Myths of the West

1
Myths of the West

• Frontier experience racial clashes with Native
  Americans progress and extermination

2
Myths of the South segregated archetypes
cavaliers, belles, mammies and bucks
3
Nat Love, aka Deadwood Dick and below, Mexican
vaqueros at Buffalo Bills Wild West
African Americans and Mexican Americans in the
West Revising the Cowboy

• Of the estimated 35,000 cowboys who worked the
  ranches during the 19th century, 5-9,000 were
  black
• At the end of the 19th century, 1 in 3 cowboys
  was a vaquero

4
Annie Oakley (1860-1926) and Ellen Watson (Cattle
Kate, 1861-1889)
5
Women Behind the Lines Hidden Histories of the
War

• Spies
• When Belle Boyd was 17, she shot and killed a
  drunken Union soldier who was trying to raise the
  US flag over her house in West Virginia
• The next year she worked as a spy for General
  Jackson
• Arrested in twice in 1863
• Government workers
• Thousands of southern women worked for the
  Confederate government--Known as department
  girls. They received higher wages than men in
  the army
• Hospital superintendents
• A CSA report in 1862 noted that hospitals managed
  by men had mortality rate of 10 while those
  managed by women had only 5 death rates

6
Shared Histories of Expulsion, Extermination and
Slavery

• Treatment of Native Americans
• Expulsion from lands (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia,
  1831 Trail of Tears, 1831-8)
• Resistance by religious leaders like Tecumseh
  (sides w/ British in 1812 Sitting Bull and Red
  Cloud, 1876)
• Massacres by settlers and US Army (Sand Creek,
  1864 Wounded Knee, 1890)
• Reservations
• Question of citizenship
• Loss of historical voice
• Savage, demonised image in popular culture

• Development of Slavery in South
• Sale and enforced separation of families
• Resistance through slave revolts (1831, Nat
  Turner, lay preacher)
• Lynchings by the invisible army aka, the KKK
• Segregation and Jim Crow laws
• Voting rights denied in South
• Slave narratives as correctives to national
  history (Harriet Jacobs, 1861)
• Image of unbridled male sexuality and female
  passivity in popular culture

7
Gender and Race in American South

• Racial theories justified as a means of
  protecting white women from aggressive black male
  sexuality (KKK)
• Black women subjected to rape by white men for
  centuries mulatto population largely result of
  white male sexuality and fantasies of power
• Both white and black women and black men subject
  to discrimination and disenfranchisement white
  southern Grimke sisters were most prominent
  abolitionists and advocates for sexual equality
  from 1830s-1850s
• Image of mulatta popular theme in 19th-century
  literature Coopers Last of the Mohicans (1826)
  and Clotel (1853), the story of Thomas
  Jeffersons daughter with Sally Hemmings
  virtuous mulatta used to defy racial stereotypes

8
Multiracial Exclusion in the West (different from
Souths black-white racial binary)

• In California, mestizos, Indians, and Chinese
  were not allowed to vote or testify in court.
  Many Californios (of Spanish-Mexican-Indian
  descent) were divested of their lands due to
  their alleged Indian blood
• Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, forbids future
  importation of Chinese labourers (made permanent
  in 1902)
• Statements against Japanese men in California and
  other western states use language of
  miscegenation and fears of unions with white
  women to stir up racial hatred (borrowed from
  South). Ban on Japanese immigration in 1924
• Were westerners really against slavery? CA, NV,
  OR all pass anti-miscegenation laws in 1870s (not
  repealed in CA until 1948 and 1959 in NV).
  Oregons law forbidding settlement of free blacks
  not repealed until 1926

9
Gender and Race in the American West

• Pioneer women share same frontier experience as
  men active wage earners and farmers women buy
  land through Homestead Act, 1862
• Native American women form unions with trappers,
  miners, soldiers
• Captivity narratives white women cultural
  border-crossers integration within native
  culture white male fear of race contamination
• Native women (Pocahontas) and mixed-race heroines
  (Ramona, 1884) popular symbols which problematize
  racial stereotypes
• Ramona, a novel, raises awareness of Native
  American situation which Jacksons history, A
  Century of Dishonor (1881) cannot
• Fears of Chinese and Japanese immigration focus
  on potential unions with white womennativist
  fears borrowed from South

10
Mixed-Race Americans Mulattoes and
MestizosWhere race and gender intersect in the
West and the South

• How race is defined along Americas borders
  (Mexican racialisation from Mexican War through
  Bracero programme)
• Anti-miscegenation laws in South police
  instability of racial categories (light-skinned
  blacks)
• Citizenship debates in California (1849-51) and
  Texas (1848) Are Native Americans citizens? Can
  Mexican Americans vote?

11
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)

• A Century of Dishonor (1881)
• Ramona (1884)
• Mexican ranchero class tries to defend land
  rights against squatters, but loses money and
  lands in court battles
• Native Americans politically disenfranchised
  genocidal pogroms instituted by state government
  sanction murder of 8,000 Native Americans in
  1850s
• Native population in 1845 150,000. By 1880, only
  16,000 left
• 1850 CA legislature allows vagrant Indians to
  become bond servants
• 1886 all Indian land deemed in public domain

12
Edna Ferber and the Mixed-Race Protagonist in
American Literature

• Cimarron (1929), no. 1 best-selling western with
  a multiracial hero, filmed in 1931

13
Images of the old West and South Racial Binaries
in American culture

• The Western (conflict between red and white)
• The noble but doomed savage (George Catlin),
  cowboy and the myth of the frontier (Frederic
  Remington)
• Theodore Roosevelts Winning of the West
  (1889-1896), racial conflict and extermination)
  and Owen Wisters Virginian (1901, Native
  Americans written out of West)
• Zane Greys Vanishing American (1925)
• Stagecoach (1939, directed by John Ford, starring
  John Wayne) whites against the Indians, most
  enduring view of West
• Racial revisionism Little Big Man, Dances with
  Wolves, Geronimo

• The Plantation Epic (black and white society)
• Women and the mythology of the Lost Cause
• Thomas Dixon (The Leopards Spots, 1902 The
  Clansman, 1905) reinvent post Civil War South as
  violent clash between black and white
• The Birth of a Nation (1915), racist history of
  Civil War and Reconstruction, regenerates KKK
  Micheauxs Within Our Gates contests view
• Gone with the Wind (1936, 1939), womens
  narratives of Civil War new history of race and
  gender in American South
• Alice Walkers The Color Purple (1982) and Tony
  Morrisons Beloved (1987)

14
Race and Gender in the Twentieth Century The West

• Historically, Mexicans have been looked upon as
  inferior, non-white race. Parkman, Roosevelt,
  Dana all criticise Mexicans as lazy, mixed-race
  degenerates
• Mexican American Immigration and racial purity
  Mexicans not in quotas but only to satisfy big
  business need for cheap labour
• Jim Crow laws affect Mexicans in South too
  separate schools, churches, restaurants,
  restrooms, etc., and votes often controlled by
  elite whites
• Sharecroppers in Texas were black, white and
  Mexicantensions develop between poor whites and
  Mexicans
• Indian Citizenship Act, 1924
• 1924 first Mexican and Canadian border patrol
  instituted in US
• League of United Latin American Citizens, est.
  1928 in Corpus Christi, Texas to develop
  coherent, upwardly mobile, white Mexican
  population
• Mexicans listed as white in 1920 census listed
  as other in 1930 census
• Racialising Okies in the Great Depression
• African American migration to California during
  WWII
• Japanese internment, 1942
• Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots

15
Souths Racist Legacy in Hollywood Cinema
16
Blackface and playing Indian

• In addition to perpetuating many racial
  stereotypes, Hollywoods censorship code forbade
  narratives which depicted mixed-race couples
  (miscengenation). However, sometimes filmmakers
  got around these strictures

17
African Americans in Hollywood

• Oscar Micheaux most successful black filmmaker in
  1920s
• Hattie McDaniel wins Academy Award for Best
  Supporting Actress, 1939
• Actor Canada Lee (Body and Soul, 1947)
  blacklisted by HUAC
• Dorothy Dandridge major 1950s sex symbol
• In the Heat of the Night (1967) with Sidney
  Poitier and Rod Steiger landmark Civil Rights
  film
• Shaft (1971) Af-Am alternative to classic white
  detective films

18
Popular images of Native Americans
19
Breaking Southern Belle Stereotypes in 1936
20
The red dress is black miscegenation and
demystifying race
21
The Politics of Race and Dress in the Civil War
South
22
Passing for white cinema confronts the
imagined nature of race in Imitation of Life
(1934)
23
Performing Race Imitation of Life (1959)