Native american actress and actor profiles Native american actress and actor profiles with pictures: actors and actresses with american indian heritage
Very few Native American actors are seen in today's movies and television shows, and when they are, they are most often portrayed in the stereotypical roles of the "savage" plains indian in war bonnets and loincloths, or in modern day roles portraying a drunken rez Indian. It has been difficult, and remains so, for actors and actresses of native american heritage to cross over into mainstream roles.
Responding to the growth of the film industry, American Indians moved to Los Angeles for acting jobs throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Like other peoples of color, they balanced the limitations of entertaining a popular audience with the benefits performing could provide for themselves and their communities.
While indian actors were cast in earlier silent films and western movies as early as 1910, the first native american actor to land a regular television series was Jay Silverheels, who portrayed Tonto in The Lone Ranger. However, he was typecast by the role and found it difficult to break out of that image for the rest of his acting career.
Beginning with the relocation of film studios from the East Coast in the 1910s, Hollywood producers and directors recruited Indians as actors, stunt persons, and technical advisors. Native people of various backgrounds responded enthusiastically, recognizing these jobs as opportunities and alternatives to reservation poverty and low-skilled labor.
For many Indian actors, working in Hollywood became part of a larger entertainment career centered on displays and performances of Indian identity, Indian culture, and popular ideas about Indianness. While in Los Angeles, Hollywood Indians also organized communities and settled into the urban lifestyle. In the process, they helped build the motion picture industry and shape what became one of the preeminent cities of the modern American West.
Yet while Indians found opportunities on the Hollywood "frontier," they also faced limitations. Indian actors frequently obtained minor parts, but rarely starring roles. Even as movie extras, they earned lower pay than non-Indians and had little job security. In addition to this day-to-day exploitation, Indian actors helped Hollywood invent a mythic West that glorified the conquest and subordination of North America's indigenous populations.
Almost without exception, the Indian characters portrayed by Indian actors conveyed unflattering portraits of Native American people and distorted Indian history and culture. With little control over the content of western films, Indians working in Hollywood often confronted the stark choice between participating in these cultural productions and finding another way to make a living.
Native Americans on Hollywood's frontier sought to reconcile the contradictions between the freedoms and limitations found in performing for a popular audience. They sought a broad range of changes that addressed basic issues such as labor conditions and the welfare of the city's emergent Indian community, but also non-material concerns, such as control over the production and articulation of Indian culture and identity.
While limited at times, this work impacted Native people, both in Los Angeles and throughout the rest of the country, then was carried on by subsequent generations of Indian actors and activists. Thus, in seeking to "represent" Indians, both in film and throughout the larger society, Indian actors on Hollywood's frontier helped begin a struggle over both material rewards and larger issues of cultural identity, one that continues to the present day.
During the 1930s, Native actors organized the Indian Actors' Association, in part because of the practice among some studios of engaging pseudo-Indians for leading roles, utilizing sun-tan oil and braided wigs. Indians in Hollywood were also profoundly frustrated by the ways that western films distorted Indian culture and history.
In addition to advocating for Indian actors, the Indian Actors' Association functioned as a support group. If Indian actors had trouble finding work, the IAA provided subsistence funds, which it raised through membership dues, powwows, and performances for local clubs and organizations.
Early Indian actors foreshadowed the ways that future generations of Native performers conducted themselves within the entertainment industry. In later years, Indian actors maintained this ambivalence when it came to working in Hollywood, and they sought to address it in similar ways.
Jay Silverheels (Mohawk), for instance, who was famous for playing Tonto on the 1950s Lone Ranger television series, acknowledged that there were problems with Hollywood representations of Indians, but thought that they might be best addressed by working Indian actors, who could influence the films and television in which they appeared. Towards these ends, Silverheels founded the Indian Actors Workshop, which trained Indians for roles in theatre, television, and motion pictures.
The American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts (AIRPA) opened in 1983, with the help of actor Will Sampson (Creek) and other Indians established in the entertainment industry. As an organization for Indian actors, AIRPA provided Native people for Indian roles, worked with film and television studios to encourage historical and ethnographic accuracy, and served as a support group.
Marjorie Tanin (Santa Clara Pueblo), an actress and casting consultant, remembered joining the Registry in 1989 and becoming "part of a wonderful Native American acting community. We were a big family of sorts, all eager to work in the entertainment industry."
After financial difficulties forced the Registry to close in 1992, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) formed a Native American Sub-Committee through its Affirmative Action Department, made up of Native SAG members. As of 2003, the sub-committee was working to address the under-representation of Indians in film and television and to "help reverse misinformed racial stereotypes of this group."
Another non-profit advocacy group, American Indians in Film and Television, founded by Sonny Skyhawk (Sicangu Lakota), has operated out of Pasadena since 1985.
Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-Arapahoe) became the first well known Indian movie director with the production of the 1998 film Smoke Signals, adapted from the Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d'Alene) short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (New York, 1993).
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