The Hollywood Indian

This past week we watched a film in class titled "Reel Injun". For the most part, this film focused on how media has portrayed the Native people, and how this has affected the way society looks at the individuals. It covered topics ranging from how these people dress, how they talk, what they do, and just how they live in general. It was very interesting to see some of the things that many people believe to be true about Native American's actually be nothing but myths created by the media, and it was very surprising to see how many of these things I actually believed to be true just because I was so used to the ways that the media portrayed these people.

Probably the biggest thing that this film showed me was how much the media created an Identity in a way for all Native American's through clothing. The media created this "Identity" by generalizing all Native people and tribes and creating one specific look to represent basically all tribes, regardless of how they actually dressed. One of the big identifying factors that was created for male native people was the idea that all men wore huge, feathered headdresses similar to the one pictured below. Although there were some native tribes and individuals who did wear these headdresses, the media made it seem like it was a universal trait for all native men, even though it was actually fairly uncommon. Another trait about native people that has been created by the media is the idea that all native women wear headbands similar to the one in the picture below. Hollywood used these headbands originally as a way for actresses to keep wigs from falling off of their heads, and this trait ended up sticking and becoming another one of the ways that the media generalized the native population even though it was a trait that very few native people actually possessed. Although this information may seem insignificant to some, it just goes to show how much power the media truly has on topics such as this, and how media can completely generalize a population and create an image that is completely untrue about this population but still spread this image to millions of people with ease.