Visualizing first nations

The racist discourse of Québécois nationalist Pierre Falardeau (quoted in Alioff 1994, 13) which others the Indigene nationalist as a target for violence is created and maintained, in part, through the circulation of representations that stereotype First Nations as intellectually challenged, blood-thirsty or Noble Savages, the fossilized remains of a culture that belongs to the historical past. For Ward Churchill, these types of literary and cinematic images constitute ‘fantasies of the master race’, the ironic title of his study examining the roles played by literature and cinema in the colonization of American Indians.1 In her introduction to Churchill’s book, M. Annette Jaimes characterizes such representations as ‘weapons of genocide’ (quoted in Churchill 1992, 1); they provide misinformation deforming human subjects with highly developed social, cultural, economic, agricultural and linguistic systems into non-human, primitive obstacles to colonization or settlement. The classical Hollywood western emplots genocide as a jingoistic and triumphalist narrative of conquest that gives birth to the white US nation. Although the narrative works to elide it, the film of contested ‘Indian’ nation is palpable inside the classical Hollywood western. The violence of Native Americans in classical Hollywood films, while it may be coded as a sign of savage bloodlust by the film-maker, signals an irruption of resistance to aggressive acts of invasion or settlement to the spectator who reads the screen oppositionally. Sympathetic depictions of the imperial violence waged against Amerindian nations come much later through the agency of a white character and camera eye in films such as Little Big Man (Arthur Pen 1970) and Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner 1990).

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.