James Young Deer | The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

the indian cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Young Deer The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

 

One of the most explicit of early LGBTQ films concerning race, James Young Deer’s The Red Girl and the Child, is itself conflicted regarding racial relationships.

     The film begins with the arrival of villain Bill Duggins at the local store, part saloon, post office, and grocery run by a black man, performed in blackface. Duggins and his gang take out their guns and, after ruffing up the store clerk, proceed, to use the euphemism for shooting at an individual’s feet, “make him dance” in a high unpleasant scene of abuse.

      In the midst of this melee, Princess Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr) of a local Indian tribe, enters to pick up some goods. Immediately Duggins and others turn their attention to her and begin to grope and pummel her as well.

 

     Meanwhile, cowboy Dick Sutton kisses his wife and baby daughter goodbye as he also intends to visit the store, only to discover, as “The Moving Picture World” synopsis describes it, “the jollification” within. Startled by what he observes, he immediately sets Red Wing free and slugs out Duggins, ordering him to leave. The rest of the men, who now come to Sutton’s support with regard to his protection of the Indian Princess, still busily abuse the symbolic man in blackface. Red Wing (who the synopsis incidentally describes as “an Indian squaw, hinting that the publicists still saw even an Indian Princess as something to denigrate*), expresses her deep appreciation to Sutton for his protection.

      Sutton’s young daughter toddles off into the fields with her water bucket to get some water from the well while her mother works in the house. Duggins and his partner encounter the child on their return to their camp. They lure her toward them and kidnap her, leaving a note on the Suttons’ door reading that Duggins has kidnapped the child in revenge for Sutton’s treatment of him. When Sutton’s wife finally discovers the note, she immediately rides into town to report it to her husband, who quickly rallies a posse.

 

       Red Wing, still evidencing her respect of Sutton, joins them, and when they finally find the girl’s water bucket, Red Wing points them in the right direction.

        In their run, the villains stop for a moment to make a small cut in one their arms, spreading the blood across one the child’s articles of clothing, leaving it behind with a note: “Follow and I will kill the kid.”

        Frightened for the child’s safety, Sutton and his friends ponder what to do. But Red Wing insists she will follow without them being able to notice. Dressing in cowboy garb, she silently follows, finding the encampment where Duggins has left the child in the hands of several apparently drunken, sleeping women of the group. Red Wing crawls under the wagons and snatches the child away.

 

    When the child’s absence is soon discovered, the entire gang goes after the “cowboy” as, with the child on his back, “he” climbs up a steep pile of rocks and down the other side before moving hand over hand on a rope stretched across a deep gully. When the “cowboy” reaches the other side, he cuts the rope, leaving those in pursuit to fall away or find themselves without the possibility of catching up.

        Crossing the rest of the plains with the child, the cowboy reverts once more to Red Wing, delivering up the child safely to Sutton and his wife, and establishing close relationships with the frontier townsfolk and Red Wing’s tribe.

        One commentator noted that the women in the villains’ camp seem to be wearing scarves, suggesting that it is a gypsy camp, and it certainly has that appearance, which, if so, adds yet another layer of racism (gypsies being the bad guys) to this film arguing for the respect of the Indian tribalism.

        Some of those conflicts may lie within the director himself. Born in 1876 as James Young Johnson in Washington, D. C., Young Deer identified himself as a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, the same tribe into which his wife, Lillian St. Cyr was born. But, in fact, Young Deer’s origins, as Angela Aleiss has explained in a fascinating article in Bright Lights Film Journal (May 2013) was much more complex. Perhaps without him even knowing the fact, he was part of the Nanticoke people of Delaware, variously described as the “Moors of Delaware,” a mid-Atlantic community of whites, African Americans, and Native Americans, sometimes described as “Delaware’s Forgotten Folk,” people of color who were identified as white if they looked white, and described as black or mulatto depending upon the hue of their skin. Young Deer’s Native American roots, according to Aleiss, “actually trace back to his father’s side of the family in 1881, when the Delaware General Assembly recognized the Nanticoke’s descendants as an Incorporated Body or a ‘special class’ with their own schools and churches.” Among the original 31 members was Young Deer’s great uncle Whittington Johnson. It appears that Young Deer was unaware of his actual Indian heritage, falsely claiming to be a member of Indian tribe of his wife.

       In any event the Indian couple made over 70 films together, most of them lost. And Young Deer, believed to be the first Native American filmmaker and producer had an enormous impact on the silent era for his portrayal of Native Americans in a positive manner.

       Starting out with Pathé Frères, the Jersey City based French studio, long criticized for their unrealistic representations of the Old West, sent him to Edendale in Los Angeles to make Indian-themed movies. He eventually become the head of the West Coast Studio operations in Edendale, acting in, writing, and directing over 150 silent films.

       By 1910, the date of The Red Girl and the Child. one-fifth of American films were Westerns, and due in part to Young Deer’s influence during those year most of them, as movie historian William K. Everson observes, most Indians were “generally portrayed in a positive way. During this period the Indian became accepted as a symbol of integrity, stoicism, and reliability,” while clearly at the same time Hollywood was generally mocking blacks, the Chinese, gypsies, and, of course, gays and lesbians.

        The brief, but important, drag transition that Red Wing makes in this movie has very little to do with a question of gender and almost everything to do with identifying and commiserating with the white male cowboy.

 

*As linguist Ives Goddard argued in the 1997 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, the word squaw, coming from the Algonquin tribe of Massachusetts, had a perfectly decent meaning, primarily indicating simply an Indian woman; and in the early Plymouth Colony, the early settlers such as William Bradford and Edward Winslow used it quite correctly, having picked up some Indian words from the local tribes. But over the years it accrued highly negative racist and sexist connotations that by 1910, the date of this film, were quite apparent. It is strange that James Young Deer and Red Wing did not protest, but perhaps they had no say in the publicists’ release of information.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).