Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film

Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film. By M. Elise Marubbio. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. xiv + 298, preface, introduction, photographs, illustration, notes, filmography, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth) This sophisticated and careful analysis of the "Celluloid Maiden" character type in film is an important and much-needed extension of earlier scholarly work on images of Native American people in mass media. M. Elise Marubbio exhaustively dissects the representation of Indian women in films, dating from the silent period up to the twenty-first century, and this book is responsibly rooted in the specific racial history of Native American people, as well as in the intersections between theories about race, sex, gender, colonialism, culture, and film. In six persuasive chapters, Marubbio argues that the representation of Native American women and the Celluloid Maiden character type is "a vehicle through which to explore and express American ambiguity over Native American-white relations and interracial mixing"(225) and suggests that analyzing these images may help us understand "how deeply imbedded the Native American woman is in violent and romantic images of nation building," (225) unpacking the extent to which even seemingly "pro-Indian" films and images perpetuate racial/sexual stereotypes and nationalist narratives. Marubbio's nimble, highly readable prose makes this a well-paced, reader-friendly book - one that will prove to be required reading for both beginning students and long-time scholars of Native American studies, film history, and postcolonial theory. Marubbio defines the Celluloid Maiden as a "paradoxical" and complex symbol that manifests somewhat differently during each decade of American film, a cultural marker and stereotype for playing out whatever the nation's cultural tensions are at the time. The Celluloid Maiden can be divided into two sub-categories: the Celluloid Princess, a romantic symbol of innocence, purity, and "authentic" Indianness, who (always) ultimately dies tragically, and the Sexualized Maiden, whose exotic sexuality poses some measure of danger to white male protagonists and who also (always) ultimately dies (but "deserves" her fate because she proves to be a "bad" Indian). The author rapidly but satisfactorily surveys historical and political events that contributed to the containment of Indian people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She engages with mainstream American cultural and social history in parallel with Native American history, arguing that filmed images are fundamentally rooted in the dominant cultural narratives. The ongoing representation of the Celluloid Maiden in film "reframes nationalist and racist agendas around the Native woman's body" in a way that "validates and perpetuates cultural genocide as a by-product of progress and assimilation" (20). Marubbio points to images ranging from 1908 to 1931 as symbols that provide a way to work through tensions caused by demographic shifts in America, and suggests that these images "offer insight into the political and social attitudes toward Americanness, Native Americans, and raced immigrants at the time" (27). …