Passing the Buckskin Part II: The Buckskin Stops Here

In the U.S., anti-miscegenation laws were once enacted by individual states to prohibit interracial marriage or interracial sex, particularly race mixing between black people and whites. The term "miscegenation" was first used in 1863 during the Civil War by journalists who hoped to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up controversy over the prospect of interracial marriage following the end of slavery.

Anti-miscegenation legislation was a part of American law in some states before the United States was established, as early as 1691 in some colonies, and remained enforced until ruled unconstitutional in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Virginia law was amended in 1705 to remove "Indian-white" from the prohibition. Years later, Thomas Jefferson's policy for dealing with Native Americans was "to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and to become one people."

Unfortunately, Mr. Jefferson's sentiment was overlooked by Hollywood filmmakers and TV producers, who have long cast white actresses as American Indians, more often than not to avoid depicting - God forbid - a relationship between a Native American woman and a white cowboy or cavalryman.

This is not unlike blackface entertainers in old-time minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville. Or yellow-face performances by white actors as Oriental characters: Boris Karloff as Chinese master criminal Fu Manchu, Peter Lorre as Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto, and Warner Oland and Sidney Toler as detective Charlie Chan. In motion pictures since the silent era, Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American movie star, suffered the biggest disappointment in her career when she was passed over for the role of the Chinese farmer's wife, O-Lan, in 1937's "The Good Earth" in favor of Viennese actress Luis Rainier.

Ruth Hopkins, a Native American activist of Wahpeton, Dakota, and Lakota heritage, utilized the term "red-face" when referring to the casting of white performers as American Indians. She said, "If non-Natives dress up as Natives, its red-face." With that in mind, let's get back to the buckskin runway and see what else our actress are dressed up as.

Actually, some of the earliest depictions of Native Americans on film were silent documentary-like shorts, such as tribal dances or, as shown below, 1912's "A Sioux Wedding."

Also from 1912, "The Heart of an Indian" was one of the earliest attempts at casting white actors as Native Americans, including Ann Litte, the daughter of a northern California rancher, as Ravenwing and Francis Ford, elder brother of famed director John Ford, as Chief Mountain Rock (pictured below).

Two things 1950's "Broken Arrow" had going for it is that there were really two historical figures named Tom Jeffords, a U.S. Army Scout and Indian agent, and Cochise, a leader of the Chiricahua Apache. The film is otherwise a fictionalized dramatization of their friendship and Jeffords' efforts to broker a peace in the Indian wars in Arizona territory. James Stewart offered his typical, down-to-earth persona of the frontier Everyman as Jeffords, while Jeff Chandler, born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, brought his piercing eyes, prominent cheekbones, and sonorous voice to the role of the Apache chief. Ironically or not, Chandler received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Debra Paget, the daughter of an ambitious stage mother and former burlesque entertainer, whose most memorable role was Lili the water bearer who falls in love with John Derek's Joshua in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments," appeared as Sonseeahray (pictured below), a young Apache who falls in love with Jeffords and marries him in an Apache ceremony.

Debra Paget returned to the role of a Native American in 1955's "White Feather," which, like "Broken Arrow," offered a sympathetic portrayal of Indians ("Broken Arrow" director Delmer Daves scripted "White Feather"), although one would be hard pressed to find a pair of whiter actors than Jeffrey Hunter and Hugh O'Brian to play Cheyenne warriors Little Dog and American Horse. Hunter offered a memorable characterization as hotheaded Martin Pawley in John Ford's "The Searchers," with John Wayne, while O'Brian starred for several seasons as the stalwart lawman in the series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp." Paget portrayed Little Dog's sister, Appearing Day, torn between betrothal to American Horse and her affection for civilian surveyor Josh Tanner (Robert Wagner).

Debra Paget, wearing a non-traditional torpedo bra, is
joined on-location for "White Feather" by the daughter
of the governor of Durango, Mexico, Matilde Rosas.

Jeff Chandler, by the way, repeated his role as Cochise, the wise Apache chief, in 1952's "The Battle at Apache Pass," a fictionalized account of historical confrontations during the Apache Wars. In 1954, Chandler portrayed Cochise on his death bed in 1954's "Taza, Son of Cochise," a pro-Indian western with white actors playing Native Americans, including Rock Hudson in the title role. Hudson had played an Indian warrior named Young Bull in his third motion picture, 1950's "Winchester '73," starring James Stewart. Oona, Taza's betrothed, was portrayed by Barbara Rush, who was a regular on the series "Peyton Place" in the late 1960s.

Rock Hudson and Barbara Rush play dress-up
as Native Americans in "Taza, Son of Cochise."

"The Big Sky," produced and directed by Howard Hawks ("Red River," "Rio Bravo") in 1952, was something of an anomaly in Hollywood in its casting of Elizabeth Coyote Threatt (pictured below), whose father was a Cherokee Indian employed by the U.S. Army, as the daughter of a Blackfoot chief whom a band of fur trappers hope to return to her tribe in the Yellowstone River territory of 1832. On the expedition, rival fur traders Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin (who costarred in the Hawks-produced "The Thing from Another World") vie for Threatt's affection.

Elizabeth Threatt, whose dialogue in "The Big Sky" was spoken in a Native American language, left motion pictures and acting after this sole film appearance.

The year 1952 also brought to the screen "Hiawatha," a low-budget interpretation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha," which delineated the tragic love between an Ojibwe warrior and a Dakota woman, Minnehaha (whose name means "laughing water"). Supposedly based on visits with an Ojibwe chief, along with Sauk warrior Black Hawk and other Sac and Hawk Indians, Longfellow maintained, "I can give chapter and verse for these legends. Their chief value is that they are Indian legends." He set the poem at what became Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, on the southern shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's upper peninsula.

The screen version of "Hiawatha" was directed by Kurt Neumann, who made three of Johnny Weissmuller's latter "Tarzan" movies as well as the cult sci-fi production of 1958's "The Fly." Vince Edwards, the Brooklyn-born son of an Italian-American bricklayer who would achieve prime-time TV fame as the burly, idealistic neurosurgeon on the series "Ben Casey" from 1961 to 1966, was cast as Hiawatha (pictured above), while the role of his beloved Minnehaha went to French actress Yvette Dugay (pictured below), who came from a family of Marseilles wine merchants.

In 1997, Showtime and Hallmark Entertainment produced the movie "Song of Hiawatha," starring Litefoot (born Gary Paul Davis), a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma who played Little Bear in the charming 1995 family fantasy "The Indian in the Cupboard." In a cast that included Native American actors Graham Greene, Russell Means, and Adam Beach, Minnehaha was portrayed by Irene Bedard (pictured below, with Litefoot), who provided the voice for Pocahontas in Disney's animated feature "Pocahontas" and it's direct-to-video sequel, as well as playing Pocahontas' mother in the live-action "The New World." She is of Inupiat, Yupik, Inuit, Cree, and Métis lineage.

Pocahontas (born as Matoaka and otherwise known as Amonute) was the daughter of Powhatan, the chief of an alliance of Algonquian-speaking Virginia Indians, whose friendship with Jamestown settler John Smith, folklore has it, led to a 1607 confrontation that resulted in her offering her own neck on an Indian execution block intended for Smith. If true, John Smith's account would make Pocahontas a 10-year-old. Smith also related another story about being rescued from certain death in 1602 by a Turkish girl. And, in his recollection, there was even a third female who saved his life.

What is factual is that Pocahontas was held for ransom by the British during hostilities in 1613, after which she converted to Christianity and adopted the name Rebecca. She married tobacco planter John Rolfe and traveled to London, where she gained celebrity as a "civilized savage." Planning on a return voyage to Virginia, Pocahontas died at Gravesend, an old town in northwest Kent, England, at the relatively young age of 20 or 21.

The first major motion picture to depict the legend of the young woman from the Tsenacommacah homeland was 1953's "Captain John Smith and Pocahontas," from a script cooked up by a writing team responsible for such literary-historical mash-ups as "Sons of the Musketeers," "Lady in the Iron Mask," "Island of Monte Cristo," "Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl," "Return to Treasure Island," and "Son of Sinbad." Jody Lawrance, a Texas native who attended Beverly Hills High School and was Marilyn Monroe's stepsister, portrayed Pocahontas (pictured below).

Jody Lawrance dyed her own hair black for her role as
Pocahontas and ended up suffering a terrible allergic
reaction, but she persevered through the production.

In 1995, the modest Canadian production "Pocahontas: The Legend" beat Disney's animated feature "Pocahontas" to theaters by three weeks. Miles O'Keeffe, Bo Derek's leading man in "Tarzan, the Ape Man," was cast as John Smith, while the title role went to Sandrine Holt (pictured below). Holt, the daughter of a Chinese father and French mother, made an auspicious film debut in 1991's "Black Robe" as a young Algonquin attracted to a French explorer. She portrayed an Easter Island native in 1994's "Rapa Nui," produced by Kevin Costner and directed by Kevin Reynolds ("Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," "Hatfields & McCoys").

Disney's 1995 "Pocahontas" presented a fairy tale depiction of Native Americans living in edenic harmony with the forest and its adorable, cuddly creatures before the Europeans arrive to prove who the real savages are. Beyond that, the movie propagates myth over historical facts (not unlike George Washington chopping down the cheery tree or Daniel Boone wrestling a bear rasslin' a bar) in its recounting of Pocahontas' love for John Smith, while in reality, it was tobacco grower John Rolfe who wooed and wed Chief Powhatan's daughter.

Mel Gibson performed the voice of John Smith, David Ogden Stiers was the ruthless, greedy governor of the white settlement, Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means provided the voice of Powhatan, Christian Bale performed as a fictional friend of Smith, and Linda Hunt did the voice of a talking willow tree. To its credit, it was the first Disney animated picture to feature an interracial romance. Pocahontas was voiced by Anchorage, Alaska-born Irene Bedard (pictured below), who claims Inupiat, Yupik, Inuit, Cree, and Métis ancestry. She also served as the character's physical model for animators.

The "big picture," according to Roger Ebert, "is that Pocahontas,
raised in communion with nature, can help John Smith free himself
of the moral constipation of European civilization...Since these
lessons are taught by an Indian maiden with a waist-length mane
of black hair, an hourglass figure and a Playmate face, John Smith's
heart finds it easy to listen, and soon he is singing a new hymn
to the new land."

Three years later, Disney's direct-to-video sequel, "Pocahontas II: Journey to a  New World," continued its presentation of indigenous people and European interlopers alike as angular, square-jawed paragons, finally depicting the marriage of John Rolfe (voiced by"Titanic" schnook Billy Zane) and Pocahontas and her subsequent voyage to England as a "princess" with the anglicized name Rebecca, although politely omitting details of her questionable death from such conjectured maladies as pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculosis, even poison.

This time around, John Smith was voiced by Mel Gibson's kid brother Donal Gibson (who had supporting roles in Mel's "Maverick," "Braveheart," and "Conspiracy Theory"), while Billy Zane voiced John Rolfe. David Ogden Stiers, Russell Means, and Linda Hunt repeated their original voice performances, and Irene Bedard reprised her role as Pocahontas.

In 2005, Irene Bedard portrayed Pocahontas' mother in "The New World," an intelligent, beautifully crafted re-examination of the contact between the European settlers of Jamestown and the indigenous people of Virginia, written and directed by Terrence Malick, a maverick filmmaker responsible for two of the best motion pictures of the 1970s, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," as well as the astounding, mind-boggling "The Tree of Life" from 2011, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.

Q'orianka Kilcher was 14 when she was cast as Pocahontas
(in a leather halter top?) in "The New World."

Colin Ferrell played John Smith, with Christian Bale as John Rolfe, Christopher Plummer as Captain Newport, August Schellenberg (an actor of Mohawk and Swiss-German descent best known for his role as the orca's keeper, Randolph Johnson, in the "Free Willy" movies) as Powhatan, and Wes Studi as Powhatan's half-brother. Q'orianka Kilcher, who portrayed Pocahontas, is of Peruvian Quechua-Huachipaeri heritage on her father's side and Swiss-German descent on her mother's.

Pocahontas tends to John Smith in "The New World."

What Malick brought to the story, having stripped away, in Roger Ebert's phrasing, "the fancy and the lore," was a heretofore unseen re-envisioning of "how new and strange these people must have seemed to each other. Malick," Ebert wrote, "strives throughout his film to imagine how the two civilizations met and began to speak when they were utterly unknown to one another...it is crucial to 'The New World' that it does not know what history holds."

"Chief Crazy Horse," a 1955 biopic of the Oglala Lakota leader who took a leading role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the demise of George Armstrong Custer, played fast and loose with history, with Hollywood beefcake Victor Mature ("Samson and Deliliah") in the title role. Director George Sherman's Hollywood career included cranking out countless B-westerns until his final, big-budget swan song, 1971's "Big Jake," starring John Wayne, Richard Boone, and Maureen O'Hara.

Suzan Ball, a second cousin of Lucille Ball, portrayed Crazy Horse's bride, Black Shawl (pictured below). In 1953, Ball played the daughter of a Seminole chief in "War Arrow," also directed by George Sherman. Sadly, at a young age, Ball had a leg amputated because of cancerous tumors. She used crutches and an artificial limb, but the cancer had spread to her lungs, and she died at the age of 21 in April 1955, four months after the release of "Chief Crazy Horse."

Where did these women find eyeliner, eyebrow pencils, and lipstick?

"The Far Horizons" (1955) was a fanciful dramatization of Lewis and Clark's historic expedition of the early 1800s to survey the territory the U.S., under President Thomas Jefferson, had recently acquired in the Louisiana Purchase from France. Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston portrayed the level-headed Meriwether Lewis and the hot-headed William Clark as quarrelsome friends and frequent romantic rivals.

Famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth depicted Sacagawea guiding
Lewis and Clark in this 1940 painting.

Historically, the 17-year-old Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone living with her husband, a French trapper, in a Siouan village in the middle of what became North Dakota, traveled with the expedition over thousands of miles, helping the explorers establish cultural understanding with the indigenous populations. Fictitiously, director Rudolph Maté ("The 300 Spartans") cast Iowa-born Methodist Donna Reed as Sacagawea. Sure, she played a "nightclub hostess" in 1953's "From Here to Eternity" (in James Jones' novel, the character was a prostitute - a no-no in '50s Hollywood), but come on, she was the epitome of a white-bread housewife in "It's a Wonderful Life" and in her own '60s sitcom "The Donna Reed Show."

Slather on skin-darkening greasepaint and plop on a pig-tailed wig
wig, and you get Donna Reed as a Shoshone pathfinder, cuddling
with Charlton Heston at Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park.

The moviemakers included a nonexistent romance between Clark and Sacagawea - which was OK by '50s standards because she was played by Donna Reed, and you can't get any whiter than that - which was ludicrous anyway, since Sacagawea's husband, Toussaint Charbboneau, accompanied the expedition, and she was expecting their first child.

In 1971, on the CBS historical dramatization series "You Are There," hosted by venerable news anchor Walter Cronkite, a half hour devoted to the Lewis and Clark Expedition featured Tenaya Torres as Sacagawea. The little-known actress earned a niche in television advertising lore as the Native American spokeswoman for cholesterol-free Mazola Corn Oil commercials in the early '70s (pictured below), noted for the catchphrase, "You call it corn, we call it maize."

"You Are There" would always conclude with Walter Cronkite ominously intoning, "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those elements that alter and illuminate our times...all things are as they were then, and you were there." From the 1970s into the 2010s, Tenaya Torres appeared in bit roles as a Native Americans or Mexicans in television films and movies.

Mention of the Mazola ads can't help but bring to mind the packaging of dairy products processed and distributed by the Minnesota-based agricultural cooperative Land O' Lakes (pictured below).

The original logo figure for Land O' Lakes butter was dubbed Mia, painted in 1928 by St. Paul publishing company illustrator Arthur C. Hanson. In 1939, Mia was "simplified and modernized" by commercial illustrator Jess Betlach. Red Lake Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait, who created the comical animated bear for Hamm's Brewery commercials, simplified and modernized Mia's image in the 1950s. The image on the package is an example of the infinite loop of the Droste effect, in which the picture is repeated within itslef.

But we digress. The only other significant portrayal of Sacagawea in movies after "The Far Horizons" was her appearance as a diorama exhibit come-to-life in the 2006-2014 trilogy of "Night at the Museum" comedies, featuring Ben Stiller as the night security guard at a natural history museum where the exhibits become real after hours. The combined box office of the three films is over $1.35 billion. They were all directed by Shawn Levy. As a fledgling actor, Levy made his screen debut as an arrogant teen who gets impaled by a baseball bat wielded by an undead hulk in 1986's "Zombie Nightmare," which was mercilessly riffed apart on "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

Mizuo Peck was cast as Sacagawea in the "Night at the Museum" pictures (pictured above, between scenes). Her father is of British and Irish descent, her mother has Japanese ancestry.

In the "Night at the Museum" films, Sacagawea was amorously pursued by the reanimated wax figure of Theodore Roosevelt, played by Robin Williams (pictured above). As President of the U.S., Teddy was anything but fond of Native Americans, systematically uprooting them from their homelands to make room for national parks. In a January 1886 speech, he said "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are. And I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

"The Story of Mankind" was a notoriously awful, all-star historical epic staged in 1957 by producer-director Irwin Allen, the man who brought "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" and "Lost in Space" to TV and became known as the "Master of Disaster" for producing "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno." The cast of those who should've known better included 43-year-old Hedy Lamar as 19-year-old Joan of Arc, Dennis Hopper as Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter Lorre as Nero, John Carradine as an Egyptian pharaoh, and Vincent Price as the Devil.

Groucho Marx appeared as a cigar-smoking, wisecracking Peter Minuit, the 17th-century Dutch colonist who bought the site of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians for $24. Groucho's brief contribution to the hokey production featured a leggy Native American named Laughing water whose mini-skirted getup is straight out of '30s burlesque. She was played by Eden Hartford (pictured below, with Groucho), a Mormon from Utah who was Groucho's third wife at the time.

In separate scenes from their brother Groucho, Chico Marx played
a friar trying to convince Christopher Columbus the world is flat,
and Harpo Marx played Isaac Newton in "The Story of Mankind."

Just to show audiences that Hollywood, U.S.A. wasn't the only dream factory dressing up Anglos as American Indians, West Germany cranked out several movies based on stories and novels written by German author Karl May from 1875 to 1910, featuring Winnetou, an Apache chief, and his white blood brother, Old Shatterhand. From 1962 to 1968, 17 movies were made, most of them starring French actor Pierre Brice as Winnetou and Lex Barker, an expatriate American actor who starred in five "Tarzan" movies as Johnny Weissmuller's successor, as Old Shatterhand.

Pierre Brice, Karin Dor, and Lex Barker pose in one of several
Yugoslavian locations utilized in "Winnetou: Last of the Renegades."

"Winnetou: Last of the Renegades" (1964) featured German starlet Karin Dor as Ribanna, the daughter of a Nakota chief. Dor, who happened to be the director's wife, was Bond Girl Helga Brandt in 1967's "You Only Live Twice," with Sean Connery.

The supporting cast featured Klaus Kinski and, as a U.S. Cavalry officer, Mario Girotti (pictured above, with Karin Dor) before he became Terence Hill and starred in the "Trinity" western comedies.

During a too-short career of less than 30 years, superstar Steve McQueen appeared in only 29 films, 26 of them as the leading actor. Just before the arguably best role of his life, an Oscar-nominated turn as the rebellious machinist's mate in "The Sand Pebbles," McQueen starred as Max Sand, an illiterate half-breed "youth" (he was in his mid-30s when he played the part) obsessed with avenging the torture and killing of his parents by a trio of sadistic saddle tramps (portrayed by Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy, and Martin Landau) in the ambitious, near-epic 1966 western "Nevada Smith." Director Henry Hathaway was an old hand at working with western stalwarts Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne, guiding the latter to his Academy Award-winning role in 1969's "True Grit."

Janet Margolin, the New York City-born daughter of Jewish parents who made her screen debut as a young psychiatric patient with a split personality in the tender 1962 drama "David and Lisa," was cast as Neesa (pictured below), a girl from the same Kiowa tribe as Max Sand's murdered mother, who shamefully works as a saloon dancehall girl before going back to her native roots to nurse a wounded Max Sand back to health.

In Woody Allen's hilarious 1969 mockumentary "Take the Money
and Run," Janet Margolin played a laundress who falls for Allen's
inept bank robber; she later appeared briefly as an oppotunistic
wife of Woody Allen in 1977's "Annie Hall." Sadly, Janet Margolin
succumbed to ovarian cancer, age 50, in 1993.

We know this one doesn't count as an entry on our runway of Native American women in buckskin, but we felt compelled to include Don Knotts in drag from the 1968 family comedy "The Shakiest Gun in the West" (pictured below), a harmless remake of the 1948 comedy "The Paleface," with Bob Hope and Jane Russell.

"100 Rifles" (1969) was an action-packed western made by people who didn't really understand what action is. This was the fourth film with a leading role for former Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown, as an Arizona lawman who crosses the Mexican border in pursuit of a half-Yaqui Indian bank robber, played by Burt Reynolds, who has made the claim offscreen that he has Cherokee roots. His characterization of Yaqui Joe Herrera as an impertinent but comically endearing wise guy pretty much set him on track for future film roles. Raquel Welch portrayed a fiery Yaqui guerrilla named Sarita who leads her people in a rebellion against an evil Mexican general, a snide German adviser, and a duplicitous railroad executive.

Raquel Welch sports what every fashionable Yaqui Indian
should wear to a revolution; make sure the bandolier accents
your curves and don't forget to show some leg.

The much ballyhooed screen tryst between African-American Brown and the white Raquel fizzled more than it sizzled. Otherwise, the movie did feature a battle or fight every other scene, but they were sloppily executed and muddled in who-was-doing-what-to-whom logic. Director Tom Gries eventually improved in handling action sequences, as evidenced in "Breakout" and "Breakheart Pass," both with Charles Bronson.

There's that leg again, as Raquel Welch walks far
in "The Legend of Walks Far Woman."

Raquel, whose father was Bolivian and mother was of English descent, with ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, starred in the title role in the made-for-television film "The Legend of Walks Far Woman," which was shot in 1979 but not broadcast until 1982. A labor of love for Welch, whose production company helped fund the project, it was based on the true story of a Blackfoot woman in 1870's Montana who kills the two men who murdered her husband. Ostracized and banished by her people, she was adopted by the Sioux tribe of her mother and eventually married a Sioux named Horses Ghost. The real Walks Far Woman allegedly died in 1953 at the age of 102.

...Come to think of it, Raquel always seemed to have a hard
time keeping her clothes on in the Old West, as seen here in
her wardrobe for the offbeat 1971 western "Hannie Calder."
As Miss Welch once put it: "Just one more way of trying to
get 'Rocky' nude."

"Mackenna's Gold" (1969) was an absurd, poorly written, overlong bore about various factions frantically searching for the mythical Canyon of Gold, among them a stalwart marshal played by Gregory Peck, a Mexican bandit named Colorado portrayed by laughably miscast Egyptian-born Omar Sharif, and a sadistic cavalry sergeant played by Telly Savalas as if he was rehearsing his role as Bond villain Blofeld "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." Produced by Carl Foreman and directed by J. Lee Thompson in the futile hope of repeating their success when they collaborated on "The Guns of Navarone" (which also starred Peck), the picture features Ted Cassidy ("The Addams Family's" butler, Lurch) as a hatchet wielding Apache outlaw appropriately named Hachita and Julie Newmar (TV's Catwoman on "Batman") as the dangerous Apache Hesh-Ke, who has the hots for the marshal.

Such a dipping décolletage would be dubious
in the wardrobe of Native Americans, but Julie
Newmar, who was a patented lingerie designer
(she personally designed her skintight Catwoman
costume for "Batman"), was no doubt responsible.

Like the obligatory shower scene in a horror
flick, Newmar performs a gratuitous skinny-dip.
She claimed she also filmed the bit without the
superfluous loincloth, to which no one objected.

Glenn Ford, a staunch old-hand in the saddle, starred as a gunfighter-turned-preacher in 1969's "Heaven with a Gun," a routine cattlemen vs. sheepherders western. Barbara Hershey, in her second film, appeared as a young Hopi orphan named Leloopa, whose father was lynched by the town "wild mustang," played by David Carradine. In the movie, Carradine rapes Hershey; in real life, they started a domestic relationship that lasted for six years.

In "Heaven with a Gun," Leloopa takes a liking to the new
preacher in town and wants to cook and clean for him.

When an Indian woman shows up in a mini-buckskin-skirt and buckskin go-go boots, you know it's the 1970s. "Dirty Dingus Magee" (1970), touted as a raucous western comedy, featured Frank Sinatra, slathered in brown makeup for no conceivable reason and crowned with one of the most ludicrous toupees in cinema history, as a dopey, incompetent outlaw who is repeatedly at odds with his former saddle pal-turned lawman, the equally dimwitted George Kennedy. Michele Carey, basically discovered by director Howard Hawks, who cast her in his 1966 John Wayne-Robert Mitchum western "El Dorado" as a feisty tomboy with a rifle, played the chief's oversexed daughter, Anna Hot Water (pictured below). Directed by Burt Kennedy ("Support Your Local Sheriff"), "Dirty Dingus Magee" was co-scripted by Catch-22 author Joseph Heller.

At this point in his career, the 55-year-old Sinatra just didn't care about his movies and felt they were interfering with his concert venues, so he "retired" from the picture business after "Dirty Dingus Magee," returning to star in the 1977 made-for-television film "Contract on Cherry Street" and in the 1980 crime thriller "The First Deadly Sin." The word "dingus," by the way, can refer to something the name of which a person can't recall (a thingamajig) or a person who does stupid things (a spaz). In slang, it's another word for the male member.

Things got a little bit more back on the path, at least in intent, with 1970's "A Man Called Horse," starring Richard Harris as a British aristocrat on a hunting expedition in the early 19th century who is captured and treated like an animal by a Lakota Sioux tribe. His survival depends on gaining the respect of his captors while respecting, in turn, their culture, which includes participating in the painfully gruesome "Vow to the Sun" suspension ceremony (a ritual, incidentally, that the Sioux never practiced but was fabricated by the screenwriter). Most of the dialogue was in the Sioux language, without subtitles.

Judith Anderson, a venerable be-knighted British dame, portraying an aged, childless, mateless squaw who, more or less, adopts the British captive. Corrina Tsopei, a Greek model and actress, portrayed Running Deer (pictured below), the daughter of Chief Yellow Hand (played by Fijian  actor Manu Tupou), whose hand the Englishman desires in marriage.

Singer and social activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, who was born on the
Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in Saskatchewan, remarked,
"Even the so-called authentic movies like 'A Man Called Horse' -
that's the whitest of movies I've ever seen."

Richard Harris returned as the white savior of his adopted tribe in their conflict with unscrupulous trappers in 1976's "The Return of a Man Called Horse." Seven years later, in "Triumphs of a Man Called Horse," Harris reprised his role long enough to pass the torch to his son, played by Michael Beck (best known as Swan in 1979's "The Warriors"), who was raised by the Sioux.

One would be hard pressed to figure out the motivation behind the
depiction of Michael Beck's Native American companion, Redwing,
as a scantily clad "Conan" babe in not one, but several posters.

Mexican actress Ana De Sade appeared as Redwing (pictured below), a member of the Sioux's enemy, the Crow, who joins Beck's character in a showdown with greedy white gold prospectors. In "The Return of a Man Called Horse," De Sade portrayed a different Native American named Moon Star.

Ana De Sade, in - and out of - buckskin as Redwing.

In between starring roles on the series "The Six Million Dollar Man" in the early 1970s and "The Fall Guy" in the early '80s, TV actor Lee Majors really, really wanted to be a movie star. In 1978 he and then-wife Farrah Fawcett were executive producers on "The Norseman," a bargain basement-budgeted adventure starring Lee as Thorvald, an 11th century Viking in a silly raccoon-masked helmet and Errol Flynn mustache in search of his father, who, along with his crew, had been abducted and blinded by Native Americans.

The all-around cheap-looking venture was written and directed by Charles B. Pierce, a Southern independent filmmaker responsible for such '70s cult drive-in classics as"The Legend of Boggy Creek" and "The Town That Dreaded Sundown." (On a side note, as a screenwriter, Pierce contributed to the script for the 1983 "Dirty Harry" sequel "Sudden Impact" and was responsible for creating the iconic line: "Go ahead, make my day!").

Susie Coelho, a British model of East Indian and Portuguese heritage who became the third Mrs. Sonny Bono in 1983, slipped into a sexy mini-buckskin slit-skirt as the norsk-friendly Indian Winetta in "The Norseman" (pictured above).

Sonny Bono, Susie Coelho, Farrah Fawcett, and Lee Majors
are pictured in happier times. As "Susie Bono," the wannabe
starlet received fourth billing in 1984's "Breakin' 2: Electric
Boogaloo." The couple was divorced later that same year.

"The Mountain Men" (1980) was meant to be a rollicking vanishing-breed saga, featuring Charlton Heston and Brian Keith as grizzled, grumpy old beaver trappers in the early 19th century at the close of the fur trading era. They rescue a Blackfoot woman, Running Moon, from her cruel husband, Heavy Eagle (Stephen Macht), and she eventually latches onto Heston as his woman, prompting a relentlessly violent pursuit by Heavy Eagle. Although beautifully photographed in Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest and Shoshone National Park, the film, sloppily scripted by Charlton's son, Fraser Heston, suffers from inept directing and an abundance of unnecessary profanity and gore, belying its rowdy intentions.

Victoria Racimo, a New York City-born actress and equine enthusiast, played Running Moon (pictured below). In an interview, Racimo said she was Spanish and Filipino on her father's side and Irish and Lenape Indian on her mother's side. The Lenape are an indigenous people of the so-called Eastern Woodlands, from east of the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. In 2012, Racimo was hired by Steven Spielberg as a "Theater Consultant" to stage two theatrical sequences for "Lincoln."

Victoria Racimo portrayed a Native American nurse in the 1987
comedy "Ernest Goes to Camp," starring Jim Varney. For 1991's
"Ernest Scared Stupid," she was credited as an acting coach.

Kevin Costner's multi-Academy Award-winning directing debut, 1990's "Dances with Wolves" (with Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director), deserved merit in its casting of Native American actors, including Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant, Floyd Red Crow, and Wes Studi, but cultural columnist Richard Grenier took issue with the idyllic depiction of the Lakota people, accusing Costner of misrepresenting them as peaceful. Grenier pointed out that the film's "portrait of the Sioux, the most bloodthirsty of all Plains Native tribes and neither pacifists nor environmentalists, is false in every respect." Political commentator and newspaper columnist David Sirota referred to "Dances with Wolves" as another "white savior" film. "The idea is that a film like 'Dances with Wolves' cannot be bigoted or overly white-centric if it at least shows Kicking Bird and Chief Ten Bears as special and exceptional," Sirota wrote. "This, even though the whole story is about a white guy who saves the day."

"Dances with Wolves" gave Mary McDonnell her Oscar-nominated breakthrough role as Stands with a Fist (pictured below), a white woman raised since childhood by the Sioux after her parents were killed by a Pawnee party. She convincingly portrayed the difficulty and hesitation in having to relearn and speak English with Costner's character, but one thing we're left wondering is, after so many years of living with these indigenous people, how did she maintain that voluminous head of 1980's hair.

Before continuing into the relatively recent fashion trends in the depiction of Native Americans, it might be interesting to step back and take a look at how 1960s and '70s TV presented indigenous women in various western series.

On a 1965 episode of the goofy western series "F Troop," Silver Dove, the daughter of the chief of Hekawis, the opportunistic souvenir-selling tribe that neighbors the stronghold of stupidity that is Fort Courage, is kidnapped and must be rescued by the inept troopers led by con artists Sgt. O'Rourke (Forrest Tucker) and Cpl. Agarn (Larry Storch).

Looking more like a cosmeticized store mannequin than
an abducted Native American, TV actress Laurie Sibbald
portrays Silver Dove in "F Troop," with Forrest Tucker.

For those interested, this is was what Laurie Sibbald
looks like without makeup...and wardrobe.

In a 1968 episode of "Bonanza," Michael Murphy (best known for his role as an adulterous husband in director Paul Mazursky's "An Unmarried Woman," as Woody Allen's best friend in "Manhattan," and as a Democratic presidential candidate in Robert Altman's "Tanner '88") portrayed a newly hired bronc buster on the Ponderosa with a fresh Indian bride named Moon, played behind eyeliner, lip gloss and Hollywood costume shop pig-tailed wig by Dawn Wells (pictured below), a former Miss Nevada pageant winner and Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island."

The 1976 series "The Quest" featured "Escape from New York's" Kurt Russell and "Animal Houses's" Tim Matheson as brothers seeking the whereabouts of their sister, long held captive by the Cheyenne (pictured below). They crossed thousands of miles over the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains in search of her, but the series was canceled during its first season, leaving four episodes unseen and her fate unknown.

In a 1976 TV movie re-edited from the series called "The Captive: The Longest Drive 2," the brothers rescue a reluctant white woman living with Indians with her half-breed son. The woman was played by Susan Dey (pictured below), in between "The Partridge Family" and "L.A. Law."

Cher frequently mentions her Native American heritage. Her father, who got a divorce when she was ten months old, was an Armenian-American truck driver, while her mother, Georgia Holt (born Jackie Jean Crouch), claimed Irish, English, German, and Cherokee ancestry. Cher would say she was 1/16 Cherokee. On a 1968 episode of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," Cher portrayed Pocahontas in a bit with Tim Conway (pictured below).

Cher appeared as Pocahontas Pirelli in a sketch on "The Carol Burnett Show" (pictured below).

In 1973, Cher recorded the hit song "Half-Breed," written by Al Capps and Mary Dean, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. The video for the song, featuring Cher riding a horse - er, bareback - was performed in 1973 on "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour" (pictured below).

As if channeling Cher, Gwen Stefani donned Native American-inspired garb for the 2012 music video for her band No Doubt's song "Looking Hot." The video premiered November 2 and was yanked the next day amid controversy for its stereotypical depiction of American Indians.

No Doubt released a statement saying, "As a multi-racial band, our foundation is built upon both diversity and consideration for other cultures. Our intention...was never to offend, hurt or trivialize Native American people, their culture or their history. Although we consulted with Native American friends and Native American studies experts at the University of California, we realize now that we have offended people...We sincerely apologize to the Native American community...Being hurtful to anyone is simply not who we are."

The American Indian Studies Center of UCLA released an open letter to the band which pointed out "perceptions that American Indians are mere historical relics, frozen in time as stereotypically savage, primitive...and - in the case of Native women - hyper-sexualized objects to be tamed." The letter noted that the video was "rife with imagery that glorifies aggression against Indian people, and, most disturbingly, denigrates and objectifies Native women through scenes of sexualized violence." The center, however, did commend No Doubt's decision to remove the video.

Returning to the big screen, Adam Sandler, unsettlingly adopting some sort of flat, "Billy Jack" voice inflection, portrayed a white man raised by Indians in 2015's "The Ridiculous 6," the first of a four-picture deal Sandler signed with Netflix as distributor. Sandler, as "White Knife" must locate his five half-brothers to rescue their abducted outlaw father (Nick Nolte). The title is, of course a take-off on "The Magnificent Seven."

The cast of "The Ridiculous 6" poses for a family photo: (seated)
Taylor Lautner (best known as lupine shape-shifter Jacob Black in
"The Twilight Saga"), Adam Sandler, Luke Wilson; (standing) Adam
Sandler hanger-on Rob Schneider, Jorge Garcia (best known as
"Hurley" on "Lost"), and Terry Crews ("Brooklyn Nine-Nine").

The movie attracted unwanted attention when it was reported by Indian Country Today that during production, "a dozen Native American actors and actresses, as well as the Native Cultural advisor, left the set...in protest of its portrayal of the Apache culture." Ricky Lee, one of the indigenous actors in the film, said that the report was exaggerated, and there were only "four actors who left, but there were 150 extras, including grandmas and grandpas and children, who kept working." Lee's account was corroborated by a New York Daily News story.

Navajo Nation tribal members Loren Anthony and Allison Young said they walked off because they felt the picture portrayed Native Americans in a negative light and took satire too far. They also saw the portrayal of women as degrading. A Netflix representative said, "The movie has 'ridiculous' in the title for a reason...It is a broad satire of western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of - but in on - the joke."

...That must mean Jackie Sandler was in on the joke when husband
Adam cast her in the film as an Indian named Never Wears Bra.
Jackie, who married Adam in 2003, is of Italian descent.

Apparently audiences and critics alike were not "in on the joke," as the picture was universally reviled as uninspired, offensive, and remarkably humorless. Ojibwe broadcaster and activist Jesse Wente commented, "American filmmakers continue to return to indigenous people and the western as a setting for storytelling that reduces indigenous characters to props."

...One such prop is actress Julia Jones as Sandler's Indian fiancée,
named Smoking Fox. Jones, who played the shape-shifting Leah
Clearwater in the "Twilight" movies, is of English, Choctaw,
Chickasaw, and African-American descent.

According to Jesse Wente, "The awfulness of 'The Ridiculous 6' is a symbol of a genre that is beyond revision or parody...one deeply out of touch with its own history."

In 2017's "Hostiles," Christian Bale played an embittered U.S. Cavalry captain reluctantly assigned to escort a dying Cheyenne chief, Yellow Hawk (played by Cherokee actor Wes Studi), and his family from New Mexico to his ancestral home in Montana's Valley of the Bears. On the journey, the detail takes in a woman (Rosamund Pike) whose family was massacred by an Apache war party. They also pick up an imprisoned soldier in Colorado, who is to be courtmartialed and hanged en route to Montana. The picture was written and directed by Scott Cooper, whose 2009 movie "Crazy Heart" resulted in a Best Actor Oscar for Jeff Bridges.

Critic Godfrey Cheshire noted that "the film's biggest flaw lies in how
underwritten the Indian parts are. Though the venerable Wes Studi is
a commanding presence...his character is given very little shading or
dimension, and the other Indians are allowed practically none."

Q'orianka Kilcher (Pocahontas in "The New World") portrayed Elk Woman (pictured above, with Christian Bale)), the wife of Yellow Hawk's son, Black Hawk. Tanaya Beatty, who played Living Woman (pictured below, with Rosamund Pike), is of Himalayan heritage on her father's side, while her mother was descended from British Columbia's First Nations. She was adopted and raised by an Italian family.

Wes Studi believed "Hostiles" is "just another step along the way to actually getting a real Native American perspective. This story does not totally allow for that simply because it is a story about someone else. This is not an Indian film, and so many folks jump on the idea that it is an Indian film because it may have a lot of native content and subject matter...it is a film about America in 1892."


In Conclusion: No Laughing Matter

Back wen we began this long trek down the Moviehouse runway, when "Broken Arrow" was released in 1950, 20th Century Fox hired Rosebud Yellow Robe, a Native American folklorist, educator, and author to travel on a national tour to promote the movie, which the studio deemed the first major motion picture since World War II to portray Indians sympathetically.

Rosebud Yellow Robe stands between her father, Chief Chauncey
Yellow Robe, and President Calvin Coolidge, who was adopted as an
honorary member of the Sioux tribe for his support for the Indian
Citizenship Act of 1924, granting full U.S. citizenship to all Native
Americans and allowing them to retain tribal lands and cultural
rights. Chauncey dubbed Calvin "Leading Eagle."

Rosebud voiced complaints about the portrayals of American Indians to "a new generation of children learning the old stereotypes about whooping, warring Indians, as if there weren't anything else interesting about us."

Much whooping and warring came, unfortunately, in popular cartoons of the '30s and '40s, from Fleischer Studios, MGM, and Warner Bros. Popeye encountered a hulking Indian chief eager to make Olive Oyl his "squaw" in the 1938 cartoon "Big Chief Ugh-Amugh-Ugh" (pictured below).

Ten years later, in "Wigwam Whoopee," Popeye follows the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock in a rowboat to discover "Indian princess" Olive Oyl showering in a waterfall. In the inevitable confrontation with the village warriors, Popeye downs his spinach and turns his attackers into Indian-head pennies and buffalo nickels (pictured below).

In the 1944 MGM cartoon "Heel-Watha," the title Indian, unfortunately depicted with a prominent schnoz, decides to snare Screwy Squirrel (one of early cartoons' least popular recurring characters) to impress Indian princess Minnie Hot-Cha (pictured below).

The curvaceous Minnie Hot-Cha was created by Warner Bros.-MGM wild man Tex Avery, who was also responsible for the hip-shaking, eyebrow-raising antics of "Red Hot Riding Hood," "Swing Shift Cinderella," and "Little Rural Riding Hood."