Inventing Red Indians

Tuesday 20th October

Sometimes you stumble upon a gem on TV.  Not very often of course.  But on Sunday night I watched, more by accident than intention, a very different documentary – that wasn’t even a documentary.  It was presented by an American comedian Rich Hall, famous for his dead-pan delivery, and various modern-day red Indians.  And it was about how the Red Indians were invented by the white man, and how they have been treated throughout the last few hundred years.  It was unsentimental and ironic and quite revealing.

I read ‘Bury My Hear At Wounded Knee’.  I watched ‘Soldier Blue’ and bought the record and many others by Buffy Ste. Marie.  I thought I knew quite a bit about the Native American Indians and their treatment.  I have read quite a bit about Leonard Peltier.  But I learned from this programme that just like everything else, the Wild West Shows and the Movies, all of this was simply the white man’s way of inventing the Red Indian.   The true story is not of noble savages or a proud people.  It is a simple story of Genocide and Theft.  And the ultimate theft is of their identity, as we continue, each generation in a slightly different way, to re-invent the Red Indian.

And the only message the Red Indians seemed to be saying about them-selves is that whatever ideas you might have about them, they are still here.  They are no different from anyone else, except they have almost been eradicated and re-invented, and yet despite Wild Bill Hickock and Hollywood and all the romanticism and lies, they are still here.  The film concluded, or did not at all conclude really, that it was for the Red Indians themselves to write their stories, to make their films – one of which this was in a way, and they had no need to invent themselves because they are still here.   At last a programme by the BBC (on BBC4) which lived up to it’s charter – to Enlighten, Educate and Entertain; which it managed to do in a slightly ironic and quite different way.