Then there is the Jewish peddler, Sol Levy, who asks if he is allowed to be at the meeting. Again, Yancey makes sure he feels welcome. But the most surprising moment in the entire film is when Yancey calls on everyone to contribute some money to help buy the new church organ…except the Indians. He says they don’t have to pay anything because the white man has already stolen enough from them already. That was an astounding thing to say in a 1931 film*. Remember that in 1931, there was widespread and very serious discrimination against the Indians. Almost no white Americans knew the true history of how their ancestors had stolen the land from the Indians and if they did know it they believed the theft was justified because the Indians were just “savages”. The scene is brief, yet it is quite a remarkable moment in film history. This is the only Western film I have been able to find before about 1953 in which a white man openly admits that his people have stolen the Indians’ lands. In this sense, Cimarron is a far more honest film than John Ford’s Stagecoach. Stagecoach is a brilliant film and one of the very greatest Westerns ever made, but when Ford depicts the Indians in Stagecoach he badly distorts history.

*Cimarron is as progressive for its time as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would be in its time thirty years later. In fact, the scene in which Prostitute and Lady, Jew and Gentile, White and Indian are all under one roof is reminiscent of Ransom Stoddard’s school where everyone is welcome.

In fact, nothing like this kind of attack was ever recorded in history. This is purely a “Hollywood” event. It is very exciting and wonderful film making with its many exciting stunts, but it is historical nonsense. So, my first point about Hollywood films and the Indians is that the films were usually very inaccurate accounts of history. Stagecoach certainly was.

Another important thing that happens during the attack is the behavior of Hatfield the gambler. Hatfield actually came on the trip to, as he said, “offer my protection to this lady”. Throughout the film he has been Lucy’s friend and protector out of a sense of chivalry. Hatfield tells Lucy that he served in her father’s regiment in the army during the Civil War. Protecting the daughter of his old Commander is, of course, the way he will achieve the redemption he seeks from whatever crimes or sins he has committed that forced him to leave home and change his name. So, why is it that just as their situation seems most desperate, Hatfield suddenly turns his gun on Lucy and seems to be preparing to kill her? Yes, it is because he fears what the Indians will do to Lucy more than anything else, and the chief fear is of rape.

The image of the Indian created by Hollywood films was that of a completely uncivilized people who engaged in killing, rape, and torture. But there was in Hollywood films a special emphasis placed on the fear of rape. Why? Throughout history rape has been used as a weapon of war. When two nations fight wars there is always the threat that the victorious army will not only kill the soldiers of the losing side but that they will rape the women. Rape is a form of terror. It sends a message to the enemy soldiers: “you are too weak to protect your wives, mothers, and daughters”. But for the white European invaders of America, the fear was also deeply rooted in their racism. A white woman taken captive alive by Indians might not only be raped but might eventually give birth to a racially mixed child. To the whites, this represented the ultimate degradation. Therefore, they believed that a white woman would be better off dead than risk being taken prisoner by the Indians. Hatfield is prepared to kill Lucy rather than allow her to be captured. But just as he is about to kill her, he himself is shot and killed. At that very moment, Lucy hears the bugle blowing the cavalry charge. The curious thing about Hatfield’s death scene is that Ford makes it such a redemptive one. Hatfield just has time to say, “If you see Judge Greenfield, tell him his son…” and Hatfield dies, but he has redeemed himself. Nobody in 1939 questioned whether killing Lucy was the right thing for him to try to do. It was simply assumed that he was saving her from unimaginable horrors.

The very same year John Ford made Stagecoach, he made another film which was not, technically speaking, a Western at all. But I am going to show it to you because it is about the Indians. The film, Drums Along The Mohawk (1939), is set during the American Revolution of 1776. It is the story of how a young colonial-era couple, Gil and Lana, survive in a frontier village of the time. We first see Gil and Lana getting married and then we see them traveling west to their new home in the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts.

By the way, white Americans are hardly the only people to do this. The practice of cultural genocide has been widespread throughout human history and is still being actively practiced today. In Chinese occupied Tibet and the Western province of Xinjiang, the Tibetan and Uyghur cultures respectively are being systematically wiped out by the Chinese Communists who are committing cultural genocide in almost exactly the same way the white Americans did against the Indians. When I was in Tibet I witnessed this happening first hand although my Chinese guides tried to explain that Tibet was being “developed “and the Tibetans “educated”. For example, if the new hotel where I was staying in Lhasa was built for the benefit of the Tibetans why was it that no Tibetans were allowed in the hotel?

But to return to Drums on the Mohawk, Lana’s terror is not an exaggeration. White people throughout American history were taught to fear Indians. To be fair, the conflict with the Indians was very real and atrocities were committed on both sides. But let us remember that one side was the invader and the other side the invaded.

Moreover, the fear of the Indian was something that did not disappear once the Indians had been defeated. Hollywood kept this fear alive. As a little boy, I remember being especially afraid of three things: werewolves, space aliens, and Indians. In all three cases, I learned to be afraid of these things by watching Hollywood movies. But while werewolves and space aliens were not real, Indians are real. They were real people but the movies taught me to fear them as if they were like werewolves or space aliens. Fear is, of course, the origin of prejudice and discrimination. As a little boy, I was afraid of Indians even though I had never met one. I would not meet any actual Indians until I was in university and started studying Native American history and culture. The first time I ever met an Indian was when I was a first-year university student and a very tall, well-dressed woman walked into the classroom and said “I am Professor Rogers”. She was from the Navaho tribe. I wonder if you had a similar experience? Was the first time you met a gaijin in a university classroom?

As a university student, I was soon to get to know Indians a lot better. In fact, I dated two Native Americans while I was a student. The quickest way to lose your fear of people is to just get to know them. This is what meeting real people does. It makes us realize that we are all just people and not characters in a movie.

Later in the film, Lana has stopped being afraid and has started to love her new home. But just as all seems to be going so well, disaster strikes

As one critic put it, “Unfortunately, the 1939 film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert, abandons the historical complexity of the original for the mythic simplification of an all-American Western.” At the time, Ford was far more interested in making exciting movies than in telling the truth about history.

Except for Blue Back, who is an assimilated Indian, we rarely see an Indian in either a medium or a closeup shot or hear them talking, but when we do, it is in scenes like the following: