| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

'Injuns!' Native Americans in the Movies. By Edward Buscombe. (London: Reaktion, 2006. 272 pp. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 1-86189-279-9.)
"Injuns" in the title of Edward Buscombe's book is a term movies popularized, and it more accurately signifies, than does "Indian" or "Native American," the cinematic portrayal of the indigenous peoples of North America. It is a portrait that does not present Indians as they really are nor does it show what happened to them historically. It is about Indianness, an artificial construct that represses and contains the cultural understanding of the first Americans.	1
The heart of the monograph lies in the initial two chapters. The first, "The Formation of a Genre," traces the pre-cinematic representation of Indians, explaining that movies inherited images and an ideology that predetermined how Indians could be represented and, that by working within such generic restrictions, the filmmaker's "accuracy" of representation was limited. Tracing various images of Indians through pictorial presentation and literary forms from captivity narratives to the romances of James Fenimore Cooper and the later dime novels to the westerns of Zane Grey, Buscombe outlines the progression of Indian images from savage to exotic to tragic as they evolved in the white imagination from a threat to a race destined to vanish.	. . .

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