In this essay, I would like to talk about the “White Indian,” first in Hollywood films, but more significantly, beyond. Hollywood films like Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990), similarly, give expression to the white desire to “become Indian” through idealized stories of whites who assimilate to native ways. Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), based on the Thomas Berger novel, portrays the Cheyenne as the good guys and the U.S. Army soldiers as the villains. The narration contrasts largely symbolic Indigenous style of warfare with the massive violence of western-style warfare, asking the question: where is the courage when one side has all of the weapons? The film stages a paradigmatic recognition scene found in many of the White Indian films, the scene where the indigenized white is at first misrecognized as Indian by fellow whites and then exposed. The film draws subliminal allegorical parallels between the U.S. cavalry invading Indian country with the U.S. military invading Vietnam, an equation made almost explicit in real life through soldierly colloquialisms describing Vietnam as “Injun Country.” Just as the Dustin Hoffman character was siding with the Indigenous enemy in the movie theatres, anti-war protestors were chanting “Ho, ho, ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win” in the streets, and hundreds of U.S. towns and cities were signing Peace Treaties with the Vietnamese.
Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves offers another “White Indian” in the form of U.S. Army Lieutenant John Dunbar, who joins the Lakota in their struggle. He begins by respecting the “enemy” and ends up taking their side. The character becomes Indian, but only in order to rediscover his implicitly white “true self.” In the “misrecognition” scene where he is captured by his own people, the military first think he’s an Indian, and when they discover he is not, remark: “turned Injun, didn’t you … I don’t know whether to salute him or shoot him!” The film’s final intertitles inform the spectator of the historical outcome, the closing of the frontier in 1893. The net effect is a past-tense compliment, an elegy for a vanished civilization. The film also falls into the old Manichean trap of binaristic oppositions, not only the good Dunbar versus the bad whites, but also the good Sioux versus the bad Pawnee. With all its innovations, its positive portrayals and tributes to Indigenous dignity, the film is ultimately all about the white “us,” and only secondarily about the Indigenous “them.” Dunbar is in some ways, if not better, at least as good as the Indigenous warriors, who are relegated to supporting roles. The racial transformations are asymmetrical: the white men can become Indians and thus ennobled, but Indians cannot become White without losing their dignity and their souls.