The Searchers

I don't have too much to write about right now. I was not even sure what I was going to put on this post until about five minutes ago...so here goes nothing: I watched The Searchers in my film history class this past Tuesday and I saw a lot of stereotyping of Native Americans throughout the film. The most predominant stereotype I noticed was the thought of Indians as blood thirsty savages. The "bad guy" Indians had brightly colored war paint on their faces which was almost laughable. This film depicted your classic cowboys and Indians battling. It was the white heroes versus the dark skinned villains. I really couldn't feel happy being on the side of the good guys simply because of the way the Indians were represented. This film was of course made in the 1950s, but that kind of representation of Native Americans would not be accepted today. Whenever there were Indians that were depicted as good, they were also represented as being obviously uneducated by western standards. They were a sort of comic relief. So those are my thoughts on the misrepresentation of Native Americans in older films.