Most of this American Indian revisionist history began in the late 1960s and increased after the 1973 takeover at Wounded Knee.
Two of the worst movies, fun to watch but totally inaccurate, were LITTLE BIG MAN and the horrid SOLDIER BLUE.
After 1973, the American Indian could do no wrong. Movies about modern Indians showed them to have a sixth sense about nearly everything, and showed the evil White Man to be stupid. Older movies were recut to make the Indians look better. I remember seeing THE WAR WAGON on TV out of Tulsa Oklahoma. When Howard Keel says “Dumb Indians!” the sound goes off.
Anyone remember the Mazola Margarine commercials from that time?
In the early 1980s OETA, out of OKC, put on a series called IMAGES OF INDIANS, about how Hollywood has portrayed the Indians. at one point in the program they talk about Indians torturing, and one young man breaks in and says..”That’s not so! Indians NEVER did anything like that!” But the did!
About that time, National Geographic published a dig in which they found the bones of a white woman who had been scalped in the late 1500s. Letters to the editor claimed it to be false, but NG then mentioned how proof of scalping had been found in the past. NG had earlier published engravings by Theodor de Bry showing Indians dancing over the scalps and cut off limbs of their enemies.
Anyone who doubts should look at Massacre at Crow Creek, long before the evil White Man came.
http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0200/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0200/stories/0201_0122.html
Da*n! Now you got me started!
Now, they just scalp palefaces at the casinos.
LITTLE BIG MAN
It’s odd how that movie NEVER shows up on cable TV.