Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson Stevenson (review)

Abstract

Tonto, a Comanche character. Though the book focuses on the film at length, it is not a study of the film, but rather an examination of the film positioned inside the Comanchecentered concepts and cinematic history. Chapter 2 provides an especially interesting and developed analysis of Johnny Depp’s controversial adoption by Comanche elder LaDonna Harris, which Tahmahkera positions as a contemporary captivity narrative that opens a space for Comanche influence in the production of the film. Importantly, the “capture” of Johnny Depp reveals important moves by Comanche elders and leaders to gain agency in the production of The Lone Ranger. Playing on the idea of capture/adoption as a way to replenish the tribe and establish networks of relationship, Harris’s savvy move presents a type of intervention that allowed the tribe to have more input than they otherwise might have had in the creation of the film and created actual benefits to the peoples represented in the film. Chapter 3 engages with the film in a more conventional, but still Comanchecentered, textual analysis, and chapter 4 presents a textured and focused Comanchecentered reception studies– type examination. Cinematic Comanches presents an important conjunction of Native American studies and film and media studies. Additionally, it illuminates both past and present Comanche participation in the representation of Comanche people across representative media, raising important conversations about the futurity of this representation and resisting the socalled fall of the Comanches by depicting them as a people very much participating in their culture, past, present, and future.