Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow explores Indian-American relations with a humane lens, blending historical reinterpretation with 1950s political ideals.
What’s great about the Western is the extent to which it can be linked to American political desires in the first half of the 20th century. With the clear display of the development of civilization in the West, implying an underlying education of a wild, uncivilized and backward America, massively populated by Indians living on the land for hundreds of years. A revisionist vision that would endure and bring about one of the best-known features of Westerns, the Indian attack on horseback. And it’s precisely this that makes Broken Arrow such an interesting work, as it attempts to separate the true from the false in the perception of the Indians.
Directed by Delmer Daves, the film opens with Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) meeting a wounded young Apache in Arizona in 1870. After treating the young man, Jeffords meets the Apache tribe led by Cochise (Jeff Chandler), who let the American leave unharmed to honor their thanks. A friendly relationship between Cochise and Jeffords soon develops that defies the norms and political objectives of the army, which is at war with the tribe.
What’s remarkable about Broken Arrow is the film’s ability to re-establish a humane discourse on Indians and their culture, while completely reinterpreting history and actual events. This makes the film a fine case of historical reinterpretation for beneficial purposes, but still from an American perspective. There are too many historical changes to mention here, but it’s important to focus on a few. The first is Jeffords’ motivation for going into Indian territory in search of gold and silver. A motivation that the Indians don’t understand, because they have no knowledge of what gold is.
It should be remembered that gold is precisely the reason why Washington has been renegotiating – and breaking – numerous land contracts with the Indians for over twenty years, in order to protect white settlers moving ever further West. However, the film unconsciously establishes an important notion that clearly distinguishes whites from Indians: that of commercial material value versus the sacred value of Indian territory. These two ways of thinking are also demonstrated in the Indians’ understanding of the treaties they signed, which they understood as a sharing of the land with a community, whereas for the Americans it was an appropriation of the land and its contents.
Nevertheless, Tom Jeffords immerses himself in Indian culture as he becomes increasingly close to the tribe and its members, especially Sonseeahray (Debra Paget). Although the display of Indian culture is ultimately rather meager, it is at least shown respectfully and endorsed by the white man, the American people’s friend of the 40s and 50s, James Stewart. Who, by virtue of his connotation and image in the country, might be thought to serve as a certificate of civility and humanity. His character preaches Indian independence and, above all, peaceful coexistence by acting as an intermediary. While the rest of the town’s inhabitants regard him as a traitor and refuse to accept Indians as equals. In the end, this is a rather binary and simplified vision, but one that is enriched by an Indian perspective as opposed to an American one.
Broken Arrow’s depiction of the tribe, however, is idealized, even idyllic, living in the hollow of a magnificent rocky mountain, seemingly a few hundred meters from a sumptuous river. The truth is, by 1870, the Indian camps had already been reduced to a state of survival and starvation, following the near-extinction of the buffalo in the region. The same goes for Cochise, the great, strong and wise chief of all the tribes, who was not only neither chief of all the tribes – which was represented by several chiefs – but was also by 1870 reduced to a weak physical state and in the acceptance that he could not cope with American numerical superiority.
On its release, Broken Arrow was so well received and commercially successful that it was developed into a TV series between 1956 and 1958. But while its portrayal of Indians reflected a breakthrough in the Western genre, it did so at the cost of a great deal of historical modification. As Peter C. Rollins writes: “It portrayed Indian/white relations in the old West not as they were, but as Euro-Americans wanted them to be. The film’s treatment of the Chiricahua Apache culture minimizes the importance of land to their lives; ignores the diseases, devastation, and disruption brought by Euro-Americans to Native American.” [1]
What makes this film so fascinating is the relationship between its intentions and its results, and more broadly, the fact that it belongs to an America that was hardly ready to fully accept its History by 1950. As Angela Aleiss argues, Broken Arrow represents the contradictory American political period between the valorization of individual rights and conformity, cultural pluralism and the rapid assimilation of foreigners towards Americanism. [2]
The Western was undergoing its first real changes, but there was still a long way to go before a real look in the mirror.
[1] ROLLINS Peter, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
[2] ALEISS Angela, Hollywood Addresses Postwar Assimilation: Indian/White Attitudes in Broken Arrow, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 1987, p.74.
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