Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood

By Andrew H. Fisher.

Taken together, their careers allows us to see Hollywood Indians as agents of film history, rather than merely as objects of the cinematic gaze.”

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood seemed to be full of chiefs but not enough Indians. Thanks to the popularity of the Western genre, the film industry supported a veritable council of celluloid chiefs and sachems, who competed for work and sometimes jealously checked each other’s bona fides. Many were not mere charlatans or pretenders, but popular expectations compelled them to adopt colorful stage names and even to assemble whole personas of dubious authenticity. Among the notables were Chief Big Bear, Chief Black Hawk, Chief Blue Eagle, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Chief Francis Sitting Eagle, Chief Red Fox, Chief Running Horse, Chief Standing Bear, Chief Thunderbird, Chief Young Turtle, and at least three Chief White Eagles. Others performed under such imposing titles as Chief Darkcloud, Chief John Big Tree, Chief Many Treaties, Chief Strongheart, and Chief Yowlache.[1] By the late 1920s, “Hollywood Indians” had become so commonplace that a Wyoming newspaper could sarcastically describe them as a distinctive type:

He is a male person, so eager for work “in the movies” that he even jumps at the chance to take off his clothes, dab 95 percent of his body surface with an unpleasant red compound that is disagreeable to wear—besides temporarily ruining [the] bathtub—and run about the Hollywood environs with a thousand of his kind, wearing only a few feathers, in blazing sun or shivering cold.[2]

There were some women as well, including Princess Redwing and Princess Tsianina Red Feather. The latter, a Cherokee-Creek singer, reportedly caused a local “Indian shortage” in the fall of 1927 when she summoned all the Native performers in town to participate in a four-night extravaganza of “ceremonials” at the Hollywood Bowl.[3]

The “Hollywood Bowl Inter-tribal Ceremonial,” as it was billed, combined opera performances with large Native dances modeled after those of the recent Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial in New Mexico. Many movie Indians answered Red Feather’s call and stayed off the job until the pageant had ended.[4] As a result, director Wallace Fox purportedly had difficulty finding sufficient extras to wrap up the shooting of FBO’s The Riding Renegade, starring cowboy actor Bob Steele. According to the Roosevelt Standard, Princess Tsianina’s event at the Hollywood Bowl lured virtually all the Native actors away from the studios and compelled Fox to “combine the hinterland of Hollywood for three days to get enough Indians for the scenes in the production.” Apparently, he could not wait for the pageant to conclude and chose not to participate himself, despite his Chickasaw ancestry and the good cause to which it contributed; namely, “to raise funds to build an Indian village near Los Angeles where the vanishing Americans can carry on their arts and crafts.”[5] He had a schedule to keep, and he would soon acquire a reputation for finishing his movies on time and under budget.[6]

The Riding Renegade, which opened in February 1928,was Fox’s third film as lead director and one of six he released that year alone. Such a high rate of productivity did not lend itself to auteurism, artistry, or concern for authenticity. It also suggests the different choices made by one Native film professional at a time when Hollywood expected and rewarded stereotypical presentations of Indianness both on and off screen. While his brothers Edwin Carewe and Finis Fox collaborated to create Ramona (1928), a lavishly produced and critically acclaimed epic about the plight of California Indians, Wallace Fox began a long and prolific career churning out B movies. Between 1927 and 1938, he directed sixteen Westerns and served as assistant director on The Last of the Mohicans (1936). Of those films, only the latter and The Riding Renegade featured Native Americans in any significant way. The rest were conventional B Westerns, with bandits, kidnappers, robbers, or rustlers as the villains and Indians conspicuously absent. Significantly, Native Americans provide heroic backup in The Riding Renegade, but none of Fox’s early movies made them the protagonists or the focal point of the story. If he was interested in advancing what Michelle Raheja calls “visual sovereignty,” it is not readily or consistently apparent within his body of work.[7] Whether we should read that choice as capitulation to the dominant discourse of early American cinema, or whether Fox’s career encourages us to expand our understanding of Indigenous filmmaking, is one of the central concerns of this essay. 

Fox presents a particularly interesting case because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not engage in obvious forms of “redfacing” either as a director or as a member of the Los Angeles Indian community. Most Hollywood Indians of his generation worked in front of the cameras, taking the roles assigned them by the cinematic conventions and cultural discourses of the day. They played their part as Savages or Noble Savages, Vanishing Red Men, and Romantic Primitives in scenarios written by and for members of the dominant society. In public appearances as well, they often donned paint and feathers to satisfy the expectations of white audiences, which generally assumed their inherent backwardness and imminent demise. As Raheja notes, these acts of redfacing performed cultural and ideological work with subversive potential, “even if they lead through what appears to be negative self-fashioning.” Especially in the early twentieth century, she argues, Hollywood Indians often functioned as “trickster figures” who simultaneously enacted and critiqued stereotypical representations of Indianness. Fox presents an even more ambiguous and ambivalent figure, one who “illustrates the intricacy of archival retrieval in the face of the complex histories of Native presence in the film industry and in film audiences across the span of the twentieth century.” On the one hand, he had clearer connections to a living Indigenous community than did some of those who gathered at the Hollywood Bowl, and he could readily access the Native networks that pervaded Los Angeles. On the other hand, Fox often passed as white and largely passed up the opportunity to use his Chickasaw heritage as a promotional vehicle.[8] 

Unfortunately, his reasons for doing so are opaque, as he did not leave behind a collection of personal papers or publications and did not receive much attention from the contemporary press. We simply cannot know with certainty how he perceived himself and his work in Hollywood. What is clear from Fox’s filmography is that he managed to find steady employment directing movies during a period when Native Americans generally had little creative control within the film industry. Fox certainly faced powerful constraints in the form of Western genre conventions and B movie production standards.[9] As a director, though, he may have enjoyed a level of power in the studio that most Hollywood Indians could only imagine. Unlike James Young Deer, and to a lesser extent his brother Edwin, Fox did not use that position to create alternative images and narratives concerning Native Americans. For the most part, his early films had no overt pedagogical purpose, activist agenda, or artistic pretensions to match the likes of Ramona. Yet, insofar as Fox had the ability to select and shape his productions, he avoided indulging the popular appetite for tropes of Indian savagery and doomed nobility. In that sense, he escaped the confines of Raheja’s “virtual reservation” and resisted the typecasting of Native film professionals. In that sense, we can see Fox as a trickster, shielding himself and his people from the colonial gaze even as he made movies that otherwise suited dominant assumptions about the American West and prevailing tastes in Western cinema.[10]

Regardless of his personal motives and perceptions of his own work, Fox deserves recognition as a pioneering Native filmmaker during the Golden Age of American cinema. He was part of a much larger cohort of Hollywood Indians, but one of only a handful to rise beyond the rank of actor or extra in the early twentieth century.[11] The Fox brothers were particularly successful in that regard. Edwin and Wallace became directors, while Finis wrote numerous screenplays and directed one film. Other Indians of their generation worked as technical advisors, which provided opportunities to engage in a kind of artistic activism. Although they lacked creative control, they could nudge movie productions in the direction of greater authenticity, accuracy, and sympathy in their representation of American Indian cultures and histories. Native technical advisors rarely received much attention or credit, but their invisible labor in film studios represented an early attempt to exert Indigenous influence over the narrative and to communicate ideas with potential to empower Native Americans. Even when they failed to do so, their presence complicates and enhances our understanding of the Hollywood Indian. “They were there,” argues historian Liza Black, “and that should matter at least as much as the discursive battle going on over filmic representations of Indians.”[12]

One of these unsung activists was Nipo Strongheart, a celluloid chief who came to Hollywood during the Silent Era and stayed for more than forty years. He never became famous and often struggled to earn a living, yet he worked on numerous productions through the heyday of the Western genre and made meaningful contributions to several proto-revisionist Indian films. It was often frustrating work because it required negotiating the paradoxical demands of Hollywood studios. Some producers and directors sought the stamp of authenticity for their films by hiring Native technical advisors, who presumably possessed special knowledge of Indian cultures. Once on the job, though, these technical advisors frequently struggled against their employers’ preconceived notions of Indianness. “For filmmakers,” writes Black,” Native employees had to present ideas and cultural objects radically different from anything with which white Americans were familiar, yet those ideas had to simulate or build on what white people already believed they knew about Indians.” As someone determined to challenge these assumptions, Strongheart provides an interesting contrast with Fox, who occupied a different part of “the space between resistance and compliance” wherein Native film professionals engaged with settler society’s expectations.[13]

Taken together, their careers allows us to see Hollywood Indians as agents of film history, rather than merely as objects of the cinematic gaze. Moving beyond studies that emphasize settler colonial constructions, scholars such as Liza Black, Philip Deloria, Jacob Floyd, Joanna Hearne, Michelle Raheja, Linda Scarangella McNenly, and Kiara Vigil have started to investigate how Native Americans themselves disrupted the dominant discourse and negotiated the terms of representation. Like other “contact zones” where Indigenous people engaged with non-Indigenous audiences and expectations, the movie industry presents “a site for the investigation of agency and of the negotiation of social meanings and representations of Native identity.”[14] Such investigations are crucial to overcome the logic of elimination that still dominates both Hollywood films and academic studies concerning Native Americans in the movies. As Black explains, “Failing to document Indian presence in film implicitly endorses the myth of the vanishing Indian, thereby implying that Indian people did not survive settler colonialism. Recognizing Indian involvement in films decolonizes film studies and challenges the unexpectedness of their presence in twentieth-­century films.”[15]

Fox and Strongheart alike worked within the constraints of a studio system that marginalized Indians, but with different means and ends, and with different public personas. While Strongheart eagerly played Indian and pursued representational reform through prestige pictures, Fox downplayed his Native identity and labored in the relative obscurity of the B movie system. Neither is widely known today, even among film scholars, and only Strongheart routinely receives mention in the same breath as other Hollywood Indians. It is my contention that Fox warrants inclusion in a cohort that, to quote Raheja, “set the stage for later generations of Indigenous artists who would borrow from, contest, and operate in dialogue with images produced by this first generation of film actors and directors.”[16]

Wallace Fox

Fox and Strongheart came of age at a time when the future of Native Americans seemed in doubt—indeed, when most whites assumed Indian people would soon die out as distinct cultures within the United States. From the 1880s to the 1920s, federal policies pushed to complete the settler colonial project of elimination through religious conversion, compulsory education, and land redistribution. In the name of “Americanization,” mission and boarding schools attempted to strip away the languages and customs of Native children, so that they could be remade in the white man’s image. The 1887 Dawes Act intensified the assault on Indigenous families and communities through the allotment of reservations and the sale of “surplus” lands to non-Indians. Meanwhile, world’s fairs and Wild West shows presumably gave Americans and Europeans their last opportunities to see the “Vanishing Race” in all its primitive splendor, at least until motion pictures began recording Native cultures for posterity. In 1894, Thomas Edison shot the first footage of American Indians in his New Jersey studio. Specifically, he filmed Lakotas performing the Ghost Dance, which just a few years earlier had triggered the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Modern technology would ostensibly help preserve the final, fleeting vestiges of a people unable to adapt to modernity.[17]

Fox was born soon after Edison premiered his new Kinetoscope. On March 9, 1895, Frank Marion and Sarah Priddy Fox had their third son in the town of Purcell, located within the Chickasaw Nation in Indian Territory. Wallace’s father was a former Confederate officer turned farmer, businessman, and lawyer, who had settled in the area during the 1870s. His mother was a “half-breed” Chickasaw, in the parlance of the time, and the daughter of a prominent local cattleman. In the language of blood quantum, the federal government’s pseudo-scientific system of racial classification, their boys were one-sixteenth Chickasaw. The 1900 US census identified them as “Indian,” but it is unclear how much they learned about Chickasaw culture and history before entering the Euro-American school system. Their mother had a college education, and both Finis and Jay (later Edwin Carewe) attended university when Wallace was still a boy.  He went to military school in San Antonio, Texas, and by 1910 he and his parents had temporarily relocated to Corpus Christi. However, Finis served several terms in the Chickasaw Nation’s legislature during Wallace’s youth, so he likely grew up with some awareness of the challenges facing their people.[18]

Around the turn of the century, the Chickasaws and other nations in Indian Territory found themselves once more in the path of American expansion. During the 1830s, Chickasaw leaders had accepted removal from their ancestral homelands in present-day Mississippi with the understanding that they could live undisturbed in their new home. By the early 1890s, however, white settlers had begun pressing on the nation’s borders and squatting on its land. Two years before Fox’s birth, the Secretary of the Interior reported the presence of some 49,000 whites and only 3,000 Indians within Chickasaw territory. The region quickly became notorious for banditry and lawlessness because tribal governments lacked jurisdiction over non-Indian intruders and federal law enforcement was thin on the ground. In 1895, several mixed-race gangs committed a string of robberies, murders, and rapes across Indian Territory. Perhaps childhood stories of those wild and wooly days influenced Fox’s later cinematic interest in Western outlaws and gave him an imprimatur of authority on the subject. The greatest crime being perpetrated, though, was the theft of tribal lands in Indian Territory. In 1897, the Atoka Agreement compelled the Choctaws and Chickasaws to take allotments and provided for the opening of their “surplus” acreage for sale. The following year, the Curtis Act ratified that agreement and paved the way for Oklahoma statehood by abolishing tribal courts, establishing public schools, and extending federal jurisdiction over the former Indian Territory.[19]

On the Dawes Rolls, which enumerated the people eligible for tribal enrollment and allotments, the Fox brothers appear as “Chickasaw by Blood.” Given their ancestry and background, they could have made passable celluloid chiefs. Certainly, other Hollywood Indians made do with less, wringing every last drop of cachet and credibility from highly attenuated or even imaginary bloodlines. For the most part, though, the available evidence suggests that the Fox siblings rarely drew attention to their Native heritage. By 1920, when a census enumerator visited Wallace and his wife Cleo Easton at their Los Angeles address, he identified himself as white. Newspaper stories almost never noted his Chickasaw affiliation—even when he was out scouring the Hollywood Hills for Indian extras—and he did not present himself as a chief. By contrast, the Chickasaw actor William F. Harrison regularly performed as Chief Young Turtle in plays and pageants around Los Angeles. He likely represented the Chickasaws at the Hollywood Bowl Inter-tribal Ceremonial along with Tessie Mobley, a young opera singer known as Princess Lou-scha-enya, the “Hummingbird of the Chickasaws.” She was neither a true princess nor “full-blooded,” but savvy Hollywood Indians often claimed both a pure bloodline and a royal lineage because it enhanced their appeal to white audiences.[20]

The Fox brothers were not ashamed of their Native ancestry, and they invoked it selectively to help promote particular movies or underscore their authority on Indian subjects. In 1927, for example, The Los Angeles Times interviewed Finis Fox regarding his script for Edwin Carewe’s remake of Ramona. “Very appropriately,” the reporter wrote, “the adapter of ‘Ramona’ to the screen has a little of the red man’s blood in his own veins. And Finis Fox is very proud of his descent from the peace-loving Chickasaws.” His youngest brother Wallace echoed that sentiment in 1945, following the release of Song of the Range, when a newspaper story said that Wallace was “proud of a percentage of Choctaw” and “claim[s] that a dash of Indian helps to put zip into a ‘western.’” As the mistaken tribal affiliation suggests, reporters and critics may well have exaggerated or even invented such statements to suit their own essentialist notions of Indian identity. However, it is probable that these declarations of pride accurately reflected the brothers’ own views as well as their knack for promotion. Like other Hollywood Indians of their day, the Foxes had adapted to white society and lived far from home. After they settled in Los Angeles, whatever ties they had to the Chickasaw community in Oklahoma grew more tenuous, and being Indian became more abstract. Just “a dash” of Chickasaw blood was enough to pitch certain movies without having it circumscribe or define their larger body of work.[21] 

White Cloud and Little Wolf are not the protagonists of The Riding Renegade, but it is unique among Fox’s early films in affording Native Americans a significant and sympathetic place in the story.”

Although the racial position and politics of the Fox brothers are difficult to discern in the absence of much direct evidence, we can speculate based on their background and the dominant discourse among Native American intellectuals at the time. During the early 1920s, when they launched their film careers, the rhetoric of pan-Indian leaders generally emphasized universalist themes of racial progress and uplift. Members of the Society of American Indians (SAI) differed over the merits of specific policies and the desirability of full assimilation, but they largely agreed that their “race” could and must become full, competent citizens of the United States. “In formulating their positions,” argues Lucy Maddox, “the SAI spokespersons had essentially to demonstrate to their audience, especially their white audience, that Indians were not constrained or determined by their racial identification.” Prominent among these spokespersons were representatives of the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Oklahoma, such as Cherokee writer John Milton Oskison and Chickasaw politician Charles Carter. Oskison urged the public to embrace the “modern Indian” as a “new man,” one who remained “Indian only in blood and traditions.” Carter, who briefly served on the Chickasaw Council before winning election as a Democrat to the US House of Representatives, helped pass the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. For them, race was not a permanent bar to Native American advancement, as it seemed to be for African Americans. Rather, as Oskison wrote optimistically, “prejudice simply does not exist among people who can make or mar a career….The Indian who fits himself for the company of those at the top will go up. He will go up swiftly and surely as his white brother.”[22]

Such sentiments would have appealed to the Fox brothers as they fitted themselves to ascend the professional ladder into the upper echelons of Hollywood society. By presenting as “civilized” Indians, practically white in both appearance and culture, they forsook the allure of “full-blooded” celluloid chiefs but also escaped the stigma associated with visible markers of racial difference. They could pass as white people, if they chose to do so, yet still lay claim to special knowledge of Indians through their family history and “blood memory.” That liminal position—simultaneously precarious and privileged—had been staked out by elite members of the Five Tribes almost a century before the Foxes arrived in Hollywood. As the light-skinned children of a “mixed-blood” Chickasaw and a former Confederate soldier, they likely grew up sensitized to the importance of emphasizing their white ancestry within a local racial hierarchy that accorded few rights to African American freedmen and their descendants. Within the Hollywood Indian community as well, white admixture passed muster while allegations of black ancestry produced scandal and disgrace, as demonstrated by the sad fate of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. The Fox brothers could expect to “go up,” as Oskison said, if they did not make too much of their Native heritage in a world that still placed Indianness at odds with modernity.[23]

And up they went. By the early 1930s, Wallace Fox was happily hobnobbing with other movie moguls at the exclusive Embassy Club and Montmartre Café, located on a glitzy section of Hollywood Boulevard. He was among 117 studio notables arrested there in October 1931, when the Los Angeles vice squad raided the establishments to shut down an illegal gambling operation. In some newspaper stories, Fox was one of the few mentioned by name, in the same breath as actors Harry Carey and Joseph De La Motte, directors Robert G. Vignola and Robert Hill, theater manager Marvin Park, and orchestra leader Gene Morgan. Such illustrious (if bad) company suggests that Fox had indeed reached the higher rungs of Hollywood society just a few years after his directorial debut. He had also achieved acceptance as something other than a curiosity. Significantly, none of the newspaper coverage made an issue of his Native heritage or even mentioned it. Despite the presence of illegal alcohol and even “drunks” passed out under gaming tables, there were no smirking, suggestive references to his Indian ancestry. He was simply a director, one of the boys, arrested at a studio “stag party” where bigwigs talked business over cards and roulette.[24]

At the same time, Fox’s “dash” of Indian blood gave him an entrée to the “Native hubs” that united the diverse and diffuse American Indian community in Los Angeles. Building on Renya K. Ramirez’s ethnographic concept, which emphasizes the connections between urban centers and distant reservations, Jacob Floyd suggests that Native hubs also formed within metropolitan areas. In L.A., commercial, intellectual, and social networks radiated out from Hollywood like spokes on a wheel, serving “to connect Native people separated from each other by the physical and subjective geographies of urban life.” These hubs had begun to form even before the film industry relocated to California, as Native people from across the state and beyond moved to the City of Angels in search of employment. The 1920 federal censuses listed 183 Indian adults and 35 children in Los Angeles County, while an untold number of others escaped enumeration or chose—like Wallace Fox—to pass as white. By 1930, the official population of Native Americans had grown to 236 adults and 133 children, with around 20 percent hailing from Oklahoma. Others came and went periodically, like Humming Bird and her Osage husband, perhaps carrying news from back home to friends and relatives in Los Angeles.[25] 

As the Indian community grew, its disparate members developed overlapping associations that provided both personal comfort and professional opportunity. During the 1920s, Native actors began hosting regular parties or “powwows” at their homes, which often became hubs in their own right. A 1926 gala at Luther Standing Bear’s house in Culver City reportedly attracted more than 2,000 guests, including “Indians from every part of Los Angeles,” and one wonders if the Fox brothers made an appearance. Hollywood Indians also joined or founded an array of charitable and fraternal organizations, such as the American Indian Order and the Wigwam Club. These groups witnessed their share of debate and scandal, often surrounding issues of race and sex, but they gave Hollywood Indians additional venues in which to socialize and network. Starting in 1928, the Wigwam Club hosted an annual picnic in Sycamore Grove Park, where people from many different tribes mingled and sampled each other’s foods, dances, and handicrafts. That same year, Edwin Carewe announced plans for his own “ultra-exclusive screen colony club” composed of “the ultra-Americans of filmdom…an ultra-American being defined as one with American Indian ancestry.” Among those invited to join were Will Rogers, Monte Blue, Al Roscoe, Finis Fox, and Wallace Fox.[26]

Fox may have tapped into these social networks when searching for Indian extras to appear in The Riding Renegade. That production was the only one of his early films to feature Indians as a plot device, and it is notable that he took the time to track down Native performers. Many B Western directors would not have bothered, as studios routinely hired non-Indians to play both leading roles and background parts. In 1926, Western actor William S. Hart complained that, “since the motion pictures have become controlled by business interests they do not go in for the real thing so much. They use Mexicans for Indians and there a great many Mexicans in this country.”[27] Even so, film audiences and critics appreciated seeing real Indians and praised productions that featured them as more authentic, even as they often heaped derision on the Native actors themselves. Witness a review of George B. Seitz’s 1925 epic, The Vanishing American, which applauded the fact that

Indians, themselves, act parts of considerable importance. Indian babies play Indian baby roles, and in one case a child so young it could not speak plainly was required in several minutes of camera close-ups, and it is one of the favorite stories of Seitz—that of the tedious time experienced in feeding the little Redskin chocolate candies in between scenes to keep it good humored and awake.”

The reviewer went on to say, “Almost every moment of it you believe. This is true because almost every foot of its action may very well have happened. And most of it actually did happen.”[28] Paramount shelled out big money shoot that film on location in Navajo Country, though, whereas B movie directors had to make do with low budgets and local resources.

Why did Fox make the effort to track down Native extras for a film that lacked not only the overhead but also the artistic aspirations of The Vanishing American or Ramona? One intriguing possibility is that he knew hiring non-Indians could antagonize his compatriots in the Hollywood Indian community. In 1926, Indian actors had organized the War Paint Club, which despite its stereotypical name pursued the serious mission of advancing their interests within the film industry. Initially headquartered in the home of Mary and Daniel Simmons, who performed as White Bird and Chief Yowlache, the club assembled a list of “authentic” Native performers for distribution to the studios. The club’s purpose was to ensure employment for actual Indigenous people, rather than pretendians, as well as to “keep the Indian character from defamation or ridicule…as is often the case when white men, who don’t know what it’s all about, are dressed up to represent Indians.” In effect, Floyd explains, “it became a casting agency for Native talent, and White Bird was its casting director,” reputedly able to procure “as many as 150 Indians…at short notice.” By 1927, when Famous Players-Lasky handed Fox his first directing assignment, he must have known about the War Paint Club and may have sympathized with its grievances. If so, calling White Bird on the phone would have been the practical way to go about locating Indian extras for his production.[29]

Unfortunately, because no copies of The Riding Renegade have survived, it is difficult to assess the level of verisimilitude Fox achieved in terms of casting and costuming those extras. According to one newspaper story about the production, the script called specifically for Apaches, but the promotional materials show generic Plains tribesmen in buckskins and feathered war bonnets. Advertisements and reviews simply refer to them as Indians, and the film’s setting is described vaguely as “the Western bad lands” or “desert.” In any case, Fox did not employ more than a “score” of cowboys and Indians, though he apparently used them effectively “to give the proper background to this thrilling story.” None of them are credited, so we cannot know which tribes they came from or whether their names appeared on White Bird’s list of approved Native performers. We also do not know the wages they received for their work, which goes to the question of whether Fox prioritized his budget over the demands for pay equity coming from the War Paint Club. He certainly followed studio practice in hiring non-Indians for the two named Native characters. The role of Chief White Cloud went to Nicholas Tamborello, an Italian American who performed as Nick Thompson, while a Greek immigrant called Pedro Regas (or Riga, born Panagiotis Thomas Regaskos) played the part of Little Wolf.[30]

White Cloud and Little Wolf are not the protagonists of The Riding Renegade, but it is unique among Fox’s early films in affording Native Americans a significant and sympathetic place in the story. The hero, Bob Taylor (played by Bob Steele), is the son of a sheriff but “runs away from home to become a wanderer of the wastelands.” After he saves the life of Little Wolf out in the desert, the young man’s tribe adopts Bob, causing his own father to disown him for “going native.” He then discovers that bandits have been robbing the Indians, and he sets out with Little Wolf to foil the gang’s latest plot to stick up a stagecoach carrying a strongbox and Bob’s love interest, Janet Reynolds. The duo secures Janet and the strongbox, only to have Sheriff Taylor arrest them for robbery, which allows the villains to escape with the loot after wounding Little Wolf. The sheriff soon realizes his error and goes in pursuit of the bandits, but they take him prisoner and are about to kill him when Bob and his Native friends come to the rescue. The Indians, not the cavalry, save the day. Still, wrote one reviewer, “Steele is the whole show. He is a three-ring circus in himself, riding, roping, shooting and making love with the same fine grace and skill he displayed in his previous picture.”[31]

Although neither original nor bold in its positive treatment of Native Americans, The Riding Renegade stands nearly alone among Fox’s early films in its engagement with themes of racial transgression and “going native.” The trope of the white man who befriends Indians, or becomes one of them, was already familiar to contemporary audiences. They would not have found shocking promotional taglines such as “Red Man or White!” or “Why did he turn renegade and live with the Indians?” In focusing on the injustices done to Indigenous peoples and the power of racial prejudice, however, The Riding Renegade echoed other, more famous films of the Silent Era in their calls for reform. It was thus of a piece with both Ramona and the Meriam Report, which in 1928 publicized the scandalous state of Indian affairs in the United States. That parallel alone hardly qualifies Fox as an activist director, as his film also aligns with other contemporary Westerns that told stories of white absolution and cultural appropriation. Moreover, The Riding Renegade was effectively a one-off for Fox, though Trapped in Tijuana (1932) flirted with issues of boundary crossing and interracial love. Even so, the film can be read as an act of “aesthetic diplomacy,” one of the few instances in which Fox overtly talked back to colonial discourse and in defense of Native Americans.[32]  

The bulk of his own cinematic output over the next ten years was devoted to comedic shorts, romantic adventure films, and B Westerns. Of the latter, the majority were conventional cowboy and gunfighter movies such as Near the Trail’s End (1931), Powdersmoke Range (1935), and The Mexicali Kid (1938). None of them depicted Native Americans or referenced Indian issues, except for an allusion in Trapped in Tijuana to Mexican Yaquis who are wrongfully accused of kidnapping an American boy. Their general absence from Fox’s early productions constitutes a form of erasure, but it can also be explained more benignly or even interpreted as a kind of passive resistance. As a cog in the B movie machine, Fox may not have exercised much control over which films he directed or the scripts that studio producers chose to make. He also likely recognized that B Westerns did not offer much space for grand artistic or political statements. They were intended as cheap entertainment, and he excelled primarily at making them cheaply. In the process, he made a good living for himself and avoided the pitfall of being branded an “Indian director” in a business that barely allowed Native people to act. If he turned away from artistic activism, though, he also refused to indulge the dominant society’s insatiable appetite for images of Indian dysfunction, savagery, and stoicism in the face of inevitable annihilation. From that perspective, Fox also engaged in redfacing “as a kind of virtual, visual prophylactic that keeps Native American cultural and spiritual practices somewhat sacrosanct, or at least hidden from the white tourist gaze.”[33] 

That does not fully absolve him of complicity in the perpetuation of problematic tropes, however, as seen through his involvement with the 1936 screen adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans. To be fair, as an associate director to George Seitz, Fox had limited creative influence on the production. It is also true that James Fenimore Cooper’s original story gave them little room to maneuver around the biggest stumbling block in Native American cinema—the Vanishing Indian myth—even if Seitz had been so inclined. The film trips over many of the others as well. Set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War, it features a heroic white Indian (Hawkeye) and his noble savage allies (Chingachgook and his son Uncas), an evil savage villain (Magua), and a pair of damsels in distress (Alice and Cora, the daughters of a British colonel). Ultimately, the good guys win, but at great cost to themselves and the movie Indian’s image. Uncas dies after saving Cora, his newfound love, and she leaps to her death in grief. Thus, a lasting cross-race romance is averted and the extinction of the Mohicans is assured, while Hawkeye and Alice survive to build a bright future on the American frontier. Fox could hardly have altered the film’s ending or underlying message, but he did collaborate with Seitz in bringing this saga of settler colonialism to the screen.  

Without access to production records, it is difficult to say precisely how Fox contributed to what some critics have called the most successful film adaptation of Cooper’s novel. Most likely, he used his logistical expertise and managerial skills as a maker of B movies to help the production run as efficiently as possible. Perhaps Fox even deserves a share of the glory that went to assistant director Clem Beauchamp, who received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the film. If Fox had a hand in casting decisions, he might also claim some credit (albeit indirectly and negatively) for the subsequent formation of the Indian Actors Association (IAA), which succeeded the War Paint Club in 1936. According to Bill Hazlett, a Blackfeet who served as the Association’s first chairman, “when [the studios] were casting The Last of the Mohicans, some of us noticed that Indians were underbidding each other just so they could get work.” The IAA organized to “stop the movie producers from encouraging and allowing this price cutting,” and it went on to achieve some important victories for Native performers in Hollywood. Did Fox side with labor or management in this dispute? Was he upset or conflicted when, as usual, non-Indians landed all the credited Native roles? We may never know the answer to these questions. Judging from Fox’s cinematic oeuvre, however, it seems safe to conclude that advancing Indian causes either locally or nationally took a back seat to making movies and making a good living in Hollywood.[34]

Nipo Strongheart     

By contrast, for Nipo Strongheart, the play was the thing wherein to capture the conscience of the nation. During a career that overlapped temporally with Fox’s, Strongheart self-consciously embodied the Indian imaginary for the express purpose of asserting Native rights and challenging white racism, while also affirming his own identity. Born in May 1891 to a white father (George Mitchell) and a Yakama mother (Leonora Williams), Strongheart began life as George Mitchell, Jr., a “mixed-blood” who spent most of his childhood far from the Yakama reservation in south-central Washington. The lifelong process of embracing and embellishing his Native heritage began in 1902, when he and his father signed on as trick riders with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. By his own account, the troupe’s Lakota performers dubbed him Nipo (supposedly derived from Nee-Hah-Pouw, “Messenger of Light”) after he fell from a horse, then “came back” from the dead. The translation is incorrect, but he stuck with it and later added both the title of chief and the surname Strongheart, probably after seeing the eponymous William DeMille play that he would later help remake for the screen. This knack for appropriation and invention remained a hallmark of his career after he left the Wild West in 1904 to work in theater. By 1917, he had appeared in productions of The Heart of We-to-Na and other plays that reputedly “interpreted the romance and poetry of the Red Man with skill and fidelity.” American entry into World War I brought additional opportunities to perform as a paid lecturer on behalf of bond drives and military recruiting, which “Chief” Strongheart parlayed into regular employment on the lyceum and Chautauqua circuits.[35]

During the early 1920s, life on the lecture circuit gave him the chance to blend performance with political action, as well as to connect with Native communities around the United States. His rigorous touring schedule made him an ideal field representative for the Society of American Indians. Part of Strongheart’s mandate was to cultivate support among influential whites and distribute petitions in support of Indian citizenship. During his travels, however, he also visited reservations and other Indigenous enclaves to report on their needs, recruit members, and render whatever assistance he could in the moment. These experiences opened his eyes to the severe problems confronting Indian Country in the 1920s, and they enabled him to claim expertise as an ethnographer, which became part of his resume in Hollywood. He then fed his observations back into his lectures, using specific examples of government corruption and mistreatment to sharpen his critique of the “Indian Bureau System.” His penchant for naming names repeatedly got him into trouble with the Office of Indian Affairs—including threats of arrest and his temporary dismissal from the Chautauqua circuit in 1923—but it also infused his performances with a purpose higher than mere entertainment. Shrugging off the danger to his career, he defiantly declared, “I am still going on and my arrows are dipped in truth and they make mighty weapons against the enemy.”[36]

By contrast, for Nipo Strongheart, the play was the thing wherein to capture the conscience of the nation. During a career that overlapped temporally with Fox’s, Strongheart self-consciously embodied the Indian imaginary for the express purpose of asserting Native rights and challenging white racism, while also affirming his own identity.”

Strongheart also began acting in movies during this period. After appearing in early pictures with the Philadelphia-based Lubin Company around 1905, he took a series of uncredited roles in Western shorts such as The White Chief (1908), The Bandit King (1912), and The Crisis (1916). He also claimed to have advised David Belasco on the screen adaptation of The Heart of Wetona (1919), but the exact nature of his contributions is murky. These productions steeped Strongheart in the melodramatic mode that framed cinematic portrayals of the “Vanishing Red Man,” and he grew to resent such films and the people who made them. In 1920, for example, he rejected the advances of the Wyandote Indian Film Corporation when it “tried to rope [him] into buying stock and go out soliciting trade for them…” Although the company’s representative purported to be “a half breed Wyandote,” Strongheart thought she looked “very much from the place where the shamrock grows. Anyway they try to tell me that they are going to make movies about Indians and their primitive life. I can see another mind poisoning movie that will make a savage of my dear Red Brothers.” His own racial assumptions and insecurities aside, he recognized that Native Americans needed to get behind the camera if they hoped to shift the discourse concerning their past, present, and future in America.[37]

His big break came in 1925, when Cecil B. DeMille’s studio hired him as the technical advisor for its remake of the 1914 film adaptation of Strongheart. It was one of several movies chosen to establish DeMille’s reputation as an independent producer, and he recruited top talent from his former company to ensure its success. True to Hollywood form, a non-Indian star named Rod La Rocque landed the leading role, with Tyrone Power cast as his father. Strongheart, who sometimes mocked his own small stature and thinning hair, no longer looked “Indian” enough to play the strapping hero. While his on-screen presence was limited to the minor part of “Medicine Man,” he had important things to do behind the scenes.[38]

One of his first assignments as technical advisor was to help select a title that would distinguish the movie from the original screen version. A few days after he signed the contract, production editor Elmer Harris asked “our Indian friend” what he thought of the title Braveheart as an alternative. Strongheart was initially nonplussed, stating that he had “never heard of that as the name of an Indian,” whereas his own surname connoted the virtues of “patience, courage, bravery and sacrifice.” Of the other possibilities they discussed—including The American, Race, The Red Barrier, The Savage Gentleman, Red and White, This Civilization, and “But Not Our Women!”—he actually preferred The Redskin.[39] Despite the term’s pejorative connotations, Strongheart saw it as a more authentic choice:

He said that the term – Redskin – is used in the Indian sign language to indicate the red man as against the white man. In the sign language, the white man is indicated by a gesture across the forehead, meaning that the white man wears a hat. The Redskin is indicated by rubbing the forefinger of the right hand on the back of the left hand, and indicates the color of the Indian’s own hide.[40]

They finally settled on Braveheart, which Strongheart conceded “might be a good title as well as a name for the hero.” As a technical advisor, he lacked the creative control that he had possessed on the lecture circuit, but he would not stop trying to push the production in the direction of greater verisimilitude.[41]

Strongheart’s commitment to constructing a historically authentic and politically pointed narrative shows most clearly in his work on the screenplay. Here again, however, his contributions were overshadowed by others who received greater compensation and credit. In March 1925, DeMille’s studio had hired continuity writer Mary O’Hara (later famous for the children’s novel My Friend Flicka) to create three scripts for a total of $18,000, one of which became Braveheart. In her autobiography, the “Queen Bee” makes no mention of Strongheart or the film, but a publicity photo shows them together with her holding the script. While the exact nature of their collaboration remains fuzzy, his fingerprints are literally all over the screenplay. Trying to ground the story in Yakama culture and history, he added details that only he could have known and even crafted whole scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. Hollywood compromised Strongheart’s vision—as it has so often done with Native artists—yet that hardly negates his agency within the production.[42]

His influence on O’Hara’s screenplay is most evident in the film’s setting and storyline. In the original draft, the movie opens with a scene depicting the 1855 council that produced the Yakama Nation’s treaty and reservation—not an event widely known or a tribe often (ever?) featured in Hollywood films. Washington Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens and his secretary are shown interpreting the treaty terms to the fourteen signatory chiefs, including their nominal “head chief,” Kamiakin. Speaking through sign language, he agrees to surrender their land but explicitly reserves their rights to salmon, game, berries, and roots. Stevens readily agrees: “It shall be as you say. The fish, the game, the roots and berries everywhere shall be yours forever.” Kamiakin does not trust him, however, so he insists upon three “immortal witnesses” to the agreement; the Sun, a snow-capped mountain (Ta-ho-ma, or Mt. Rainier), and the Big River (the Yakama name for the Columbia). Stevens has that written into the treaty too: “[A]s long as the sun shines and the mountain stands and the river flows the Redskin shall hunt and fish at his accustomed places and keep peace with the white man.” All of these details came from Mid-Columbia Indian oral traditions concerning the Stevens treaties, which Strongheart had learned about from his contacts on the reservation. Working through them, he grafted Yakama concerns onto a script that originally had nothing to do with them.[43]

The original screenplay also contained ethnographic markers that further root the film in the Columbia Basin and show Strongheart’s hand. Early scenes of an Indian village included shots of salmon drying on racks in traditional Plateau fashion, women pounding and packing fish into buckskin parfleches, and a dog knocking over a cradleboard without hurting the infant. Strongheart added these touches to illustrate Native ingenuity, a recurring theme in his lectures, as well as to teach the audience about his own people. He sent Harris detailed descriptions of popular Plateau pastimes such as stick game and horseracing, and he furnished O’Hara with Sahaptin language translations for the names of the principal Indian characters. Apparently, she chose not to incorporate them, but the writing team took his advice seriously. As one note on the third draft said, “All cross marks by Strongheart. Better see on all these things, some are wrong and others incorrect and could stand much improvement.” We can only imagine his frustration when the editors eliminated most of the cultural background and the opening council scene. Although the press book called the film “a colorful romance of the Northwest,” nowhere does it specifically identify Braveheart’s people as Yakamas. Still, thanks to Strongheart’s interventions, there is little chance of mistaking them for the Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Sioux that populate the majority of early Westerns.[44]

In his quest for historical authenticity, Strongheart went so far as to scout shooting locations on and around the Yakama reservation. He promptly sent a telegram to a friend and contact in the area, Lucullus V. McWhorter, requesting photographs of “local scenes” that could inform the screenplay and potentially appear in the film. McWhorter responded enthusiastically with images and ideas for the script, and he urged Strongheart to lobby for a shoot in the Yakima Valley. “Practically every feature of tribal life can be staged,” he wrote, “from the travos [sic] and pack-horse to the aristocratic automobile; from the rush-mat lodge…to the two story dwelling of modern structure.” Strongheart’s inventory of “essentials for an Indian camp” included modern props like cars and iron stoves as well as traditional items. The Yakamas would thus appear as a living culture, with one foot firmly planted in the present, not as generic movie Indians in ersatz paint and feathers. Both men had seen enough of the Wild West to grow tired of its conventions and stereotypes, especially what McWhorter called “the posing of the self-conscious Indian.” As he told Strongheart (himself a self-conscious poser), “I think that you are correct wherein the Sioux contingent with its sameness…is depicted in the various shows.” Staging the movie in Yakama country would offer something “original and unique” to the producers, not to mention personal rewards for Strongheart. If “Brother Nipo” could pull off the move, McWhorter promised, “then you will be solid with our people here, and no mistake.” Bringing the movie home would be Strongheart’s ticket to authenticity and acceptance by his mother’s tribe.[45]

In the end, though, nothing turned out as he hoped it would. He did not travel to the Northwest, and the company never reached the Yakima Valley. Nature itself seemed to conspire against the production. On September 12, Strongheart sent a letter to McWhorter sheepishly explaining that a portion of the cast and crew had come as far as Portland and Astoria, only to be deterred by forest fires and a flood on the Upper Columbia that “scared the company out.” Unable to film because of the thick smoke, director Alan Hale headed back to Los Angeles after waiting two weeks for better conditions. He managed to get some footage, but most was of such poor quality that it had to be redone in Sonoma County, California, in the fall. Strongheart came up from Hollywood with a contingent of Plains Indian extras to shoot the required outdoor scenes. The setting was much different from the “Land of the Yakimas,” and he felt “heart sick” about the failure to deliver on a promise to his people. There would be no triumphant homecoming for him. Still, to borrow a line from Smoke Signals, the finished film got about as close to “Dances with Salmon” as one could expect from Hollywood at that time.[46]

For all his frustrations and failures, Strongheart succeeded in framing an original picture that evoked the Yakama Nation’s contemporary fight for justice. Finished in December 1925, Braveheart pays homage to the original play but takes the story into new territory. The hero attends college and plays football, but he goes for the specific purpose of acquiring the legal knowledge necessary to defend his tribe’s fishing rights against a rapacious cannery owner. The principal villain is Hobart Nelson, who uses intimidation and violence to drive Braveheart’s people away from their traditional fisheries. During his time at the fictional Strathmore College, Braveheart wins the big game and the heart of Nelson’s daughter Lucie, whose life he had saved earlier in the film. In doing so, he earns the enmity of Nelson’s son, Frank, an open racist who also plays football for Strathmore and frames Braveheart for passing the team’s signals to the opposition. He is expelled from school and banished from his tribe, yet he continues to represent his people in court and ultimately wins their case. He then saves them from destruction at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry when the savage Ki-yote, a jealous rival for future leadership of the tribe, tries to start a war by abducting Lucie. After killing Ki-yote in a duel, Braveheart does the noble thing and lets Lucie go (against her wishes) because their races cannot mingle. He then returns to his people and marries the maiden Sky-Arrow, who has loved him from the start.

Even as this resolution reaffirms the trope of the Noble Savage and the theme of doomed interracial romance, Braveheart ends with a message of Indigenous persistence. The law upholds the tribe’s treaty, and so they will continue to fish in perpetuity. It is a dramatically different ending from those seen in most Indian movies of the Silent Era, particularly The Vanishing American, against which DeMille’s film competed for audience attention. Based on Zane Grey’s novel of the same name, the 1925 Paramount production is considered a cinema classic and a textbook example of the titular trope. The original story shares many dramatic conventions with Strongheart and Braveheart, including a Native protagonist who uses his college education to defend his people, an interracial love affair, and an uprising of not-so-noble savages triggered by the actions of nefarious white villain. As the title loudly proclaims, though, The Vanishing American presumes the final demise of Indians as the inevitable price of progress. The hero, Nophaie, accepts the necessity of assimilation into Euro-American society shortly before dying from a gunshot wound. This conclusion, argues Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, “allows the viewer to ‘tolerate’ the Native Other, even feel deep sympathy, but without responsibility since the Indians are soon to be no more.” Braveheart, by contrast, lives to lead his people into the future.[47]             

Although the film earned disappointing returns at the box office, Strongheart made it the centerpiece of his resume and his evolving persona as an expert on all things Indian. He began advertising his services as a technical advisor in the Studio Directory and often identified himself as a friend of Cecil B. DeMille, though there is no evidence that the two men ever spoke directly. Unfortunately, studio employment dried up during the Great Depression as the film industry shrank and the Western genre hit hard times. Throughout the 1930s, Strongheart struggled to get contracts, and to make ends meet he often had to work part-time in Hollywood costume shops and as a seasonal carrier for the Postal Service. He also kept a foot in the world of live performance as a paid organizer of Indian pageants in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. During World War II, his reputation as “a recognized authority on the American Indian” landed him a position as chair of the American Indian War Finance Committee, which produced patriotic festivals designed to sell war bonds. When the war ended and movie production cranked up again, he returned to the studios and enjoyed a period of steady employment over the next ten years. By 1956, he took credit for technical advising on the films Canyon Passage (1946), Black Gold (1947), The Outriders (1950), Young Daniel Boone (1950), Westward the Women (1951), Across the Wide Missouri (1951), The Painted Hills (1951), Lone Star (1952), The Half-Breed (1952), Pony Soldier (1952), The Charge at Feather River (1953), and Rose Marie (1954).[48]

His involvement with these productions spanned a range of activities in the studio and on shoots across the West. In addition to costuming and location scouting, he trained actors and extras in military skills such as horsemanship and saber maneuvers, supposedly based on his own experience in the U.S. Cavalry. His claims of military service are undocumented and dubious, but they were ultimately less important to his resume than were his carefully burnished credentials as an ethnographer and an authentic Indian himself. As he told producer-director Nunnally Johnson in 1958, “It has been my privilege to reside with numerous Tribes and Nations of the American Indian People, having been assigned by the United States Government in the translation of Language, Music and Mythology for the Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, and the WAR Department.” Although these statements stretched the truth, Strongheart understood that Hollywood accepted and even invited bold acts of self-invention and self-promotion. The important thing was to get the job, earn the salary and the experience, and thereby be in a position to portray Native Americans as accurately and sympathetically as possible.[49]  

Strongheart’s work shines a spotlight on the hidden history of Native creativity in Hollywood, reminding us that Indians and other Indigenous peoples have always been more than mere performers in settler colonial fantasies.”

Strongheart’s most important contributions in that regard came as a writer and coach of Indian dialogue. Going beyond the linguistic suggestions he had made for Braveheart, he crafted entire passages employing Indigenous languages rather than the broken English common in most contemporary Westerns. For The Outriders, an MGM production featuring Navajos as well as some Apaches and Pawnees, he wrote the dialogue and taught the actors how to pronounce their lines properly. It was, he later joked, “not an easy task to coach some movie people to speak an Indian language while they are still unable to speak their own.” He could not speak Yakama fluently, much less Diné Bizaad or Pawnee, but apparently he did develop a command of both Plains Indian sign language and the Chinook Jargon historically used for cross-cultural communication on the Northwest Coast. Those skills came in handy for the film Across the Wide Missouri, which Strongheart personally considered “better than any of the pictures made so far.” While shooting on location in Colorado, he provided many hours of dialogue coaching and sign language instruction to the principal actors (all non-Indian) Clark Gable, Ricardo Montalban, Mariah Elena Marquesa, James Whitmore, Jack Holt, Carol Naish, John Hodiak, and John Hartman. Technically, Chinook Jargon is not an Indigenous language and was not spoken on the Great Plains, where the film is set. For a Western movie made in the early 1950s, however, its integration into the script represented a significant step toward the authentic and respectful depiction of Native Americans on screen. Instead of inarticulate grunts, or the guttural “heaps” and “hows” typically heard in Hollywood movies of the time, audiences would hear an historical Indian tongue. Furthermore, non-Indian actors would have to learn that language from the Indian technical advisor who wrote their lines.[50]

Of course, in terms of audience response, it is impossible to measure the effects of Strongheart’s creative interventions. None of the motion pictures that he worked on became major commercial or critical successes, and film historians rarely comment on them. As part of a broader movement to reframe Native Americans in cinema, however, Strongheart scored some minor victories. In 1948, for example, President Steve Broidy of Allied Artists wrote a letter to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) commending his work on Black Gold. In turn, the NCAI bestowed its first Tolerance Award on the film for portraying Native American history “truthfully” and “creating a warm spirit of tolerance for the American Indian.”  Broidy said, “Your west coast representative, Nipo Strongheart, was an important figure in making this picture authentic and instilling the proper spirit in the depiction of the Indian characters.” Two years later, Twentieth Century Fox released Broken Arrow, commonly (if mistakenly) regarded as the first revisionist Indian film of the postwar period. Strongheart did not work on that production but helped bring similar sensibilities to Across the Wide Missouri, Pony Solider, and other Westerns of the early 1950s that showed Native Americans in a more positive light.[51]

Strongheart’s work shines a spotlight on the hidden history of Native creativity in Hollywood, reminding us that Indians and other Indigenous peoples have always been more than mere performers in settler colonial fantasies. Well before the 1970s, when Vine Deloria, Jr., urged Indians to engage in self-representation, Strongheart was striving to shape cinematic narratives that would educate non-Indian audiences and encourage better treatment of Native Americans. His accomplishments were relatively small and his frustrations many, but he never stopped trying to swim against the stream of myths and stereotypes flowing out of Hollywood. Others swam with it. Two years after Strongheart’s death in 1966, the Chickasaw technical advisor Rodd Redwing (nephew of Princess Redwing) complained, “I’ve got the worst job in the world. I teach cowboys how to kill Indians.” Although he recognized that the films he helped produce got the history wrong, he saw nothing to be done about it. “I’ve found out we won practically all the battles. The white man didn’t beat us, he starved us out.” Still, sighed Redwing, “you can’t combat lies.”[52] Strongheart would have disagreed. He was among the first Native film professionals to recognize an essential truth about movie making: If Indigenous artists ever hoped to see full and fair representation of their peoples on screen, they would have to get behind the camera before they got in front of it.

Conclusion

Nipo Strongheart and Wallace Fox were both Hollywood Indians, part of a diverse and dynamic community engaged in the making and remaking of societal expectations for Native Americans. They chose different career paths, though, and they staked out different positions in the space between compliance and resistance that comprised the virtual reservation of the early movie industry. For Strongheart, film offered a means of challenging racist attitudes, correcting biased narratives, and calling the public to action. As a technical advisor and writer, he tried to advance not only the cause of visual sovereignty, but also the goals of Indian citizenship and tribal treaty rights in the United States. To achieve those ends, he often engaged in “Indian play” and thus played into some of the very stereotypes and tropes that still haunt Native Americans.[53] Even so, artistry and authenticity mattered to Strongheart because films had to inspire and inform as well as entertain if they were to effect societal change. As with many other Native performers, his commitment to aesthetic diplomacy spilled over into public speaking, pageants, and other community events that drew on his experience with live entertainment.

Wallace Fox took a different road, and definitely the one less traveled by Hollywood Indians of his time. As a director, he possessed greater creative control than did Indian actors and technical advisors, though still limited by the financial and technical constraints of B movie production. With a few exceptions, he did not use that power to make films about Native Americans or Indigenous issues. He also seems to have eschewed the sort of redfacing or Indian play that characterized the professional lives and personas of so many contemporaries, perhaps because it could have resulted in professional confinement on the virtual reservation. While Strongheart struggled to flip the script in the Western genre—and periodically struggled to find employment with the studios—Fox worked more steadily and ultimately made a larger variety of movies. The Western remained his bread and butter, but he enjoyed the freedom to range beyond it, as the other essays in this volume show. Fox’s low profile, coupled with his lack of artistic or activist aspirations, has reduced his visibility and legibility as an Indigenous filmmaker. If Edwin Carewe belongs in that category, however, then certainly we must also count his brother among the first Native artists to carve out a niche in Hollywood.

What did Fox and Strongheart make of each other and their respective bodies of work? Once again, the historical record provides no solid answers, as there appears to be no evidence that they interacted either personally or professionally. They moved in different (if overlapping) circles and labored in different parts of the film industry, making different films for different audiences, with different ends in mind. One suspects that Strongheart would not have thought much of Fox’s movies, if he ever saw them, because they did not actively challenge the cinematic conventions and cultural discourses that marginalized Native Americans. To court an old Western cliché, though, the town was big enough for the both of them. Our vision of Indigenous filmmaking in early Hollywood should be equally capacious.

Endnotes

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[1] Diane MacIntyre, “A Golden Quiver of Native Americans from the Silent Era,” The Silents Majority: Online Journal of Silent Film (mdle@primenet.com, 1997), print copy in Library and Archives of the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA, MS. 641, The Richard Davis or Chief Thunderbird Collection, Box 2, Folder “Correspondence, Grace Slaughter (great-granddaughter) and Susan Shown Harjo (great-granddaughter).”

[2] Jackson’s Hole Courier (Jackson, Wyoming), 5 April 1928, 4.

[3] “Shortage of Indians Troubles Director,” The Roosevelt Standard (Roosevelt, Utah), 31 May 1928, 4; “Indian Dance to Be Outstanding,” Los Angeles Times, 4 September 1927, B10.

[4] Cathleen D. Cahill, “Urban Indians, Native Networks, and the Creation of Modern Regional Identity in the American Southwest,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42:3 (2018), 75-76.

[5] “Shortage of Indians Troubles Director.”

[6] As Brian Taves notes, critics have generally denigrated and dismissed B directors as lesser talents within the film industry, yet they often possessed valuable skills that helped underwrite a studio’s bottom line: “Many individuals were shunted into careers dominated by B’s because of their consistent effectiveness in filming efficiently and smoothly. They became type-cast, in a sense, not for lack of talent, but precisely because of their demonstrated skill. Turning out pictures rapidly on low budgets required rare abilities: knowing exactly what shots were necessary, editing in the camera without wasting footage on full coverage or more than a few takes, quickly arranging the lighting and camera angles to conceal the cheapness of the sets, eliciting or giving an effective performance with few rehearsals, and covering such disadvantages with fast pacing and shadowy lighting. These abilities were highly prized and might well lead to a continuation in the B realm, but seldom advanced one to the A’s” (“The B Film: Hollywood’s Other Half,” History of the American Cinema, Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/b-film-hollywoods-other-half).

[7] As Michelle H. Raheja explains in Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, “visual sovereignty recognizes the complexities of creating media for multiple audiences, critiquing filmic representations of Native Americans, at the same time that it participates in some of the conventions that have produced these representations….Under visual sovereignty, filmmakers can deploy individual and community assertions of what sovereignty and self-representation mean, and through new media technologies, frame more imaginative renderings of Native American intellectual and cultural paradigms…” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 200).

[8] Raheja, 20-21; Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 3.

[9] On the constraints that Fox faced as a Poverty Row director, see Joanna Hearne, “Indian Agents and Indigenous Agency at Universal: Wild Beauty and Gun Town,” in this volume [need correct citation], 2-3. Taves defines the typical B film of the 1930s as follows: “First, they were to fill the bottom half of a double bill. Second, B’s had leads with moderate, questionable, or unknown box-office appeal, such as second-string cowboy stars. Third, budgets and shooting schedules were more limited, and B’s were usually made in three weeks or as little as one week. Fourth, the running time ordinarily ranged from fifty-five to seventy minutes. Averaging six reels, some B’s could be as short as five reels or less; a few Poverty Row films, including some of John Wayne’s “Lone Star” Westerns of 1934-1935, ran only about forty-five minutes. Yet, no single aspect of the B is a definitive guide to A or B status, and there are no clear lines of demarcation” (“The B Film”).

[10] Raheja, 43-44. According to Taves, “Most B directors could not revise the script, had little say in choosing a cast or crew, and were seldom involved in the editing.” Within the constraints of the form, however, “resourceful filmmakers, especially directors and cinematographers, were sometimes allowed to be more creative than in A’s” (“The B Film”).

[11] Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004),

231–33.

[12] Liza Black, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 4-6.

[13] Black, 192; Raheja, 193.

[14] Kiara M. Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3; Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 8-10. McNenly follows Mary Louise Pratt Pratt and other theorists in defining contact zones as “(post)colonial spaces of interaction by multiple participants with various agendas involving unequal power relationships, but with the possibility of agency by marginal groups.” They entail “a two-way process of interaction and cultural production,” not a one-way street paved entirely by the dominant group (11).

[15] Black, 36.

[16] Raheja, 45.

[17] Raheja, 35.

[18] “Biographical Sketch of the Fox Brothers,” Tribal Writers Digital Library, Sequoyah National Research Center, https://ualrexhibits.org/tribalwriters/artifacts/FoxBrothers_Biography.html; U.S. Census Bureau, 1900 United States Federal Census, Township 6, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, p. 30, Enumeration District 0155, FHL microfilm 1241849, Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryui-content/view/74959959:7602? (accessed April 12, 2021); Mary Jo Turner, “Historical Highlights,” 23 August 1962, The Purcell Register (Puncell, OK), 2.

[19] “More License Tax Correspondence,” The Purcell Register (Purcell, OK), 8 December 1893, 1; Reports of Agents in Indian Territory, Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1895 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 157-158; M. Kaye Tatro, “Allotment,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Historical Society, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AL011 (accessed January 23, 2021)

[20] Chickasaw by Blood, Card 1374, Search the Dawes Final Rolls, 1898-1914, Oklahoma History Center, https://www.okhistory.org/research/dawesresults.php?cardnum=1374&tribe=Chickasaw&type=by%20Blood (accessed January 23, 2021); U.S. Census Bureau, 1920 United States Federal Census, Los Angeles Assembly District 63, Los Angeles, California, Roll T625_106, p. 13B, Enumeration District 154, Ancestry.com, https: //www.ancestrylibrary.com/discoveryuicontent/view/385232:6061?_phsrc=psl4&_phstart=successSource&gsfn=Wallace&gsln=Fox&ml_rpos=7&queryId=6dd3e3b57268eec8f9800726df3e06ec (accessed April 12, 2021); Cahill, 73; “Tribes Well Represented,” Los Angeles Times, 3 April 1927, A1; “Indian Couple Here to Lend Aid on Film,” Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1930, A5. On the importance of being considered “full-blood” for Indian performers, see Kiara Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals and Linda M. Waggoner, Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

[21] “Ramona Found to Be True Modern, Says Finis Fox,” Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1927, C12; “Proud Indians,” The Havre Daily News (Havre, MT), 3.

[22] Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 54-57, 62; “Charles David Carter,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Historical Society https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CA066 (accessed 26 January 2021); Oskison quoted in Maddox, 64, 66.

[23] Donald A. Grinde, Jr. and Quintard Taylor, “Red vs Black: Conflict and Accommodation in the Post Civil War Indian Territory, 1865-1907,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 8:3 (Summer 1984), 211-229; Donald B. Smith, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Impostor (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer Press, 1999), 50. Grinde and Taylor note that, among the Five Tribes, the Choctaws and Chickasaws were the most hostile to freedmen and sought to either expel them or limit their socioeconomic mobility. Sylvester Long, who adopted the stage name Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and co-starred in The Silent Enemy, claimed Cherokee and Croatan ancestry. He was actually the son of former African American slaves, however, and he killed himself in March 1932 after rumors of his black heritage threatened to destroy his career.

[24] “Hollywood Film Notables Seized,” The Capital Times (Madison, WI), 2 October 1931, 5; “Lady Luck Deserts Her Devotees in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1931, A8; “Supper Club Trial Launched,” Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1931, 10.

[25] Renya Katarine Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3; Jacob Floyd, “On Hollywood Boulevard: Native Community Building in Classical Hollywood,” forthcoming essay in JCMS In-Focus dossier on “Indigenous Performance Networks” (need citation), 3; Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration & Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 21-24; “Indian Couple Here to Lend Aid on Film,” Los Angeles Times, 18 July 1930, A5.

[26] Rosenthal, 44-45; Raheja, 32-34; Richard Davis to Red Fox St. James, 9 June 1925, Library and Archives of the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA, MS. 641, The Richard Davis or Chief Thunderbird Collection, Box 2, Folder 31; Folder Ultra-American,” Stockton Daily Independent (Stockton, CA) 9 March 1928, 4.

[27] Rosenthal, 42.

[28] “Zane Grey Film of Indians in Cutting Room,” Oakland Tribune (Oakland, CA), 20 September 1925, 67.

[29] Rosenthal, 44; Floyd, 4.

[30] “Shortage of Indians Troubles Director,” 4; “Mystic,” Petaluma Argues-Courier (Petaluma, CA), 6 August 1928, 3; “‘Riding Renegade’ at the Hippodrome,” Bakersfield Morning Echo (Bakersfield, CA), 3 February 1928, 4; Full Cast and Crew, The Riding Renegade, IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019323/ (accessed January 24, 2021).

[31] “Mystic,” 3; “‘Riding Renegade’ Brings Back Days of Flaming West,” The Chico Enterprise (Chico, CA), 1 June 1928, 6.

[32] “Temple Theater,” Alton Evening Telegraph (Alton, IL), 19 October 1928, 11; “Bob Steele as ‘The Riding Renegade,’” Herald-Recorder (Arroyo Grande, CA), 5 April 1928, 5; Raheja, 19.

[33] Raheja, 21-22.

[34] Hazlett quoted in Rosenthal, 44.

[35] Andrew H. Fisher, “Tinseltown Tyee: Nipo Strongheart and the Making of Braveheart,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42:3 (2018), 96-99.

[36] Maddox, 9-14; Thomas G. Sloan to Nipo Strongheart, 29 January 1924, Folder 20-13, Yakama Nation Library, Toppenish, WA [hereafter YNL]; Thomas Bishop to Floyd L. Mathews, 30 December 1922, Folder 18-92, YNL; Nipo Strongheart to Lucullus McWhorter, 21 January 1921, Folder 114-1, Click Relander Collection, Yakima Valley Regional Library, Yakima, WA, [hereafter Relander Collection], 4, emphasis in original.

[37] Fisher, 99-100; Nipo Strongheart Diary, 16 March 1920, YNL.

[38] Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 212-216; L.M. Goodstadt to Fred Kley, Miss Rosson, Mr. Stevenson, 10 June 1925, Box 259, Folder 9, MSS 1400, Cecil B. DeMille Papers, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT [hereafter DeMille Papers]; Executive Meeting Minutes, 12 December 1925, Box 259, Folder 9, DeMille Papers, 3.

[39] Elmer Harris to Cecil B. DeMille, 12 May 1925, Box 259, Folder 12, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Barrett Kiesling to Cecil B. DeMille, 6 May 1925, Box 259, Folder 17, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers.

[40] Harris to DeMille.

[41] Barrett C. Kiesling to George Harvey, 19 May 1925, Box 259, Folder 17, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Barrett C. Kiseling to Cecil B. DeMille, 3 June 1925, Box 261, Folder 15, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Charles Beahan to Cecil B. DeMille, 14 May 1925, Box 261, Folder 13, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers.

[42] Cecil B. DeMille to L.M. Goodstadt, 24 March 1925, Box 259, Folder 9, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; L.M. Goodstadt to Mr. Stephenson, 5 June 1925, Box 259, Folder 9, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Elmer Harris to Cecil B. DeMille, 27 March 1926, Box 264, Folder 15, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Executive Meeting Minutes, 31 December 1925, Box 259, Folder 1, MSS 1400, DeMille Papers; Mary O’Hara, Flicka’s Friend: The Autobiography of Mary O’Hara (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982), 145-158.

[43] Original screenplay of Braveheart, Folder 23-1, YNL, 1-5; Andrew H. Fisher, “This I Know from the Old People: Yakama Indian Treaty Rights as Oral Tradition,” Montana, The Magazine of Western History 49 (Spring 1999): 2-17.

[44] “Notes for Mr. Elmer Harris. May, 12th 1925,” Folder 23-11, YNL; Third draft of screenplay for Brave Heart, Folder 23-3, YNL; “Catching Catchlines for use in Advertising Rod La Rocque’s ‘Braveheart,” Press Book, Folder 23-7, YNL.

[45] Bigfoot [Lucullus McWhorter] to Nippon Strongheart (telegram), 5 May 1925, Folder 22-75, YNL; Big Foot to Strongheart, 5 May 1925, Folder 22-73, YNL, 1-3; Big Foot to Strongheart, 12 May 1925, Folder 22-73; Essentials for and [sic] Indian Camp, Folder 23-17, YNL, 1-2; Big Foot to Strongheart, 22 May 1925, Folder 22-72, YNL.

[46] Brother Nipo to Big Foot, 12 September 1925, Folder 114-1, Relander Collection, 1-3, emphasis in original; “Big Bunch of Movie Actors Come,” Healdsburg (California) Tribune, 28 September 1925, 2; “Healdsburg People Attend Entertainment at Guerneville,” Healdsburg (California) Tribune, 1 October 1925, 2.

[47] Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians, 29-33. An intriguing possibility, yet to be explored, is that Paramount/Famous Players was the rival studio that Harris and Strongheart suspected of spying on their production.

[48] Studio Directory, April 1931 (Los Angeles, CA: Stenographic Service of Hollywood, 1938), Unprocessed papers of Strongheart Collection, Yakama Nation Museum [hereafter YNM], 1; H.E. McCroskey to Jack Gain, 28 July 1933, YNM; Ben Arid to C.M. Vandenburg, 18 September 1935, YNM; E.J. Fostines to Nipo Strongheart, 12 December 1945, YNM; Nipo Strongheart to Sam Marx, 31 October 1956, YNM.

[49] Nipo Strongheart to Nunnally Johnson, 9 June 1958, YNM.

[50] Nipo Strongheart to Russell B. Adams, 30 April 1949, YNM; Nipo Strongheart to Mahdah Brown, 10 October 1950, YNM; Dialogue Coaching schedules for Across the Wide Missouri, YNM.

[51] Steve Broidy to N.B. Johnson, 14 September 1948, YNM.

[52] Mary Blume, “Redwing Bites Dust Again, Again, Again,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1968, 17, Vertical File Mass Media – Films and TV, Autry Museum, Los Angeles.

[53] The concept of “Indian play” comes from Lisa K. Neuman’s Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Baycone College (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Similar to Raheja’s idea of redfacing, it describes the complex cultural and ideological work of Native performers who employ stereotypical representations in order to engage non-Indian audiences and thereby “create a space for counterhegemonic discourse” (23).

The above was excerpted from ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox, edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Andrew H. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at William & Mary. His research and teaching interests focus on modern Native American history, environmental history, and the American West. His first book, Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity (University of Washington Press, 2010), examines off-reservation communities and processes of tribal ethnogenesis in the Columbia Basin. His current project is a biography of Nipo Strongheart. Fisher currently directs the Environmental Science and Policy program.