The Misrepresentation Of Native Americans In Video Games

The Misrepresentation of Native Americans in Video Games

It has been a while since a movie depicting wrongful images of Native American has been developed. This would continuously happen about 70 years ago in cookie cutter Western films in which Indians would often be represented as barbaric, savage, and non-human. With time, these films became bland and repetitive; as a result of this, less and less money was profited with every passing Western film made. Propitiously enough we have abandoned this form of filmmaking and although Native Americans still don’t receive the ideal representation in Western movies, they are no longer presented as the villain all the time. There has recently been a resurgence of this treatment of Indians within

Western-themed video games. Although some might believe that developers produce these games because they’re under the misconception that Native Americans no longer exist or because they don’t care for Indians, that’s not the reason for the creation of these video games.

Native Americans are currently exploited in Western video games for the following reasons; developers don’t care enough about Native Americans, this group of people doesn’t have a backbone of support like other ethnic groups, the games would create just enough controversy for free publicity to be provided by the media but not enough to take it off the shelves, and because the release of Custer’s Revenge was all together able to prove this.

When the first Western Films were released at the beginning of the 20th century, most were characterized by dramatic scenes of fights between Native Americans and Anglo men. There was much more stereotyping of Native Americans in these films than can be described as simply black and white. Most of the time Native Americans were depicted as savages, something less than human; while white men represented the unbreakable macho. One movie which perfectly demonstrates this is Lesley Selander’s Tomahawk Trail. In this 1957 Western film, Cavalry veteran Sgt. Wade McCoy (Chuck Connors) butts heads with his new supervisor Lt. Jonathan Davenport (George Neise) over criticism of his experience on the dangerous road known as

“Tomahawk Trail”. This is one of the many old time Western Movies where a white man goes against all odds to become the hero and where Indians are presented as the villains. In this film, the Apache Indians begin a series of raids on a cavalry outpost, steal all the horses from a regiment, and slaughter many people; Dr. Peter C. Rollins describes it as “… a classic Western formula; it talks about Indian ferocity; it talks about Apache Atrocities.” Right at the beginning of the film we witness Apache warriors ambushing cavalry men and taking everything they have. The first lines of the Tomahawk Trail are literally as follows, “Lieutenant Murrymen was dead; the brains cooked out of his skull over an Apache torture fire…”; the film makes no attempt to buffer its description of Native Americans in any fashion. On the other end we have Sgt. Wade McCoy who takes over the cavalry after Lt. Jonathan Davenport falls ills; during the first battle he’s able to fight off all the Indians attacking him with ease and capture two women in the process. Oddly enough, most of these Indians which made the attack are killed off with their very own axe which the cavalry men took away with ease. It would be thought that Native Americans would at least be depicted as experts when it came to knife battles. Defying all odds, Sgt. McCoy is able to keep his men alive throughout the journey and reach Fort Bowie only to find that everyone has been slaughtered by the Apache. He repairs the fort and somehow knows exactly what must be done to survive; its like nothing can go wrong for the white man. After being ambushed from behind by an Indian, McCoy is not only able to fight him off, but one other Indian as well. The Apache finally ambush Fort Bowie; they have men jumping the fence,

shooting lit arrows and wielding axes but somehow still end up losing to McCoy and his men.

There is no such thing as a good Apache for the cavalry men, so they take down every Indian in sight.

Sgt. McCoy ends up saving the cavalry and winning the hand of Ellen Carter, an ex Indian prisoner. In the process of doing so, McCoy only loses around 5 men throughout the entire movie while numerous Native Americans lives are lost. The only thing this movie does to positively represent Indians is in the way they show how Tula, the chiefs daughter, keeps her word in not making any noise as she’s with the cavalry. Besides that, If I was someone who didn’t know what Native Americans were nor what they were like, I wouldn’t believe them to be human beings after watching this

film.