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

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

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