EDWARD BUSCOMBE
At the opening of
Broken Arrow (1950) James Stewart, playing the scout Tom Jeffords, speaks to the audience in voice-over: ‘This is the story of a land, of the people who lived on it in the year 1870, and of a man whose name was Cochise. He was an Indian, leader of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. I was involved in the story, and what I have to tell happened exactly as you’ll see it. The only change will be that when the Apache speak, they will speak in our language.’
1On the surface, this is rather a surprising admission. Hollywood cinema, as we know, is characterised by a strong desire to achieve realism. Filmmakers strive to put on the screen an experience which as far as possible the audience will recognise as lifelike, as comparable to their own experience of how people behave in certain circumstances, or how they think people might behave, no matter how remote those circumstances may be from what the audience may have encountered in everyday life. Although Hollywood westerns are set in a time and place beyond the audience’s direct experience, the characters are expected to behave in a recognisable manner. Ought not Indians, therefore, to speak in their own tongue?
Language is one of the most important means whereby identity is constructed, whether it be individual, personal identity, or some wider form of identity such as ethnic or national. Language is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of ethnicity or nationality. But the fact that (most?) countries have an official language (sometimes more than one) suggests that language does play a powerful role in the formation of national identity. Thus, in the cinema, spoken language is one of the primary means whereby characters on-screen can proclaim a different national or ethnic identity. The realist aesthetic dominant in Hollywood would seem to require, other things being equal, that foreigners (that is, those of a different nationality from the presumed audience) ought, especially if speaking among themselves rather than to Americans, to speak in their own language, as they would ‘in real life’; if they did so it would certainly reinforce the audience’s sense that these characters have an alien identity.
However, in the western two practical problems present themselves. Firstly, there is of course no single Indian language. Before the arrival of Columbus, there were over three hundred distinct languages spoken in America north of Mexico, of which around two hundred still survive. Moreover, these different languages do not all belong to the same historically interrelated stock, as do European languages. And although it is true that only a very limited number of Indian groups are ever represented in the movies (mainly Sioux, Comanche, Cheyenne and Apache), the various bands of Apache, to take but one example, speak several mutually unintelligible languages.
Secondly, until very recently speaking roles for Indian characters in westerns were largely played by white actors. This was certainly the case in the 1950s. Robert Taylor is the Indian hero of Devil’s Doorway (1950), Rock Hudson is Taza in Taza, Son of Cochise (1953), Burt Lancaster plays the title role in Apache (1954) and Charles Bronson is the Modoc leader Captain Jack in Drum Beat (1954). Coaching these actors to recite long speeches in an Indian language was clearly never an option. Not only would it have likely proved difficult for the actors to perform such dialogue with conviction; one can also assume there would have been considerable resistance from the audience.
However, other forces are at work which can drag films in another direction, away from the urge towards realism. Hollywood movies are meant to be an enjoyable experience for the audience, and if realism is pursued too strictly it may detract from the audience’s pleasure. Watching films is supposed to be fun, not hard work. This principle would appear to influence the representation of Indian speech in the western. In this genre, set on the nineteenth-century frontier, Indians, not yet assimilated, are assumed not to be native speakers of English. Yet if they speak in their own language how can we understand them? How, then, should they speak? On the one hand, there are the demands of realism, which appears to ordain that Indians should not speak English at all, or that their command of it should be extremely limited; on the other, if the film is to be an enjoyable experience for its English-speaking audience, the Indians have to be readily intelligible. As we shall see, there are westerns in which Indians do indeed speak their own language, but on the whole they are rare, and the strategies which these films have to adopt in order to make them intelligible, such as on-screen interpreters or subtitles, are not wholly satisfactory. (Anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, that reading subtitles is considered hard work by mainstream audiences.) Thus although the images on the screen strive for realism and attempt to show us Indians as they really were (even though the costumes, for example, are usually highly stylised versions of what Indians actually wore), at the level of the soundtrack much more leeway is allowed in the use of unrealistic conventions.
2Broken Arrow is unusual in calling the audience’s attention to the fact that it is going to employ an unrealistic convention in the representation of Indian speech. Generally speaking, Hollywood films try to elide their frequently conventional nature. Conventions work best if they are not too obvious. But the makers of
Broken Arrow are keen to claim accuracy in the telling of a true story. One might speculate that they believed if they were upfront about the artificiality of rendering Indian dialogue in English, the audience would be more indulgent to the truth claims of the film in terms of the narrative’s fidelity to history. However that may be, if
Broken Arrow is rare in its strategy of foregrounding the convention of having the Indians speak English, the actual English they speak nevertheless confirms the ‘Indianness’ of Cochise and the other Apaches.
One can take it as axiomatic that Indians in the western never speak the colloquial speech of native English-speakers. If the Indians were to speak the normal English of the Americans, it would go against the audience’s sense that the Indians are different. In their appearance, their customs, their whole way of life, they are shown as distinct from whites. Their speech ought also to set them apart, and in practice it invariably does. There is always a degree of stylisation at work, and this stylisation allows the film to communicate a range of meanings concerning Indian characters.
There are a variety of ways by which Indian speech may be marked as different. For example, Indians will speak a syntactically correct and fluent English, but one which is nevertheless marked by certain stylistic features which signify ‘Indianness’. They will speak slowly, in a rather formal and quite solemn manner, and with frequent pauses. If men, they will tend to have deep voices. This is the strategy adopted in
Broken Arrow. At one point, Cochise delivers an important speech to his people, trying to sell them the idea proposed by the whites that they should settle down, give up their nomadic way of life and become farmers. Some of the Indians object, saying that farming is women’s work and will make them weak. Cochise rejects this: ‘Now I say this. The Americans keep cattle but they are not soft or weak. Why should not the Apache be able to learn new ways? It is not easy to change but sometimes it is required. The Americans are growing stronger while we are growing weaker. If a big wind comes a tree must bend, or be lifted out by its roots. I will make a test of it for three moons. I break the arrow. I will try the way of peace.’ The slow, measured pace of Cochise’s speech conveys, firstly, that the speaker is deadly earnest. Indians, at least in liberal westerns of the 1950s, don’t joke much.
3 This solemnity also connotes that the speaker is considering his words carefully. It is the speech of one who is mature enough to have achieved wisdom; we need, the film implies, to treat his words with respect. The Indian point of view deserves a hearing.
We may note a number of features in addition to the measured tones in which the speech is delivered. Firstly, there is the frequent use of imagery from the natural world, as in the analogy of a tree bending to the wind, or the use of a natural object (‘moon’) to stand for a more abstract concept such as ‘month’. In another western of the 1950s,
White Feather (1955), Chief Broken Hand says: ‘And now our sons for many moons have hunted for the buffalo as it was in this land. It is gone.’ In associating Indians with nature, these films evoke the ‘noble savage’ conception, given currency in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his
Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1755), and continued in more contemporary notions of Indians as precursors of the Green movement, early ecologists more closely tied to the land than Western, white civilisation. Yet at the same time the tendency, as in the use of ‘moons’ for months, to prefer to deal with concrete objects rather than abstract concepts might suggest that the distinction between Indians and whites corresponds to that between nature and culture, that Indians live in a pre-social world, perhaps even one where abstract thought is not so well developed as it is with whites.
Despite such perhaps negative implications, this kind of speech is typical of those films which we may dub ‘liberal’ westerns, films which try to see the Indians’ point of view, which detail the injustices that have been done and suggest tolerance as a solution to the Indian ‘problem’. This solution places a heavy emphasis on the dignity of the Indians; it is the ‘nobility’ which is emphasised over the ‘savagery’, consistent with the traditional white view of the ‘noble savage’. This is very much a public form of speech, a kind of ringing rhetoric which demands respect from the audience. Note, for example, the use of rhetorical devices which are self-referential, calling attention to the speech itself, emphasising its importance: ‘Now I say this.’ In Taza, Son of Cochise, a kind of sequel to Broken Arrow, Cochise begins a speech to his sons by saying: ‘My sons, hear the words of Cochise.’
A further feature of Cochise’s verbal style is the refusal of contraction. Cochise does not say ‘why shouldn’t the Apache…’ or ‘I’ll make a test of it…’. His English is perfectly correct, yet the lack of the contractions common in more colloquial speech renders his dialogue stilted and rather ponderous, heavy with dignity, loaded with importance and setting the speaker off from the whites. As a filmic convention, we may note, Cochise’s style of speech affords the maximum degree of convenience both for the filmmakers (including the actors, especially white actors playing Indians, who need learn no foreign tongue nor even adopt a heavy accent), and for the audience (who need do scarcely any work to grasp what the Indian characters are saying). At the same time, fidelity to the ‘real life’ which the film is supposed to depict is reduced to the bare minimum. For how many Indians on the plains in the 1870s actually spoke English as fluently as Cochise does? (He would have been more likely to have spoken Spanish, as indeed he does when played by the Mexican actor Miguel Inclan in John Ford’s Fort Apache [1948].)
These two features of Indian speech in westerns, the references to the natural world and the absence of contraction, are identified by Barbra A. Meek (2006) in a perceptive and useful article. She identifies a series of changes from standard English which in their most developed form are sufficiently distinct to merit the term ‘Hollywood Indian English’ or HIE for short, and cites four ways in which HIE employs ‘grammatical markers’. First, there is the absence of markers for the tenses of verbs. Meek’s examples come from slightly out of the way sources such as Disney’s
Peter Pan (1952), TV shows such as
MacGyver (1985–92) and a Three Stooges film from 1940,
Rockin’ thru the Rockies. But it’s not hard to find examples from more mainstream westerns. For example, in the Cecil B. DeMille film
Unconquered (1947) Boris Karloff as the chief of the Seneca Indians gives the white settlers besieged in a fort an ultimatum to surrender: ‘White flag not on a pole when time stick [a candle] burn down, all die!’ The use of the present tense to cover both past and future is a strong marker that English is not the speaker’s native tongue.
The second marker Meek identifies is the frequent deletion of words, particularly definite and indefinite articles, pronouns and auxiliary verbs. Again, an example from Unconquered will illustrate: ‘Put white flag on pole. Take your people. Go back safe over mountain.’ The omission of the definite article (‘the’) is of course a common signifier of foreignness, and a not unusual fault among non-native speakers of English, not least because many languages differ in their use of the definite article, if indeed they have it at all.
Substitution is a third marker of HIE. In this case, most commonly the speaker replaces a subject or object pronoun with a full noun. Frequently in this mode Indians will refer to themselves in the third person, as for example ‘…hear the words of Cochise’. In Chief Crazy Horse (1955) Victor Mature as Crazy Horse says, speaking directly to his father: ‘My father looks at his son with his eyes blinded by the lodge smoke.’ It would be more common in standard English to say simply: ‘You look at me with your eyes.’
The fourth syntactical marker Meek finds to be common is the lack of contraction. Typically, Indians do not say ‘I’m’ or ‘I’ve’ but ‘I am’ or ‘I have’. As we have seen, this may be observed in Cochise’s otherwise perfectly correct English, while in White Feather an Indian says: ‘The treaty pen does not fit our hand as well as the arrow.’ Refusing to contract ‘does not’ to ‘doesn’t’ indicates a lack of fluency, a stiffness that may confer a certain dignity but also is a sure marker of one not fully at home in English.
Meek goes on to ask how these four markers come to be read by the audience specifically as a form of Indian speech and not as some other kind of foreignness. The obvious answer is the context of the film itself. We know from the plot and from a whole series of visual markers (colour of skin, costume, and so on) that the speakers are Indians. Therefore, the particular way they speak is read as typical of Indians in the western. But as Meek points out, there is also a specific vocabulary which is closely associated with Indians. Thus, an Indian axe is a tomahawk, a tent is a tepee, a wife is a squaw. Some of these words, such as papoose or wigwam, come from Native American languages. Other words and phrases in common use in HIE appear to be inventions of white writers. Meek cites Charles Cutler, who in
O Brave New Words!: Native American Loanwords in Current English (2000) traces the phrase ‘happy hunting ground’ to James Fenimore Cooper, author of
The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and also to Washington Irving, author of, among other works,
A Tour on the Prairies (1835). Cutler believes the use in Indian-speak of ‘heap’ to mean ‘very’ (‘me heap big chief’) also derives from Irving, and from Mark Twain. The use of ‘brave’ to mean ‘a warrior’ Cutler believes originates with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose six-volume
Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–57) was a highly influential work of early American ethnology (see Meek 2006: 107).
A further aspect of Indians’ vocabulary is worth noting. Often they employ circumlocutions for objects which are either inventions of white civilisation or which have significance only for whites, not for Indians. Thus a locomotive is an ‘iron horse’ (as in the title of John Ford’s 1924 silent western). In The Indian Fighter (1955) Red Cloud tells the whites they do not want miners on their land looking for gold: ‘Will it bring back the buffalo your people will kill? Will it clean the streams your people will fill with filth as they search for the yellow iron? Will it bring back the beauty of the land?’ Red Cloud reveals himself as ecologically minded, and one who rejects the cash-based economy of the whites. But in using the term ‘yellow iron’ for gold he also shows himself to be pre-modern, having a mind-set that can only recognise something new by attempting to assimilate it to already known objects.
What are the consequences of employing HIE in the movies? It would be easy enough to conclude that the overall effect of the way Indians speak in the western is racist. Indians are found in the various ways here detailed to be at best stiff, not fluid, and at worst incompetent, speakers of English. Some of the features of HIE are similar to those observed in the speech of young children, for example the absence of tense markers, or confusion about pronouns, and thus Indians are infantilised. Or, worse still, incompetence in English may be read as a sign of stupidity. In westerns one might risk the generalisation that the use of HIE in its most developed or extreme form is most common either in films (of which
Unconquered would certainly be one) which present a hostile rather than liberal view of Indians, or in films which set out to parody (usually for demeaning purposes) Indian speech. In
Son of Paleface (1952) Bob Hope, pretending to be an Indian, wants to send a telegram: ‘Me likum send message.’ In Howard Hawks’ comedy
Monkey Business (1952) Cary Grant, under the influence of a drug that makes people revert to childhood, falls in with a group of children playing at Indians. Smearing war paint on his face and adopting the name of Red Eagle, he coaches the children in a war song: ‘We wantum wampum, we wantum wampum/Ugha ugha goo goo’, and so on. In such nonsense speech Indianness and childishness are the same thing. It seems worth making a distinction between this and the evident good intentions of such liberal films as
Broken Arrow.
4In some Indian films, for example
Stagecoach (1939) or
The Charge at Feather River (1953), the question of how to dramatise Indian speech is simply avoided. The Indians are represented en masse as a hostile force of nature. No individuals are singled out as speaking characters. However, filmmakers sometimes show themselves aware of the inherent implausibility and occasional absurdity of Indians conversing fluently in English, and so in some westerns, and by no means only the more recent, Indians do get to speak in their own language, thus avoiding the kind of absurd illogicality we find in
Run of the Arrow (1957), where Rod Steiger plays a Confederate soldier who becomes integrated into the Sioux nation. He is complimented on his Sioux language skills by Yellow Mocassin (Sarita Montiel), speaking in English: ‘You do not speak Sioux like an American.’ But of course we hear no evidence of this, and indeed how could we? Not only did Steiger not know how to speak Sioux; even if he could have been taught to speak it parrot-fashion, we, the English-speaking audience, would have no means of telling if his Sioux was good or not.
Such contradictions can be avoided if Indians speak their own language. In A Distant Trumpet (1964) the Chiricahua Apache frequently speak in an Indian tongue (whether it is the correct one for these people raises issues beyond my competence). At times their speech is paraphrased for the audience by a white man, at other times the meaning is clear from the context. Indians speak a lot of Indian (for want of a more precise designation) in The Last Hunt (1956). Again, the audience understands from the context as much as it needs in order to follow the story. Sometimes realism is upheld when a major Indian character speaks no English at all. In Across the Wide Missouri (1950) Clark Gable, as a white trapper, manages to conduct an entire romance with an Indian woman who doesn’t speak a word of English, and much the same happens in The Big Sky (1952), in which Teal Eye, a Blackfoot woman, speaks no English but is romanced by another white trapper. Arthur Hunnicutt plays a companion who has the language skills to translate. In A Man Called Horse (1970) one of the Indians by whom Richard Harris is captured conveniently speaks French, which Harris as an English nobleman is conversant with; enough of the French is then paraphrased for the audience to understand.
Having Indians speak their own language in dramatic performances has a longer history than we may suppose. Edwin Milton Royle’s stage play
The Squaw Man was first performed, with great success, in 1905. (It was subsequently filmed three times, each version directed by Cecil B. DeMille.) In the stage version, the Indian chief Tabywana, father of the heroine Nat-u-ritch, speaks words from the Ute language, which are then interpreted. The white actor who played the part of Tabywana, Theodore Roberts, maintained that the Native American actor who played his on-stage interpreter had written out the words phonetically, which Roberts then memorised (see Hall 2001: 202–3). Such a practice might be a step towards realism, but the requirement for one of the characters to be constantly translating can slow up the action. In the cinema, there is the option of using subtitles, but until very recent times there was a clear feeling that audiences would resist such a device, associated as it was with the European art cinema and other such ‘difficult’ fare. Subtitles are used somewhat sparingly in Michael Mann’s version of
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and more pervasively in
Dances with Wolves (1990), though the latter also includes an on-screen translator in the person of Stands With a Fist, the white woman captive of the Sioux. Not that having Indians speak in their own language resolves all problems. In
Dances with Wolves the Sioux Indian characters were all played by Indian actors. But not all of them were Sioux. One of the largest parts went to Grahame Green, who is an Oneida, so one of the actors in the film, Doris Leader Charge, was employed to coach non-Lakota speakers in the language. An analogy might be making a film set in Spain, casting French and German actors to play the parts and having to coach them in speaking Spanish. Similarly, Kathryn Kalinak asserts that whenever Indians in John Ford’s films speak in a native tongue, they are always in fact talking Navajo (2007: 153). Is this solution truly an advance in authenticity? Some, especially Indians, might doubt it.
Meek raises the interesting question of the source of HIE. She distinguishes American Indian Pidgin English (AIPE), a historic form, from contemporary American Indian English (AIE). Her conclusion is that there are some characteristics common to both AIPE and HIE (such as the lack of tense marking, or the omission of definite or indefinite articles). However, she sees no consistent connections between AIE, a dialect spoken today by a wide range of Indian groups, and HIE, which she describes as neither a dialect nor a language, but essentially an artistic convention. (In any case, according to Meek, AIE has a variety of forms, each inflected by the particular Indian language native to the group speaking AIE.) The question of whether HIE is ultimately derived from AIPE is one which goes beyond the scope of the present essay. What can be asserted with confidence, however, is that the speech of Indians in the movies owes much to nineteenth-century representations of Indians in popular media. This is hardly surprising; western films have always derived a great deal of their story material from literary sources, and both nineteenth-century stage plays and dime novels display many of the distinctive traits already noted in Indian speech. Consider, for example, a passage from Atala. This novel, originally written in French by François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand and published in 1801, gives a highly romanticised view of Indian life. An English translation was published in 1884. In it, an Indian woman argues against the torture and killing of a white captive:
My father Eagle, you have the cleverness of a fox and the prudent slowness of a tortoise. I will polish the chain of friendship with you, and we will plant together the tree of peace. But let us change the customs of our forefathers when they are of a cruel nature. Let us have slaves to cultivate our fields, and let us no longer hear the cries of the prisoners, which trouble the bosoms of the mothers. I have spoken. (Harry 1884: 64)
One may observe the lack of contraction (‘let us’ instead of ‘let’s’), the frequent references through metaphor to the natural world, and the self-referentiality (‘I have spoken’).
In Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, the first dime novel to be published by Beadle & Co., in 1860, the eponymous heroine speaks to her dying husband of the happy hunting-grounds:
A lake of bright waters is there. The Indian’s canoe flies over it like a bird high up in the morning. The West has rolled back its clouds, and a great chief has passed through. He will hold back the clouds that his white son may go up to the face of the Great Spirit. Malaeska and her boy will follow. The blood of the red man is high in her heart, and the way is open. The lake is deep, and the arrow sharp; death will come when Malaeska calls him. Love will make her voice sweet in the land of the Great Spirit; the white man will hear it, and call her to his bosom again. (Stephens 1997: 82)
Once again we can note the insistent use of metaphors from nature, and also the substitute of a proper name (Malaeska) for the first-person pronoun.
The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish (1829) is a play based on a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. In the following exchange, Heath, a white man, does his Indian interlocutor, Uncas, the courtesy of speaking the same kind of English as the Indians:
HEATH (extending his hand, which Uncas grips): My brother is welcome! ‘Tis many moons since I have looked upon his face.
UNCAS: The pale face is a good man.
HEATH: What can the white man do for his brother? Is he poor? There are blankets and a rifle in his house; is he sick? There is a skilful leach [sic] at hand.
UNCAS: The white chief does not know his errand. Uncas is neither sick nor poor; Uncas is strong, and so must be his brothers, Uncas brings news of war. (Cooper 1903: 270)
We may note again the use of moons to signify months, the substitution of names for pronouns, and the employment of a specialist vocabulary (‘pale face’ to mean white man). There’s a similar usage in Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, a dime novel from 1877. Sitting Bull, speaking of himself in the third person, explains that the white woman he has captured has been taken from a wagon train:
The pale-face girl is the last survivor of a train that the warriors of Sitting Bull attacked in Red Canyon. Sitting Bull lost many warriors; yon pale squaw shot down full a half-score before she could be captured; she belongs to the warriors of Sitting Bull, and not to the great chief himself. (Brown 1997: 298)
In another dime novel from 1860, Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier, the hero is threatened by Indians:
‘How you like to burn, eh, Yankee?’ asked a savage, stooping and grinning horribly in his face.
‘I don’t know; I never tried it’, replied Seth, with as much nonchalance as though it was a dinner to which he was referring. (Brown 1997: 200)
The lack of a marker for the subjunctive (for example, ‘how would you like?’) is similar to the incorrect use of tenses noted above in Unconquered.
It is worth noting that the movies were not the only twentieth-century art form to be influenced by the conventions of the dime novel. As Michael V. Pisani explains in
Imagining Native America in Music, the representation of Indianness in music has a long history, both in classical and popular music. In the early years of the last century there was a vogue for Indian songs performed on stage. The lyrics for these songs frequently display an obvious origin in the highly conventional ‘Indian-speak’ of popular fiction. The most popular song of
English Daisy, a show from 1904, is ‘Big Indian Chief’; the first line of the chorus is ‘Big Chief love um little Kick-a-poo maiden,/Love um heap much too’ (see Pisani 2005: 252). In the 1909 song ‘My Copper Colored Squaw’ (racism is pervasive in this genre), the father of the ‘squaw’ of the title sings: ‘Big Chief heepee wild,/white man love him child,/squaw she make chief scalp her young white lover’ (see Pisani 2005: 256). Given the close relationship between early cinema and the popular stage, it seems likely that such conventions of Indian speech eventually spilled over into the cinema.
If then, as it appears, the dialogue in movie westerns is in part derived from popular literature, one might ask whether the style of Indian speech in dime novels is a pure invention of their authors, or whether it has its origin elsewhere. Not, perhaps, in the unmediated speech in English of actual Indians: such a thing is not available to us, since nineteenth-century plains Indians were not in the habit of writing down what they said, and any Indian speech from this period would only have been recorded by whites. Captivity narratives were a highly popular literary form in the nineteenth century; these stories of actual experiences of whites taken prisoner by Indians purported to be faithful accounts of real-life events. One such is entitled Miss Coleson’s narrative of her captivity among the Sioux Indians! An interesting and remarkable account of the terrible sufferings and providential escape of Miss Ann Coleson, A victim of the late Indian outrages in Minnesota. Miss Coleson gives a version of the defiant speech of an Indian faced with pursuing soldiers:
I am for war, war to the knife! My rifle is true to its aim, my tomahawk is sharp! I have taken many scalps in my younger days. I can still take more. White men are great liars! White men kill Indians just as they kill deer. White men see squaw, they shoot her right down; shoot papoose, the same as rabbit. I no like white men, white men no like me! (1863: 47).
While its omission of the definite article and the incorrect grammar (‘I no like white men’) are common markers of Indian speech, one has to recognise that captivity narratives are scarcely simple documentary records of events; the Indian speech which they reproduce can hardly be considered unmediated transcriptions of actual dialogue. In any case, it is not always clear whether the Indian speakers are to be understood as speaking English, or whether what is set down is in fact a translation. If the latter, then not only do we have to allow for the literary licence of a highly dramatised genre; the act of translation opens up considerable opportunities for Indian speech to be inflected in ways that conform to existing conventions.
5One might hope to get closer to how Indians actually talked by looking at the speeches of historical Indians. Leaders such as Red Cloud, Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph all had their words recorded, and some of these speeches have attained wide currency. Thus on his surrender in 1877 to Colonel Miles of the US Army after a long campaign of resistance, Chief Joseph (In-mu-too-yah-lat-lat) of the Nez Perce people (the Nimiipuu) is reported to have delivered a speech which concluded: ‘Hear me my chiefs: I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever’ (see Guthrie 2007: 516). However, this speech and others like it are very far from being the unmediated words of the Indian leader. To begin with, it is not certain if Chief Joseph delivered the speech in person or whether it was spoken for him by other Indians. Secondly, Chief Joseph did not speak English, so his speech is a translation. This already opens up a considerable space for interpretative licence. The speech was subsequently written down, at a time more or less removed from the event being recorded, thus introducing a third level of mediation from the original discourse. In a very helpful discussion, Thomas H. Guthrie shows that in the case of Chief Joseph’s speech the facts concerning the recording and dissemination of the speech are now shrouded in some confusion. What is certain is that the written text was circulated for white people by white people, and thus inevitably its meanings were subject to the context in which they were consumed. Such words as Chief Joseph may or may not have spoken were clearly delivered in a heavily overdetermined ideological context. As Guthrie puts it:
Indian speech was a fundamental, not incidental or epiphenomenal, component of the politics of encounter. The way Euro-Americans engaged with Indian speech produced and reproduced for them an Indian subject or character that fit perfectly within a larger narrative framework, that is, an epic of civilisation and conquest in the West, of domination and land appropriation. (2007: 514)
Whites were able to assign Indian speech such a role because Indians’ use of language was held to be different from that of whites. Indian languages were believed to be at an earlier stage of development from European languages, with much heavier reliance on metaphor (especially, as we have seen, metaphors drawn from the natural world). At the same time, their language was seen as more direct and more emotional. Guthrie quotes from David Murray’s book Forked Tongues (1991):
‘One of the most consistent claims made for primitive languages has been that they are simple, concrete, and, like their speakers, inextricably linked to nature. In this way they connect us to an original language rooted in things rather than ideas, and without the slippages and ambiguities of civilised speech and writing’. Reliance on concrete images ‘reflecting a lack of intellectual development on the part of the Indians, means that concepts must be built up from objects and their qualities or associations, thus preserving a vividness and natural power lost in civilised speech’ (Murray in Guthrie 2007: 523).
Indian speech was regarded by whites as more picturesque than political, attaining an oratorical eloquence perfectly suited to the enunciation of an elegiac lament for their seemingly inevitable demise. Most whites in the nineteenth century considered that Indians were a vanishing race, doomed to decline and ultimate extinction. This, of course, is the ultimate meaning of Cochise’s speech in
Broken Arrow: by adapting to the ways of the whites and becoming farmers, Indians will become assimilated, and ultimately lose their ‘Indianness’.
In this context it became perfectly permissible to indulge Indian sentiments at the very moment when their fate was sealed. Indians’ actual arguments against their mistreatment could be ignored, because nothing they might have to say was going to change the fact that they were going to be dispossessed of their land. But in defeat, the Indian could nevertheless be allowed the full expression of his melancholy. This syndrome, named ‘imperialist nostalgia’ by Renato Rosaldo, meant that whatever Chief Joseph may or may not have said at the time (and at this distance we can never recover the actual event), what he was reported to have said was already in a sense decided by the context in which it was understood (see Buscombe 2006: 78). Thus if we seek to discover the origins of the distinctive manner of Indian speech in westerns through a search for what actual Indians said at particular historical moments, we end up chasing shadows. Real, authentic Indian speech of this period is not available to us in any unmediated form.
Vocal utterances are of course not the only forms of Indian communication to be found in movies. Sometimes Indians will use sign language. It’s worth quoting The New Encyclopedia of the American West:
Communication across language barriers through signs made by the hands and arms is universal among humankind, but only among the Plains Indians of North America did sign language reach the level of a fully developed language. The Plains sign language was understood commonly by all tribes regardless of the differences in their spoken languages. There were some regional variations in the system, akin to dialect differences in speech, but a Blackfoot from Saskatchewan had no difficulty in understanding the signs of a Texas Comanche. Nearly any concept expressible in speech could be conveyed by the sign language, from the complexities of treaty negotiations to the abstractions of a religious myth or the mundane details of daily events. (Lamar 1998: 530)
As noted earlier, before Columbus there were at least three hundred Indian languages in use in America north of Mexico. Sign language facilitated communication between those whose spoken languages were mutually incomprehensible; it also allowed communication across distance on the plains. (Smoke signals, also found in westerns, are considered to be a variant form of sign language.) However, the use of sign language in cinema is sparing, since in its developed form it would require a translation no less than spoken Indian language. What one might say, though, is that when it does appear it manages to convey to the film audience not just the cultural and ethnic difference of Indians, but also the sense that there is such a thing as Indian identity. Prior to their encounters with whites, Indians did not think of themselves as one people but many. ‘Indianness’ is something which was constructed by the whites (although subsequently Indians have themselves embraced the idea of a common culture). The western, in its dramatisation of the frontier as a site of conflict between two opposing ethnic and cultural entities, needs to play up the similarities between Indians, not their differences from each other, and sign language is a way of binding them together.
One last point in conclusion. Just as spoken language in the western is highly conventional, so too is film music. In How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford, Kathryn Kalinak writes:
Indian music [in the movies] was derived from musical stereotypes for the representation of the West’s Others – Turks, Chinese, and Arabs, in particular – that developed concurrently with Western imperialism and exploded onto the musical scene in the nineteenth century: unusual, repetitive rhythms, modal melodies; short, descending motifs; a tendency to veer away from conventional major and minor tonalities and towards chromaticism; and a reliance upon unusual instrumentation, especially percussion. (2007: 71)
Quite quickly, says Kalinak, Hollywood, following these precedents, ‘developed a specific vocabulary for representing Indians: a rhythmic figure of four equal beats with the accent falling on the first beat often played by drums or low bass instruments; the use of perfect fifths and fourths in the harmonic design; and the use of modal melody. These conventions for Indianness trailed with them connotations of the primitive, the exotic, and the savage’ (2007: 72). Thus music and dialogue tend towards the same effect. And just as Indians speaking actual Indian languages are rare in the western, so actual Indian music, as opposed to using music to represent Indians, is uncommon. As Kalinak observes, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) has more than five minutes of Cheyenne chants, recorded on location, but Alex North’s score is ‘more Indianesque than Indian’ (2007: 198), an apt description too, perhaps, of how Indians speak in the western.
notes
1 All quotations from film dialogue are the author’s own transcription.
2 This problem of how ‘foreigners’ speak is of course a problem not confined to the western genre. Hollywood war films with German, Italian or Japanese characters have exactly the same problem. Should the Germans speak in a guttural, heavily-accented English sprinkled perhaps with the odd German word (‘schweinhund’ maybe?) even when talking to each other, or if played by native English speakers can they speak a normal, unaccented English, or does the film employ native German speakers and have them converse in their own language? One can readily find examples of all these strategies, even though the differing criteria of realism applied to image- and sound-track can produce some strange contradictions. Thus in the British film about the family of a Nazi concentration camp commander,
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), a German boy reads in faultless English from a book which is recognisably German.
3 I have elsewhere written on the solemnity of nineteenth-century photographs of Indians (see Buscombe 1998).
4 Sarah Kozloff is perhaps too sweeping in her generalisation about Indian speech in the western: ‘When Indian characters were given English dialogue, they often spoke either a halting baby talk, or, contrarily, pontificated with wise aphorisms’ (2000: 150). She goes on to endorse Virginia Wexman’s view that Indian dialogue is evidence of the speakers’ ‘primitivism’. My argument is that though racism is endemic in the western, the range of positions vis-à-vis Indian characters is wider than Kozloff allows.
5 It is possible that some Indian languages do not have an equivalent to the definite article, in which case omitting it in an English translation might be thought a way of remaining faithful to the original; except that the point of translation is surely to render into another language an equivalent of the original, not a pedantic and incorrect version of it.
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