Indigenous People In Popular Culture

King states: “Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. It’s the stories we tell about the past” (p. 3). Actual facts are messy- there are no clear good or bad guys. But popular Western consciousness prefers history to have dramatic flair. It’s more entertaining, memorable, and self-congratulatory that way. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if what considered to be history is based on truth and facts. Take for example the Almo Massacre (as related in King, p. 4). Written history states that this was the second largest Indian Massacre: out of three hundred Western immigrants, 295 of them were murdered by Natives (p. 4). There is even a plaque to immortalize the event and everything. The only problem being that this event didn’t actually

Well, it depends on who you ask. In the prologue to The Inconvenient Indian King states: “...but the fact of the matter is that there has never been a good collective noun [to describe Indigenous peoples] because there was never a collective to begin with” (p. xiii). I believe this is relevant to how Indigenous Peoples are portrayed in popular culture because popular culture paints all First Nations peoples as sharing a similar identity, when as was stated in class, the customs, cultural identity, and lifestyles of specific Indigenous communities depend largely on the resources found within them. Popular culture both past and present tends to ignore the diversity in cultural heritage, language, and history within and between Indigenous communities- instead favouring to paint Firsts Nations into homogenous boxes of the “noble Indian” (the hero’s sidekick), the “savage Indian” , or “a violent and bloodthirsty Indian” (p. 34). The vast majority of these Hollywood tropes contain elements of romanticization (as in the case of the “dying savage”), demonization, or eroticization. Sometimes all three. By using these tropes, pop culture paints Aboriginal people as inferior and infers that they are not to be taken seriously. Other stereotypical images of First Nations people that I have seen in the media include the drunken Indian, the environmental activist, or even the ‘imaginary Indian’. An example of an imaginary Indian is within the example King gave of the movie Twilight. He states that Hollywood mentions this movie as “a way for non-indigenous people to view more accurate indigenous characters than those in the past” (p. 45). But is representing Indigenous people as vampire-killing werewolves (essentially an imaginary beast) really any different than the historical views or images of Native culture? I don’t think so- even as a contemporary image, this can still be considered a representation of the historical “savage” stereotype. Meanwhile,