Meek's Cutoff (2010) and Native American Views of Home

Although it draws on covered wagon Western history, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) also points to an alternative view of home and ecology represented by the Native American in the film. Called the Indian in the film, Rod Rondeaux’s view builds on a history (and filmic history) of environmental adaptation. It also aligns the film with Westerns in which American Indian characters adapt horrific environments into homes. We call these films narratives of environmental adaptation. Although many westerns with American Indians at the center or on their edges do construct American Indians as either savage or noble “others,” the films also (and most importantly for us) demonstrate how effectively American Indians 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.” When the lieutenant responds that Sheridan said “Texas,” the major retorts, “Well, he meant Arizona.”

In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, American Indians in a variety of western films adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home. Pardon Chato’s (Charles Bronson) perspective in 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 Chato, 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.

This narrative of environmental adaptation evolves in U.S. western films with American Indians at their center, from the early valorization of American Indian worldviews in films like The Red Girl (1908) and Hiawatha (1913), through the vilification of the savage Indian in the 1940s and ’50s, back to a more revisionist, look at American Indian perspectives from the 1950s and 60s through the 1990s.

In Westerns from Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) through Cheyenne Autumn (1964), for example, John Ford defines the idea of the West in relation to populist views of progress that seek to dominate human and nonhuman nature and civilize the wilderness. Within this ideology, American Indians must either be exterminated or removed to make way for pioneers ready to turn the forest wilderness into a garden home.

Revisionist western films sometimes address the American Indian perspective in more positive ways. The Scalphunters (1968), for example, complicates received beliefs regarding both American Indians and Comancheros when a group of American Indians exchanges Trapper Joe’s (Burt Lancaster) animal hides for an escaped slave named Joseph (Ossie Davis). When the American Indians 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 American Indian 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). In earlier Westerns, though, “When it comes to American Indians, Hollywood either trades in Injun stereotypes or dances with Disney” (Rolling Stone “Smoke Signals” Review).

These narratives of environmental adaptation become most convincing, however, in the 1990s and 2000s when American Indians begin telling their own stories both as filmmakers and actors. We’ve written at length about how Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie transform this narrative in Smoke Signals. Meek’s Cutoff builds on similar authentic visions of environmental adaptation.