Martin Scorsese’s rather magnificent Killers of the Flower Moon is two weeks away from cinemas, and its marketing campaign has been fascinating to observe. What was initially pitched as a Leonardo DiCaprio-starring period crime epic has been repositioned to emphasise its story of atrocities brought against the Osage Nation. The presence of Lily Gladstone, the film’s superb Indigenous star, has been elevated. It was recently announced that she’ll campaign for the best actress Oscar, not supporting, while Scorsese has admitted that the script was rewritten during filming to centre its Native American characters: “After a certain point, I realised I was making a movie about all the white guys,” he told Time magazine. No more.
Consider it the latest step in Hollywood’s evolution regarding the representation of Native Americans on screen, a century or so after Indigenous characters mainly served as target practice for white cowboys in dime-a-dozen westerns. One need only trace John Ford’s career to see how it gradually dawned on the industry that this might not be good enough. Whereas his 1939 white settler saga Drums Along the Mohawk (unavailable to stream in the UK) made a plainly villainous obstacle of Native American warriors, 1956’s more poetically conflicted The Searchers ascribed a human motivation to their violence, while his final film, 1964’s ravishingly shot Cheyenne Autumn, was an overt mea culpa on Ford’s part – a sympathetic reflection on colonial abuses, albeit one that still put white saviours front and centre.
