| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward Buscombe. "Injuns!" Native Americans in the Movies. (Locations.) London: Reaktion Books. 2006. Pp. 272. $16.00.

This is a superb book on a topic that all too often in the past has provoked texts that either merely list movies that have purported to represent Native Americans or fulminate against what they see as Hollywood's invariable recourse to stereotype, as if both Indians and Hollywood were unchanging entities. Edward Buscombe's volume engages in its fair share of listing, but it does so to locate the films in question in their appropriate historical and ideological contexts. Buscombe is also very much alert to signs of racism—whether theorized as "scientific" or apparently propelled by popular prejudice—but his fundamental effort is to dissect and understand rather than simply to castigate. The book's evasion of oversimplified essentialisms is aided by its broad, loosely comparative focus, in that it examines not only Hollywood productions but westerns made in a variety of European countries. (Indeed, by itself the treatment of allegorically inclined "pro-Indian" East German communist westerns, often as rooted in classic American texts as their capitalist counterparts—the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, for example—warrants purchase of the book.) It treats Hollywood with due regard to the industrial changes it has undergone, from entrepreneurial outpost, through the rise of the studio and star systems, to the segmented but still powerful structure it exhibits today. The book is especially illuminating on the earlier years, offering, for example, delicately precise insights into the evolution of D. W. Griffith's increasingly strident representations of interracial sex and rich evocations of such phenomena as the Inceville Sioux.

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