The Silent Enemy: Representation of Native Americans

Exploring the on-screen representation of Native Americans over the course of forty years reveals varying interplays between how they see and how they are seen. The Silent Enemy, a 1930 feature-length melodrama based on detailed accounts of French missionaries, is a collaboration with Native American actors to recount Ojibwe life as it was before the arrival of European settlers. The educational short Ishi in Two Worlds relates the 1911 journey of the so-called last of the Yahi people from the Sierra foothills to the University of California Museum of Anthropology, where he lived—and was studied. In Geronimo Jones a young Papago-Apache boy torn between tradition and progress contemplates trading a tribal heirloom for a television set. Report from Wounded Knee, a fast-paced polyphonic collage of still and moving images, critiques the 1890 massacre in which three hundred Lakota people lost their lives.