The industry that produced these portrayals was not composed of people who had examined the actual diversity of the 500-plus distinct tribal nations within the boundaries of what is now the United States. It was composed of people working within a visual convention that had already simplified that diversity into a single type, and who found the type useful for producing conflict-driven narratives.
Silent-era films occasionally employed Native performers, and a small number of Native directors worked in the industry in its earliest decades. But the dominant visual language was the Hollywood Indian, applied across genres and periods without meaningful engagement with the people being depicted. When sound came, the “Indian” became further reduced to phonetic approximations of speech patterns, to war cries, to a dialogue style that reflected what white screenwriters imagined Native people sounded like.
The 1930s consolidated the negative stereotypes. The Western genre, which dominated American filmmaking through the 1940s and 1950s, organized most of its narratives around a binary in which white settlers were the protagonists and Native Americans were either the threat to be overcome or, in more sympathetic treatments, the vanishing remnants of a past that civilization was necessarily displacing.
Broken Arrow (1950) is frequently cited as the first postwar Western to portray Native Americans in a genuinely sympathetic light — but even it centered its narrative on a white protagonist and cast a white actor, Jeff Chandler, as the Apache leader Cochise. The sympathy was real and relative; the structural asymmetry remained.
The revisionist Westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s — Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970) — shifted the terms of the genre by casting Native Americans as victims of white aggression rather than as its perpetrators. This was a genuine change in perspective and carried its own political resonance in the context of Vietnam-era disillusionment with the military. But the casting of white actors in Native roles continued, and the stories were still primarily organized around white experience even when they attempted to criticize it.