New Book | Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the "Good Indian"

From: "Michael Fitzgerald" <[email protected]>

New book focuses on American Indian TV characters  

Scarecrow Press, a division of Rowman and Littlefield, will publish Michael
Ray FitzGerald's doctoral dissertation, written while he was a graduate
student at England's University of Reading. 

Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the "Good Indian"
is, as far as he knows, the only book of its kind: an exhaustive study of
American Indian characters on U.S. television, from The Lone Ranger to
Longmire. 

The book is due in December. It is part of Scarecrow's new Film & History
series, helmed by Cynthia Miller.

After cataloguing nearly every recurring character from Tonto to Jacob Night
Horse, FitzGerald noticed a persistent pattern. The most notable (i.e.,
long-running) characters, such as Tonto (The Lone Ranger), Cochise (Broken
Arrow), Mingo (Adventures of Daniel Boone), and Cordell Walker (Walker:
Texas Ranger) have been those who enforced Euro-American norms. They are
basically literary descendants of Robinson Crusoe's Friday, he says. 

"After analyzing 237 American Indian characters, I discovered a consistent
pattern in which Indians who became enforcers of Euro-American norms were
celebrated. Tonto, Brave Eagle, Pahoo, Cochise, Sam Buckhart, Mingo, John
Hawk, Nakia Parker, Cordell Walker and many more-these were the characters
who lasted the longest or became the most notable," FitzGerald explains. 

"This pattern seemed to be more or less based on Daniel Defoe's Friday, who
eagerly becomes an 'apprentice white man," he says. It a pattern that has
persisted for literally hundreds of years." 

FitzGerald's conclusion is that many Eurocentric colonialist tropes of the
18th and 19th centuries refuse to die. Even in the newer works, audiences
will encounter issues related to colonialism, he adds. 

"One would not think we would find colonial discourse alive and well in
modern times-especially since this runs against the popular assumption that
the U.S. has never been a colonizing power-yet there it is." 

Another persistent issue that kept popping up was related to American ideas
about masculinity, Fitzgerald adds. 

"The American macho-man image, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper's
character Natty Bumppo, derives many of its attributes from Indians, who
were historically considered exceptionally virile."

Fitzgerald teaches communication at Jacksonville University and College of
Coastal Georgia.

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