Westerns and Environmental Adaptation: Turning Reservation Hell Into Home

Western films in which Native American characters are highlighted rest on what we call narratives of environmental adaptation. Although westerns with Native Americans at the center or on their edges do construct Native Americans as either savage or noble “others,” the films also (and most importantly for us) demonstrate how effectively Native Americans have adapted, and adapted to, what white settlers see as an environmental “hell” or something worse. As the Fort Lowell commander, Major Cartwright (Douglass Watson), puts it in Ulzana’s Raid (1972), “You know what General Sheridan said of this country, lieutenant? ... If he owned hell and Arizona, he’d live in hell and rent out Arizona.”

In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, Native Americans in a variety of western films adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home. This narrative of environmental adaptation continues even into contemporary western films set on and near reservation lands and gains particular force in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals (1998). 

Economic and environmental disasters continue on reservations, perhaps like countries in the developing world where infant mortality, alcoholism, and poverty rates are shockingly high. Approximately one third of Native Americans live on reservations, and twenty-five percent live below the poverty line. Yet, as Sandefur asserts, numbers living on reservations have increased from twenty-five to thirty-four percent from 1980 to 2000 because the reservation also provides a cultural base where tribal language and culture can be maintained, a strong sense of family and community, and a sovereign system run by a tribal council and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The goal for Native Americans living there is to adapt the “hell” of their reservations into a home. 

An earlier film, Chato’s Land (1972), helps illustrate the parameters and repercussions of such environmental adaptation. The film highlights the Apache worldview from a white perspective but provides insight into how Pardon Chato (Charles Bronson), a half Apache mestizo, survives in what seems like uninhabitable land. According to Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance), when Chato runs from the captain because he killed a U.S. marshal in self-defense, he “picks his ground” carefully. Unlike white soldiers, Chato has adapted to this inhospitable land and can use it to his advantage in a fight. The captain explains the wisdom of Chato’s choice to run through Indian Territory: “To you this is so much bad land—rock, scrub, desert and then more rock, a hard land that the sun has sucked all the good out of. You can’t farm it, and you can’t carve it out and call it your own… so you damn it to hell and it all looks the same. That is our way. To the breed now, it’s his land. He don’t expect it to give him much, and he don’t force it none. And to him it’s almost human—a livin’ active thing. And it will make him a good place to make his fight against us.”

Other western films address the Native American perspective on adapting to their land in less obvious ways. The Scalphunters (1968), for example, complicates received beliefs regarding both Native Americans and Comancheros when a group of Native Americans exchange Trapper Joe’s (Burt Lancaster) animal hides for an escaped slave named Joseph (Ossie Davis). When the Native Americans are raided by Comancheros led by Jim Howie (Telly Savalas), racial binaries begin to disintegrate, making room for accommodation and a collective view of human and nonhuman nature. And The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) examines Native American worldviews both peripherally and from a first-person point of view—through the eyes of Lone Watie (Chief Dan George) who becomes part of a family of castoffs, including Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood). The majority of westerns, however, construct Native Americans as an “other” who must be destroyed or vanquished for civilization to prosper, but even films like The Searchers (1956) provide a more complex look at Native Americans when scrutinized through a narrative of environmental adaptation.

These narratives of environmental adaptation become most convincing, however, in the 1990s and 2000s when Native Americans begin telling their own stories both as filmmakers and actors. Written by a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Sherman Alexie, and directed by a Cheyenne-Arapaho, Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals illustrates how Native Americans still transform hell into a home, in a narrative of environmental adaptation centering on two fatherless young men exploring their heritage outside the reservation.