The Indian

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Eva Marie Garroutte

A second constant in popular imagery of Indians is the assumption that their cultures and peoples are "vanishing"--that they have died out, or will soon do so. James Fenimore Cooper's much-loved, nineteenth-century novel, The Last of the Mohicans, and a great many romanticized, popular artworks of a related theme, depend for their poignant appeal upon this motif. See, for instance, Frederick Remington's easily recognized bronze, "The End of the Trail," which Remington described as depicting the hapless, homeless, and helpless Indian, discovering himself driven to the final, Western rim of the American continent by European expansion. A corollary of the vanishing Indian theme is the belief that there are no more "real" Indians: that those who may claim an Indian identity today have lost the culture which once distinguished them from other Americans, and their racial "authenticity" along with it.

Finally, throughout American popular culture runs a constant and pronounced fascination with the idea that non-Indians can "become" Indians. The fantasy is tirelessly replayed all the way from the earliest captivity narratives through modern movies (including such blockbusters as Little Big Man and the more recent Dances with Wolves), which frequently feature protagonists who somehow traverse the great racial divide between red and white. The New Age sensibility, which allows the overburdened, modern executive briefly to exchange his or her Fortune 500 responsibilities for a weekend spent "crying for a vision" (with the able assistance of a shaman-for-hire), is a final (and often extremely capital-intensive) culmination of this journey of the non-Indian imagination.

Clearly, the use of "the Indian" in popular culture betrays complex psychological dynamics which have manifested themselves on a national scale. No doubt the ability of "the Indian" to serve as a projection screen against which the dominant society has played out both its greatest aspirations and anxieties--whatever those implied at the moment--derives in large part from the essential emptiness of the image. As Robert Berkhofer suggested in his book, The White Man's Indian, at no time has the Indian in popular culture ever been developed into an actual person. Instead, he is invariably bereft of complexity, motive, personality, or other individualizing features. The result is an infinite possibility, a metaphor which can be employed to give substance to the most starkly diverse ideas. Because "the Indian" is simply a container to be filled with the purposes of the speaker, he can be used interchangeably as, for instance, the symbol of savagery and as the symbol of primal innocence.

The persistent themes of the vanishing Indian and of the non-Indian who becomes an Indian are a bit harder to explain than America's ability to use "the Indian" as a vehicle for exploring and communicating an enormous range of its own concerns and interests. Jack Forbes addresses this problem in his essay, "The Manipulation of Race, Caste, and Identity: Classifying AfroAmericans, Native Americans and Red-Black People." He suggests that the aforementioned themes originate in Americans' persisting knowledge of themselves as aliens in a "New World" wrested from its first inhabitants only through unspeakable violence. From the beginning of the European occupation of America, he writes, Indians "had to vanish because they were a threat or an impediment to the colonial settlers. That is, the colonial settlers could not truly become 'native' until the real natives were gone. . ." Moreover, Forbes continues, "[t]his is the most compelling reason why 'Indians' must still vanish. Their continued existence as a separate population is a constant reminder of the foreignness" of American immigrants. This theory addresses not only the enduring American fascination with the vanishing Indian, but also with the idea of "becoming" Indian. Changing one's racial identification is a way to complete the symbolic journey from conqueror to conquered and to achieve vindication for the national sins of the past.