Browsing by Author "IKNIN Boualem"

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    The Representation of Indians in Daves Delmer’s Broken Arrow , Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves
    (Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi-Ouzou, 2015) IKNIN Boualem
    This research is concerned with the representation of Native Americans in three Hollywood Western films, respectively, Daves Delmer’s Broken Arrow (1950), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), and Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990). The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that these movies make use of the Indian figure to reflect on contemporary American problems such as race relations, counter-culture, and ecology. To achieve this aim, the school of the New Historicism serves as the epistemological basis of this dissertation. The New Historicism’s emphasis on the necessity of contextualization and its perception of history are relevant in handling the issue of the representation of Indians in the three mentioned movies. Beginning with Broken Arrow, I discuss the film’s use of the Indian to legitimize the policies of assimilation the U.S government was undertaking during the 1950s to solve the Indian problem; these policies were known as Termination policy. The film revises the history of the American West in order to prove to the conformist American society of the 1950s that the American Indian can be assimilated into the white society. In my analysis of Little Big Man, I argue that the counter culture movement and the Vietnam War influenced the perception of the Indians in the movie. Adhering to the Hippie Movement’s distrust of the traditional American values, the film appropriates the Indian way of life to criticize the white American society. The Romantic theme of the noble savage is contrasted with the industrial life of white America. I also demonstrate that the film uses the history of the American conquest of the West as a metaphor for the Vietnam War. The film’s focus on the massacres of the Indians by U.S army corresponds with the massacres the same army was perpetuating in Vietnam and substitutes the Indians for the Vietnamese. As far as Dances with Wolves is concerned, the theme is the same, the white/ American Indian relationship. However, in the 1990s America witnessed new issues. Ecology was both a fashion and a problem. The film deploys the notion of the Ecological Indian, the claim that the American Indian lives in perfect harmony with nature, to criticize the excesses and the dangers of pollution. Besides the issues of pollution, the film utilizes the American Indian as an instrument through which the white male hero can restore his imperialist masculinity, which coincided with the emergence of the New World Order under the leadership of the United States