York Motion Picture Company, under the Bison trademark.
With trade journals calling for more authenticity in westerns and Native American and other moviegoers protesting the inaccuracies and negative stereotypes of Indians onscreen and threatening industrywide censorship, Young Deer and St. Cyr were able to leverage their cultural identity and industry experience. From about 1909 to 1913 they used the early flexibility of the industry to exert unprecedented control over popular images of Indians. Both behind the camera and in front of it, Young Deer and St. Cyr rewrote the racial scripts of the western, commenting on racism, assimilation, racial mixture, and cultural contact. Many of their films revisited and revised the wildly popular ‘‘squaw man’’ plot involving a cross- racial romance between an Indian woman and white man.
Young Deer and Lillian St. Cyr systematically undermined the ‘‘vanishing Indian’’ trope by giving the plots a new
political center of gravity. In films such asFor the Papoose (1912) and White Fawn’s Devotion(1910), mixed-race families answer to the tribe’s justice systems and mixed- blood children remain part of their Indian communities rather than being taken away to be raised in adoptive white families or in boarding schools.
As Young Deer and St. Cyr became more successful, the mass production of movies became more established, and the studios more wary of potentially objectionable subject matter, the couple’s films became less distinctive.
The details of Young Deer’s later career are sketchy. After leaving California because of legal troubles in 1913, he worked in France and elsewhere, but little is known about his film work in Europe. Lillian St. Cyr continued to draw on her theatrical experience in vaudeville, was a college lecturer, and served as an activist in Indian affairs.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
The Falling Arrow(1909),Red Wing’s Gratitude(1909), The Mended Lute(1909),White Fawn’s Devotion: A Play Acted by a Tribe of Red Indians in America(1910),The Red Girl and the Child(1910),A Cheyenne Brave(1910), The Yaqui Girl(1910),Little Dove’s Romance(1911),For the Papoose(1912),The Prospector and the Indian(1912), The Squaw Man’s Sweetheart(1912),The Squaw Man (1914),In the Days of the Thundering Herd(1914), Ramona(1916)
FURTHER READING
Aleiss, Angela.Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.
Deloria, Philip J.Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004.
Hearne, Joanna. ‘‘ ‘The Cross-Heart People’: Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western.’’Journal of Popular Film and Television30 (Winter 2003): 181–196.
Simmon, Scott.The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century.
Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Smith, Andrew Brodie.Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003.
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popularity of racial cross-dressing in the form of black- face minstrelsy became an engine that drove the film industry’s transition to the sound era. Blackface has marked crucial moments in film history, from The Birth of a Nationto the first sound film and first musical, Alan Crosland’sThe Jazz Singer(1927). InThe Birth of a Nation, the figure of Gus, a white actor in blackface, performs ‘‘black’’ desire for white women that, in the South, became the pretext for lynching. By contrast, in The Jazz Singerthe drama of the transformation of the Jewish protagonist Jake Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) into Jack Robin through his performance of blackness suggests, as Michael Rogin has argued, that the assimilation and eliding of complex, multiple ethnicities into a consoli- dated American ‘‘white’’ identity happened through the process of racial caricature that maintained boundaries between black and white. Thus, according to Rogin, Jewish blackface performers modeled Americanization through the ritual of defining themselves as white by play- ing with blackface performance, redrawing the boundaries of social exclusion along racial rather than ethnic lines, and representing America as polarized by racial dichotomy rather than ethnic pluralism.
Blackface minstrelsy and its translation from stage to cinema at the turn of the twentieth century is only one example of the powerful deployment of stereotypes and their devastating effects. The word ‘‘stereotype’’ origi- nally referred to methods of making identical copies in the printing industry; this idea of an endlessly replicated image of an ‘‘other’’ remains important to the work of stereotypes in shaping expectations. Stereotypes are not simply accidental departures from realism; rather, they function systematically as a form of broad social control, influencing collective perceptions and public memory as well as colonizing individual self-perceptions through internalized racism. Character-based stereotypes seem sta- ble, but in fact they develop and change over time—not as an evolution or development towards more consistently positive representations but rather in response to specific historical situations. Whether stereotypes are ‘‘positive’’ or
‘‘negative,’’ they present limited options for action.
Famous examples of stereotypes abound, and minor- ity actors within the parameters of such roles have often given extraordinary performances. Hattie McDaniel (1895–1952) won an OscarÒ for her role as a loyal servant or ‘‘mammy’’ in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Bill ‘‘Bojangles’’ Robinson (1878–1949) played a version of ‘‘Uncle Tom’’ opposite Shirley Temple in the 1930s (The Littlest Rebel, 1935; The Little Colonel, 1935; and Just Around the Corner, 1938) and Stepin Fetchit (1902–
1985) became a Hollywood star playing ‘‘coon’’ charac- ters, such as his ‘‘Jeff Poindexter’’ inJudge Priest(1934).
Indian stereotypes given greater depth by Native American actors include noble savages and savage reac-
tionaries (Eric Schweig as Uncas and Wes Studi as Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, 1992), Indian prin- cesses (Irene Bedard voicing the animated Pocahontas in Disney’s Pocahontas, 1995), and wise sages (Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man, 1970).
Noriyuki ‘‘Pat’’ Morita (1932–2005) played cryptic, wise, and servile Asian characters on television inHappy Days(1975–1976, 1982–1983) and in films such asThe Karate Kid(1984), while images of decadent, seductive, dangerous Asian men and women have appeared in films such asThe Cheat (1915),Shanghai Express (1932), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen(1933) and more recently in Quentin Tarantino’sKill Bill: Vol. 2(2004). Certain directors, such as Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola, have become associated with films that explore ethnic identities and issues of assimilation and difference.
Italian American and Irish American gangster figures have been humanized on screen in films such as The Godfather (1972) and On the Waterfront (1954), and drawing on the tradition of ‘‘social problem’’ genres, such films have effectively rendered experiences of immigra- tion, although in some cases ethnicity is posited as part of the ‘‘problem’’ documented in the film.
Just as important as identifying stereotypes is thinking through the conditions of their production and reception.
Within the restrictions of Hollywood genres and character stereotypes, minority performances can provide a venue resistance both onscreen and offscreen. Actors such as Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973), Louise Beavers (1902–
1962), Dolores del Rio (1905–1983), Princess Red Wing, Jay Silverheels, and many others, though they sometimes played stereotyped roles onscreen, were able to use their position within the industry in a variety of ways—including creating opportunities for other minority actors; providing offscreen role models of professional success for minority youth; advocating for legal and social change; and, within their performances them- selves, offering subtle signs of agency and potential for self-representation beyond the scripted lines they were assigned to deliver.
This potential for subversive performance and for off- screen interventions is not possible with the conventions of racial masquerade in which minority presence is rendered only as a caricature. Blackface minstrelsy—and other forms of racial ventriloquism in casting—also excluded African American and other minority performers from the stage and screen, making the ‘‘presence’’ of stereotyped charac- ters in films an indicator of absence. In the ‘‘redface’’ of the western, for example, the common practice of having white actors (such as Rock Hudson, Debra Paget, Charles Bronson, and many others) embody Indian characters con- tributes, at the level of performance, to the visual trope of the ‘‘vanishing Indian.’’ These actors—whose ‘‘whiteness’’
is consolidated through their performance of a racialized Race and Ethnicity
Other—provide a point of identification for white viewers but not for people of color. Similarly, many films that explicitly address issues of cultural difference—such as Dances with Wolves(1990)—provide a white protagonist as a focal character whose point of view anchors and guides white viewers. Frequently, no such focal character is avail- able for minority viewers in mainstream Hollywood films.
‘‘Image studies,’’ or the practice of examining stereo- types, is an important form of analysis but it has limita- tions. Film scholars Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have described the difficulty of comparing stereotypes to an external reality (which is impossible to define without resorting to essentialist notions of the typical) as well as the need to consider broader politics of film style; race- based casting; genre conventions other than realism (such as parody or other modes of address); historical, cultural, and production contexts; and other mediating issues. They suggest considering race and ethnicity as discourse-based, in the sense of competing voices in specific historical and cultural contexts. This ‘‘relational’’ model reveals the func- tions of race and ethnicity even in films that suppress the constitutive role of race in American culture. Further, it opens our analytic horizons beyond the singular, character- based stereotype, allowing us to study a range of issues
related to hybridity and syncretism in film marketing, distribution, exhibition, and spectatorship.
RECEPTION, SPECTATORSHIP, AND OPPOSITIONAL CINEMAS
For more than a half century, segregated theaters pro- foundly affected the participation of African Americans in the film industry as both producers and viewers. The US Supreme Court ruled to allow state-legislated segrega- tion in theaters in 1883, and the earliest nickelodeons inherited the practice of segregation by race from vaude- ville theaters. Theaters enforced segregation by time (showing films for African American audiences late at night), by section, entrance (seating African American viewers in the balcony), and by neighborhood, with black-only theaters serving patrons in African American neighborhoods, especially in northern cities. As early as 1909, some theaters were already serving African American patrons only, but overall these viewers remained under- served—for example, there were about one hundred black- only theaters nationally in that decade, compared to ten thousand theaters for whites. Black-only theaters were more run down than white theaters and usually showed Disney’sPocahontas(1995) seeks to deepen the stereotyped representations of the Indian princess.EVERETT COLLECTION.
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
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