The women in these narratives fell into equally constrictive categories. The “Indian princess” was the figure who aided the white protagonist at personal cost — Pocahontas-adjacent, noble and romantic and doomed. The “squaw” was the debased counter-image: degraded, sexualized, brutal. Neither type bore any relationship to the actual complexity and diversity of Native women’s lives and cultures across the hundreds of distinct nations that existed in North America.
White actors playing Native roles was the dominant casting practice. Johnny Depp’s 2013 Tonto was cited frequently in retrospective accounts of Hollywood casting, but the practice was not a recent phenomenon. Burt Lancaster played Jim Thorpe in a 1951 biopic. Jeff Chandler played Cochise in multiple films in the early 1950s. Raquel Welch played a Native woman in The Legend of Walks Far Woman in 1982. Anthony Quinn, who was half-Mexican, played a variety of ethnic others across decades of Hollywood productions. The casting logic was consistent: Native roles were viewed as costume roles, requiring no particular cultural knowledge or community connection, and the available pool of recognizable stars was almost entirely non-Native.
The revisionist Westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a genuine shift in moral perspective. Soldier Blue (1970) depicted the massacre of a Cheyenne village in graphic detail, as a deliberate commentary on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam that had become public in 1969. Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman, centered its narrative on a white man who had been raised by the Cheyenne and presented the Battle of Little Bighorn from the perspective of those who survived it. These were serious artistic engagements that genuinely attempted to upend the Western genre’s traditional moral hierarchy.