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D. W. Griffith made some thirty short films on Indian subjects during the Biograph years. Yet these mostly melodramatic treatments have received little critical attention. Analyzing films such as The Call of the Wild, A Romance of the Western Hills, and The Massacre, this essay explains how the apparently sympathetic representation of the Native American still adheres to the logic of white supremacy eventually enunciated in The Birth of a Nation.
Ask film scholars about the representations of race in the films of D. W. Griffith, and most of their responses will center on the portrayals of black Americans in his 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation. Yet, in the hundreds of short films Griffith made for the Biograph Company in the years leading up to Birth, he portrayed many other faces representative of America's ethnic and racial diversity, including those of European immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Jews. African Americans are notably absent from these one-reelers; however, a striking body of work focuses on Native Americans. Often ignored by Griffith scholars, these films constitute a significant record of the role played by popular culture in mediating white-Indian conflicts after the turn of the century, when the Indian became one of the most prevalent subjects in silent cinema.
Griffith's Indian melodramas provide rich material for analyzing the meaning of white representations of Native Americans and suggest how those images function in white America's construction of a national identity. These films, and in particular The Massacre (1912), also offer a key to understanding the vision of race and nation expressed in Griffith's work during his Biograph years and that eventually shaped his most famous film.1
Sympathy for the Devil. Daniel Bernardi has claimed that there is "a lack of scholarship on the racist practices in Griffiths Biograph films."2 Critics have observed, however, that "American Indians make up the principal minority group represented in the Biographs, and the treatment of them was almost consistently sympathetic."3 In his biography of Griffith, Richard Schickel observes that many of the Biograph shorts
were set in various vanishing American Wildernesses and reflected the prevalent nostalgia...about the loss of these unspoiled lands to civilization. Some of these films were notable for their extremely sympathetic treatment of the Indian as a natural...