Been watching a lot of 90s and movies recently and can’t help but reflect on how much the 90s was full of native Americans and references to Native American culture. Movies like Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Free Willy, and dozens of other big movies were focused on telling Native American stories. And then all the actors from those movies all started getting cast in everything else. Just watched Die Hard with a Vengeance and one of the NYC cops is a Native American actor and I realized how “90s” that was. Natural Born Killers is maybe the most 90s movie ever and of course there’s all kinds of Native American imagery and characters.
And then TV seemed to also be doing the same thing. Recently watched Star Trek: Voyager, which had Chakotay. And I generally just remember all the random tv shows I watched during the 90s would have a Native American themed episode or character or cast member etc.
Was it just the trend at the time? Where did that clear focus on Native American characters and casting start? And why did it seem to end in the Bush era? Was there a Clinton administration executive order or policy focused on encouraging positive portrayals of natives in popular media? Or was it just that Hollywood saw that Native American stuff was making money and winning awards so everyone rushed to get on the bandwagon?
As with so many things regarding Euro-American society's relationship with Native American peoples, the answer is "Colonialism." In this particular case, it's the 500th Anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas that happened in 1992. The US government started planning to commemorate the event as early as 1984, with the formation of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission. While the Commission's efforts were ultimately considered to have flopped, they did spend more than 100 million dollars to host celebratory events attended by millions of Americans in 1992.
But all these celebrations came after several notable wins for the Native American civil rights movement in the US - the Indian Civil Rights Act in 1968, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, and the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act in 1990, to name some of the big ticket wins in national legislation.
During the early 90s the entertainment industry was hoping to capitalize on renewed interest in colonial history, but being well past the days of the Cowboys-and-Indian Westerns of the 1950s and 60s, most of these films attempted to depict Native American peoples in a more positive light than Hollywood typically had in the past. And once a few such productions proved to be successful, others jumped on the trend. So we get Dances with Wolves in 1990, Black Robe in 1991, Last of the Mohicans in 1992, Disney's Pocahontas in 1995. Also in 1995, there was a 500 Nations, a documentary series based on a 1994 book of the same name; the series itself was explicitly riding Dances With Wolves' coattails by pickup up Costner as its primary present. There was also a large number of made-for-TV movies during this time that followed a similar trend (Geronimo in 1993, Tecumseh: The Last Warrior in 1995, Crazy Horse in 1996, etc.)
By the mid-90s though, public interest had waned and the boom of Native American/Settler narratives largely fizzled out.