Economic and Psychic Exploitation of American Indians

Two general points can be made about Euroamerican exploitation of American Indians: first, whatever level of exploitation they have experienced by the motion picture industry, it is part of a long tradi tion which dates back to the earliest contacts between white Euro peans and Indians; and second, that the exploitation has taken on two forms-economic and psychic. Just how Indians have been taken advantage of economically is relatively clear. Euroamerican history texts happily record the ways in which the native inhabitants of the American shores were bilked, with the $24 worth of beads, for Man hatten Island and with equally inequitable arrangements for the rest of their lands. Perhaps less obvious, and more damain, is just how these same people have been exploited for emotional and psychological reasons. Although economic exploitation takes away one's goods, psychic exploitation robs one of dignity and self-esteem, which is the more devastating of the two. Economic exploitation in America is psychic exploitation as well, for in a society which places so much emphasis on the material aspects of existence to be without money or to have been robbed of it is to place oneself in a precarious positionvis a-vis one's place in that society . This article is concerned with clarify ing the interplay of economic reality and the development of psychic myths concernin Euroamerican images of Indians. One of the most effective ways to show the dual exploitation is to examine how "the Indian" was created by Hollywood and fixed onto the silver screen and in the minds of Euroamericans as a cultural artifact. But Holly wood received its cues from a culture wrestling with a frontier history, and it is within this broad social and historical context that we begin this examination.