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Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film. By M. Elise Marubbio. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. xiv + 298, preface, introduction, photographs, illustration, notes, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth)
This sophisticated and careful analysis of the "Celluloid Maiden" character type in film is an important and much-needed extension of earlier scholarly work on images of Native American people in mass media. M. Elise Marubbio exhaustively dissects the representation of Indian women in films, dating from the silent period up to the twenty-first century, and this book is responsibly rooted in the specific racial history of Native American people, as well as in the intersections between theories about race, sex, gender, colonialism, culture, and film. In six persuasive chapters, Marubbio argues that the representation of Native American women and the Celluloid Maiden character type is "a vehicle through which to explore and express American ambiguity over Native American-white relations and interracial mixing"(225) and suggests that analyzing these images may help us understand "how deeply imbedded the Native American woman is in violent and romantic images of nation building," (225) unpacking the extent to which even seemingly "pro-Indian" films and images perpetuate racial/sexual stereotypes and nationalist narratives. Marubbio's nimble, highly readable prose makes this a well-paced, reader-friendly book - one that will prove to be required reading for...