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Dances with Wolves is a popular movie that purports to portray first contacts between Euro-Americans, in the person of a U.S. army officer, and Indians of the western Plains-Pawnees and Sioux. This movie, with its epic landscapes, beautiful Indians, personal heroism, and new age hero, evoked in viewers the dream of seeing the pristine world of Aboriginal or Native people. The movie makers created these evocative images by recreating and playing upon images of Indian-ness that are old indeed. Within this single film we see "bad" and "good" Indians all living in a western Eden, and all doomed by the inevitable expansion of European civilization. On one level, Dances with Wolves works precisely because stereotypes are at work.
The persistence of these stereotypes makes it difficult for non-Natives to consider Native peoples as modern peoples. Sometimes they make it difficult even for Native people themselves to disentangle issues of their own identities from the pervasive stereotypes about Indian-ness.
It is ironic that most North Americans know that Native people today-most Native people- aren't like those people of the old days-though they may not know that Native people weren't necessarily like that in the old days either. Horses became associated with some Native Americans only a few centuries ago, and the majority of Native peoples on this continent never acquired them. But to the contemporary general public, the image of Native Americans is indelibly linked to horses. They find it difficult to conceive of Native Americans, or "Indians," being the real thing if they spend most of their lives working in offices, for example, or driving trucks, or teaching school-doing a number of other things that never involve a horse, or feathers, or beads.
But although we know Indian cultures have changed greatly, this image of Indian-ness has resisted change. To assist in the classroom, I have begun to develop a teaching collection about stereotypes. Toys are the most obvious category. Children's toys are serious business. They are an important vehicle for the transmission of images of Indian-ness, and the popular culture about Indians, from one generation to another. Children learn about "Indians" from an astonishingly early age, through things they see and the toys they play with. The classic example is that of cowboys and Indians, who are always posed as total opposites, usually fighting each other. Not just any kind of "Indian" will do. They are always Plains Indians, typically Sioux-the Indians of Dances with Wolves, the classic Indians of the stereotype.
A recent counterpoint in the toy department to the heavy emphasis on the Plains stereotype is the enormous amount of Pocahontas material, inspired by the recent Disney movie. The Powhatan, Pocahontas' people, lived on the east coast. They supported themselves mostly by farming, with some hunting and picking of wild plants. One of my favorite toys is a Pocahontas sunflower seed planting kit, which is actually a good representation of genuine Native cultures. Historically, most Native peoples of North America supported themselves primarily by agriculture, not by hunting. Yet the Pocahontas toys do not pose a serious challenge to the dominant stereotype of the plains hunter, in part because they are marketed primarily to little girls, whose activities and interests tend to be marginalized when compared to those of boys.
The negative and positive stereotypes found in the toys all distort the reality of Native peoples. Stereotypes about Indian-ness create enormous expectations that most people simply cannot meet-nor should they have to. Yet the stereotypes, which are based in images of Indian-ness that were wrong even in the 19th century still influence how people regard Natives today.
If the stereotype is wrong, what is right? In particular, what does it mean to be a modern Native person? The very term "modern" is a problematic one, in that "modernity" has been defined from a decidedly European slant. Native people who "became modern" were expected to give up ways of life that Europeans defined as "primitive" and adopt instead European ways of life, in a process called assimilation. But Indians who did change their former ways of making a living, organizing their communities, and substituting imported objects for their previous material culture were often seen as relinquishing that distinctive group of traits that made them distinctive Native peoples.
In Native Studies, we reject the European definition of modernity. Moving beyond the stereotypes and defining what is still essential to the identities of Native peoples and their communities is not a simple task. Identity is not necessarily visible, nor is it particularly intuitive, which is one reason for the continued popularity of Indian stereotypes-they are easy, even mindless. To move past them requires more complex analysis and a determination to challenge the "common sense" of popular culture.
Considering Native identities in terms of the ways that Native peoples live and think of themselves is the key. For example, we can turn the cowboys and Indians stereotype on its head by looking at Indian cowboys. Many Native people became successful ranchers and cowboys in both Canada and the U.S. Yet being a cowboy didn't alter their Native identities. For instance, a Blackfoot cowboy still speaks Blackfoot, uses his horses and cattle to support his traditional obligations within the Blackfoot social community, and attends sweats and sundances. While he may look like all the other cowboys of the Fort Macleod area, he is still culturally distinctive-and modern.
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