Native American Myth-Making in Hollywood

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The idea of projecting imagination from the West onto native people is a very, very old idea. It had some very powerful legal ramifications for Europeans coming to the Western Hemisphere. If they could make the argument that Native American people were cannibals or practiced strange sexual acts, these then became justifications for land theft, for enslavement and for murder even on a mass scale.

In this extended interview, we speak with UCLA Associate Professor Benjamin Madley about his book, "An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe," and discuss how newspapers, tracts, and paperbacks were an essential element in assisting and priming the public for the genocide of California's native population.

Prof. Madley's work was instrumental in our research for previous Citations Needed episodes - namely, "Episode 158: How Notions of 'Blight' and 'Barrenness' Were Created to Erase Indigenous Peoples" and "Episode 172: The Foundational Myth Machine - Indigenous Peoples of North America and Hollywood" - so we were thrilled to dig even deeper into his work on this special News Brief.