 Many American Indians have complained that they do not recognize themselves in these ethnographic descriptions. This sense of misrepresentation is at the core of the distrust of anthropology that is so pervasive among contemporary Native Americans, epitomized by the anger of Vine Deloria: "behind each policy and program with which Indians are plagued. . . stands the anthropologist. The fundamental thesis of the anthropologist is that if people are objects for observation, people are then considered objects for experimentation, for manipulation, and for eventual extinction."5
Thomas Biolsi uses the career of anthropologist Haviland Scudder Mekeel, noted for his 1930s' work with the Lakota, to illustrate the role of anthropology in constructing the Lakota as "primitive,"' as Mekeel searched for "authentic,"' full-blood Indians to study.6 While Lakota people were more interested in debating treaty rights and coping with change, anthropologists like Mekeel were looking for untainted primitivism. Similarly, Whiteley argues that standard descriptions in introductory anthropological textbooks have been important in confirming the image of American Indians as fundamentally different from whites and as representing past, "primitive" cultures. Speaking of popular portrayals of the Hopi, Whitely writes: "So, (we) self-righteous anthropologists can be appalled by Smokis, art collectors, or New Agers, while convenientloy blinding ourselves to a family resemblance with our own representations of Hopi culture."7
Perhaps most important, as Renato Rosaldo observed, "classic" ethnographic techniques had the effect of distancing the observer from the people studied, literally "objectifying" them. Individual ethnographers may have had close personal ties with the people they studied, but the conventions of ethnography prevented such closeness from showing. Bataille and Sands point out that whereas traditional anthropologists did employ techniques like autobiographies, they used these accounts simply as indicators of cultural patterns, rather than as ways to present their informants subjectively. The importance of this practice is that these ethnographies, and the white cultural products that spun from them, have continued to define popular conceptions of American Indians, even though ethnography itself has been transformed and problematized within the field of anthropology.
For example, a central stereotype of Indians is their stoicism and lack of emotion, conditioned by a century and a half of stern, unsmiling photos and descriptions of people behaving with programmed ritualism. As Rosaldo puts it, "the general rule seems to be that one should tidy things up as much as possible by wiping away the tears and ignoring the tantrums."8 "Objective" ethnography produced accounts of people devoid of human emotion, because to write of emotion was "unscientific," not to mention uncomfortable. Current popular culture perpetuates this image. Thus, Kimberley Norris, an Indian woman who had a small role in the 1980s' television miniseries Son of the Morning Star, reports how she was told to redo a scene in which she wept for the slain leader Crazy Horse. Instead of her tears, she was told, “Let's do it again and just take it with that dignified stoicism of the Indians.”9 As Norris commented, “That was a real quick lesson in their perception of how we don't have those natural human emotions.”10
My recent work on audience response to the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, which features a post-Civil War Cheyenne village on a regular basis, indicates that the different responses of Indian and non-Indian audiences often hinged on their acceptance or rejection of the classic unemotionalism of the Cheyenne characters. Thus, a white woman remarked approvingly on the stoicism exhibited by an imprisoned Cheyenne: “You know, they can be very intense emotionally but able to suppress it and not show it.”11 Another agreed, saying that stoicism was “a Native American value, and that's being true to your word and being willing to go to death.”12 Yet American Indian viewers were especially angered by this very same story, arguing that “his manhood was suppressed,” “his dignity was violated,” and the character was not allowed to show normal emotions. “I could have seen anger, but he just . . . put his head down, made him look pitiful.”13 Whereas white viewers generally found the portrayal of the Cheyenne positive and accurate, the Indian viewers did not: “They're caricatures and they're not human beings with their own language, their own thoughts, their own feelings.”14 Similarly, JoEllen Shiveley, in comparing male Indian and Anglo responses to a classic Western, The Searchers, found that although both groups enjoyed the film and both identified with the hero, played by John Wayne, the Anglo viewers also thought the film was generally authentic in its portrayal of the Old West, whereas the Indian men did not. Shiveley's conclusion, like mine, is that white viewers have tended to naturalize the popular, objectified imagery of Indians and accept it as “authentic,”' whereas Indian viewers resist the dehumanizing they see as central to the imagery. Therefore, it was not surprising to see perhaps the most elaborate, recent incarnation of white mythological construction of Indians, a 1995 major theatrical movie now doing the rounds of the video stores. Last of the Dogmen postulated a “lost tribe” of Cheyenne, who, having escaped the 1864 Sand Creek massacre, hid in the mountains of Montana for more than a century. A cynical mountain man (Tom Berenger) finds them and reports them to (who else?) an anthropologist (Barbara Hershey). An archaeologist by specialty who understands Cheyenne culture through the study of ancient artifacts, she accompanies him to visit the band and finds that her anthropological expertise in nineteenth-century Cheyenne culture enables her to understand and be accepted by this noble, idyllic people. The message is clear: The Cheyenne are dead, and only by some wonderful miracle do we find them, pure and unchanged, offering themselves up for study to the enchanted anthropologist, who never returns to the corrupt twentieth century. The marriage of anthropological and popular imagery is complete.
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