A still from the film “White Fawn’s Devotion.”
Boy Scouts battle Indians over a hidden treasure in the 1939 film “Scouts to the Rescue.” The Indians speak perfect English if you play the film backward. The director reversed the footage of Native American dialogue, creating a new language that lip-syncs with the actors.
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Such blatant cultural indifference hasn’t receded into the past, said Richard King, professor and chair of WSU’s Comparative Ethnic Studies Department. It has just become more subtle.
“ ‘Dances with Wolves’ ends with the Sioux being crushed and fading into history. ‘Pocohontas’ ends with her sacrificing herself for English society. ‘Last of the Mohicans’ is about the noble savage who can’t survive in civilization,” said King, who this fall is teaching a new online course, CES 379: Native Americans in Film.
“If it seems inevitable that they’re doomed to pass underneath the treads of civilization, then we don’t feel quite so bad about what actually happened.”
This sense of manifest destiny pervades many films, King said. Students in the three-credit course will analyze those movies and examine the roles Native Americans played as writers, directors and actors.
The course includes threaded discussions and group projects.
“I have used student blogging before,” King said, “and I found the new media to be an excellent space for more open expression and deeper exploration.”
Going online created some copyright issues, said Rebecca Van de Vord, Distance Degree Programs instructional designer.
“There are many movies we can’t put online without paying copyright fees, which get passed on to the students,” she said.
The solution was two-fold. Students will rent some movies “Dances with Wolves” and “Smoke Signals,” for example. Other movies are in the public domain and can be viewed online for free “White Fawn’s Devotion,” for example, and “Battle of Elderbush Gulch.”
“It was a pretty seamless transition” to move the course online, King said. “Rebecca was very good at keeping me on task.”
King brings extensive expertise to the course. His research into the racial politics of culture has appeared in a variety of journals, and he is the author or editor of several books, including “Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.”
He recently completed “Native American Athletes in Sport and Society” and “The Encyclopedia of Native Americans and Sport.”
“As a child, I was a YMCA Indian Guide and Boy Scout,” King said. “I played cowboys and Indians and rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs.”
He became interested in Native American issues in high school, when he learned about Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement. King went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kansas.
“It was not until graduate school at the University of Illinois, home of the Fighting Illini and Chief Illiniwek, that I began to come to terms with the ways in which Euro-Americans misinterpreted indigenous peoples,” he said.
“It became a passion that has expanded past the controversy over Native American mascots to include such issues as the debate over “squaw” place-names, indigenous rap music and the distinct ways that whiteness, blackness and Indianness are given expression in sports.”
