"The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs this month passed a resolution apologizing to all Indian nations for violence perpetrated by citizens of the United States of America. The resolution said nothing about all the Indians killed in Western films.

"Hollywood movies about Indians are dependent upon the Indians dying; there's no other story line for us," said filmmaker Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapaho), who is known for his contemporary pictures Smoke Signals, The Doe Boy, and the television adaptations of the Tony Hillerman mysteries A Thief of Time and Skinwalker. "It's not a story line that will ever go away because it's a genre that's part of our American history, and we love the telling of it in a romantically tragic way. It's almost like Greek tragedy, whether it's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dances With Wolves, or The Searchers. It's all about, 'Indians have to die, and isn't that romantic?' That's a perverse ideology in our cinema."

Eyre is one of several Native scholars and filmmakers who spoke to Pasatiempo about how Hollywood has depicted Indians in Westerns. Today, contemporary Indian filmmakers produce pictures that tell topical stories about their culture and people, like Sterlin Harjo's Barking Water, a sensitive drama about a Native man's last journey. That film plays as part of the Native Cinema Showcase at the Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque this weekend.

But Harjo, like Eyre, still works outside the mainstream, relegated to the independent-film market with most Indian filmmakers — and non-Indian filmmakers who present fresh takes on Native cultures. In this latter category is Kevin Willmott, who shot the offbeat indie film The Only Good Indian, a revisionist Western of sorts that stars Cherokee actor and Santa Fe resident Wes Studi. Studi plays a bounty hunter who strives to be white but moves back toward his own culture as he befriends his Native captive and eludes a racist sheriff. The picture is playing the film-festival circuit."

Get the Story:
Killing the white man's red man (The Santa Fe New Mexican 8/21)