1 - Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood

Summary

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood seemed to be full of chiefs but not enough Indians. Thanks to the popularity of the western genre, the film industry supported a veritable council of celluloid chiefs and sachems, who competed for work and sometimes jealously checked each other’s bona fides. Many were not mere charlatans or pretenders, but popular expectations compelled them to adopt colorful stage names and even to assemble whole personas of dubious authenticity. Among the notables were Chief Big Bear, Chief Black Hawk, Chief Blue Eagle, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Chief Francis Sitting Eagle, Chief Red Fox, Chief Running Horse, Chief Standing Bear, Chief Thunderbird, Chief Young Turtle, and at least three Chief White Eagles. Others performed under such imposing titles as Chief Darkcloud, Chief John Big Tree, Chief Many Treaties, Chief Strongheart, and Chief Yowlachie. By the late 1920s, “Hollywood Indians” had become so commonplace that a Wyoming newspaper could sarcastically describe them as a distinctive type:

He is a male person, so eager for work “in the movies” that he even jumps at the chance to take off his clothes, dab 95 percent of his body surface with an unpleasant red compound that is disagreeable to wear—besides temporarily ruining [the] bathtub—and run about the Hollywood environs with a thousand of his kind, wearing only a few feathers, in blazing sun or shivering cold.

There were some women as well, including Princess Redwing and Princess Tsianina Red Feather. The latter, a Cherokee-Creek singer, reportedly caused a local “Indian shortage” in the fall of 1927 when she summoned all the Native performers in town to participate in a four-night extravaganza of “ceremonials” at the Hollywood Bowl.

Thanks to this pageant, director Wallace Fox had difficulty finding sufficient extras to wrap up the shooting of FBO’s The Riding Renegade, starring cowboy actor Bob Steele. According to the Roosevelt Standard, Princess Tsianina’s event at the Hollywood Bowl took virtually all of the Indians away from the studios and made it necessary for Steele and Fox to “combine the hinterland of Hollywood for three days to get enough Indians for the scenes in the production.”