Pale Face Red Racial Ambiguity Racial Expressions

CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3 REPRINTS AVAILABLE PHOTOCOPYING © BERG 2006
PP 319–338 DIRECTLY FROM THE PERMITTED BY LICENSE PRINTED IN THE UK

PUBLISHERS. ONLY
PALE FACE, RED MASK

Racial Ambiguity and the Imitation
of “American Indian” Facial
Expressions
ALASTAIR BONNETT
ALASTAIR BONNETT ABSTRACT Drawing on examples of

IS PROFESSOR OF
SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY
white imitation, this article discusses
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF the racialization of facial expression.
NEWCASTLE, UK. HIS Taking the white imitator Grey Owl as
MOST RECENT BOOK IS
THE IDEA OF THE WEST:
my principal example, I argue that the
HISTORY, CULTURE AND employment of facial expressions as racial
POLITICS (PALGRAVE symbols is beset by a tenacious ambiguity.
2004). HE IS ALSO THE
AUTHOR OF ANTI-RACISM
The genesis of the stern yet fierce “Indian
(ROUTLEDGE 2000) look” is discussed in the context of the
AND WHITE IDENTITIES employment and deployment of the “noble
(PEARSON 2000).
savage” within European primitivism and
racism. The article concludes with an
CULTURAL POLITICS
account of Grey Owl’s capacity to look

“more Indian than an Indian” and his
redemption as a hero of environmentalism.
There Never Came a Redder Red Indian

Sunday Express (April 24, 1938)
319
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

by Cambridge University user
on 10 September 2018
ALASTAIR BONNETT
INTRODUCTION
> To mimic an “American Indian” is more than a matter

of dress, voice, complexion, or physique. It contains an
intriguing fifth dimension: to look like somebody can also
involve adopting their expression, their look. To adopt “the face of
the Indian” is an act at once slight and significant, for it appears
both universally available (we could all do “that noble stare”) and a
clear testament to the rigidity and narrowness of the racial identity
ascribed to indigenous peoples in North America.
The chronic ambivalence of facial imitation allows us to confront
the inadequacies and crisis-prone nature of racial stereotype. It
also exposes the ability of colonialism not merely to police the
boundaries of racial authenticity but also to actually produce the
best examples of “racial type.” This is what fascinates me about
Grey Owl (1888–1938). As Francis (1992: 136) notes, “To most
Canadians, Grey Owl looked more Indian than an Indian.” Grey Owl,
who claimed to be “half-breed” born and native bred (Dickson 1939),
was discovered, a few days after his death, to be a white Englishman
from Hastings in Sussex. In his most famous portrait, sitting for
Karsh in 1936, he adopts his standard “Indian look” (figure 1). The
expression is seen again in his picture in Tales of an Empty Cabin
(Grey Owl 1936) (figure 2). The face is motionless, serious, intently
Figure 1
Grey Owl, portrait by
Karsh.
Source: Dickson, L. 1976

Wilderness Man: The
Strange Story of Grey Owl
London, Sphere Books
CULTURAL POLITICS
320

PALE FACE, RED MASK
Figure 2
Grey Owl.
Source: Grey Owl 1936

Tales of an Empty Cabin
London, Lovat Dickson
focused, and self-contained, silent yet powerful, staring manfully

toward some unspecified challenge. This was the face Grey Owl
(or Archie Belaney as he was once known) used to great effect to
convince a generation that he was, indeed, a real “Indian” (Grey
Owl objected to the expression “Red Indian” as inaccurate and
insulting).
This article is concerned with the racialization of facial expression.
More specifically, drawing on examples of white imitation, it will seek
to provide some clues as to the historical roots and social usage of
the archetypal “Indian face.” In part, my interest in facial expression
is of a purely supplementary nature. In other words, it registers
the fact that, whilst we know something about the way racialized
identities are symbolized through skin color, body shape, accent,
clothes, and so on, the racialization of the use (cf. the physiognomy)
of the face is relatively unexplored. However, taking Grey Owl as my
principal illustration, I shall also offer a more ambitious argument. It
is my contention that the employment of facial expressions as racial
symbols is beset by a tenacious ambiguity, an ambiguity that can be
CULTURAL POLITICS
used to unsettle other attempts to employ exotic bodies as sites of

our own anxieties. The profusion of connotative associations allied
to any one expression makes it a slippery semiotic arena. In the
twinkling of an eye Grey Owl’s highly practiced “Indian expression”
can turn into something else; a military look, a moody masculinity,
a childish petulance, an ecological visionary.
The intriguing insufficiency of acts of racialized facial imitation
makes them an object of particular fascination today. Worries over
the adequacy and meaningfulness of “race” have come to beset
321
Anglo-American ethnic and racial studies (Gilroy 2000; Essed and

ALASTAIR BONNETT
Goldberg 2002) at roughly the same moment that a so-called

“affective turn” has been felt in a number of disciplines. Given that
“race” has been repudiated as a mirage for almost as long as its
scientific legitimacy has been asserted (for example, Finot 1906;
Huxley and Haddon 1939), it is hard not to approach the novelty of
“postrace” work as a reflection of the perverse longevity of the race
concept in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, contemporary
“postrace” scholarship has displayed a distinctive interest in pro-
cesses of racial crossover and transgression. Indeed, the possibilities
and histories of white peoples’ desire to flee whiteness toward an
identification with other races, and/or against the race concept itself,
helped establish the “race traitor” as a paradigmatic figure within
contemporary antiracism (Segrest 1994; Ignatiev and Garvey 1996;
Ware and Back 2002). The story of Grey Owl seems irresistible yet
awkward in the light of these politicized narratives of racial boundary
breaking. To cast him as a white man who rejected his whiteness is
plausible. But it was a rejection founded on white colonial fantasies.
Moreover, as if to preempt any possible antiracist habilitation, in
Canadian antiracist circles Grey Owl already has a role, as a byword
for cultural appropriation. Indeed, his appropriation of First Nations’
culture has earned him the title of “plastic shaman” from Francis
(1992: 109). Nevertheless, an emphasis on Grey Owl’s inauthenticity
appears increasingly at odds with the wider “postrace” attempt to
dismantle racial myths and projects of cultural purity. It is a tension
that can be traced back into the semiotic mobility of Grey Owl’s face,
onto which self-doubt and social liberation, racism and antiracism,
can be projected.
Considering how odd and compelling the life story of Grey Owl is,
it was some kind of achievement for Richard Attenborough to turn it
into one of the dullest films of 1999 (Grey Owl, Attenborough 1999).
The choice of Pierce Brosnan to play the lead role instantly rendered
Grey Owl a ludicrous figure. Brosnan’s imitation of an Englishman
imitating a Native Canadian falls back on Grey Owl’s basic facial
trick: rigidity, no smiling; a mouth so straight and tight that words,
if they come at all, seem to be being forced painfully through the
lips. Yet, since we know from the start of the film that Brosnan is
playing a fake, all the interest and power contained within Grey Owl’s
“Indian look” is missing. There are no ancient mysteries here, no
CULTURAL POLITICS
native nobility. All we are left with is a wooden version of a familiar

“manly” look, a look that suggests “action hero.” Thus, when a native
elder delivers the film’s valedictory summation to Grey Owl – “Men
become what they dream. You have dreamed well” – it highlights
the emptiness at the heart of Attenborough’s project. For Brosnan’s
Grey Owl seems incapable of “dreams,” or any flight of imagination:
he is just an inarticulate man trying to look a bit “hard.”
The real Grey Owl regarded his “Indian face” as a public per-
formance. In those photographs that capture him off guard, he looks
322
very different. He was snapped stepping down from a train, as he

PALE FACE, RED MASK
arrived at Southampton on October 17, 1935, as part of his speaking

tour of Britain (reproduced in Smith 1990). He wore his full “Indian”
costume. Everything was in place, except his face. This image shows
a generous slack-mouthed grin: he seems to be enjoying his trip,
the adulation of the cameras, forgetting, if only for a moment, that
real Indians do not “look like that.”1
Grey Owl was probably right to imagine that he would not get far
as an authentic “Indian,” and that his ecological message would not
be taken seriously, if he did not “look the part.” The latter phrase
is suggestive of the range of things people have to do to their
bodies when they want to impersonate another ethnic group. Grey
Owl dressed up, he stained his skin with tea, changed his voice, and
grew his hair long. But none of this would have been enough without
that stare, that expression of stern nobility, which he practiced in
front of a mirror.
RACIALIZING FACIAL EXPRESSIONS: UNCERTAIN ACTS

The notion of racialization is the central theoretical device in
contemporary racial and ethnic studies (Murji and Solomos 2005).
If we understand racialization to refer to those processes whereby
peoples are given or produce seemingly natural identities that can
then be situated within a comparative and hierarchical system of
human classification, we are better able to understand why it has
been aligned to an interest in the way bodies are imaginatively
seized and sized. This set of concerns also implies an interest in
the contradictions and ambiguities of racial reification. The most
thoroughly explored example is skin color: the history of people
entering or leaving recognition as white (Segrest 1994; Williams
1996) provides clear testimony to the politically contingent nature
of racial classification.
The history of racial science can be interpreted as a series of
ultimately unsuccessful attempts to defer and erase the incoherence
of the race concept. With hindsight, it is apparent that the problematic
nature of racial science was already admitted within its practitioners’
attempts to banish all trace of movement from the racialized body: all
expressive and social functions were bracketed out as prescientific.
Thus, although physiognomy was a particular source of interest for
Camper and Blumenbach as well as for later figures, such as Morton
CULTURAL POLITICS
and Knox, the extrapolation of such work to the racial codification

of facial expression was never attempted. The most striking fact
about the bodies subject to the attentions of early to mid nineteenth
century racial classifiers was that they were corpses.
From Camper’s index of facial angles (1794) through the polygenist
phase in nineteenth-century American racial science, exemplified
by Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of
the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America
(1839), and on to Lombroso’s (1911; also Pick 1989) “faces of
323
criminality,” and Dammann’s (Dammann and Dammann 1876)

ALASTAIR BONNETT
photographical gallery of races (or even Beddoe’s The Races of

Britain, 1971, first published 1895, with its gallery of facial portraits
of Britain’s “indigenous races”) we find considerable energy poured
into identifying discrete racial groups by their facial features and
skull shape. “The skill of the collector of [race-portraits],” noted Tyler
(1876: 184), commenting on Dammann’s work, “lies in choosing
the right individuals as representatives of their nations.” Tyler’s
words also remind us of the increasingly important function of the
portrait, especially the photographic portrait, in representing people
and peoples to each other. Indeed, Trachtenberg argues that, by the
late nineteenth century,
Looking at photographed faces, tokens of familiarity and celeb-

rity, making the world seem present in its absence, emerged
as a defining act of modernity . . . Faces stated as public events
became available for intimate viewing. (2000: 10–11)
This observation suggests the ability of the photographic portrait

to represent the mosaic of national life. Within August Sander’s
compilation of portraits, People of the Twentieth Century (Lange and
Contrath-Scholl 2002), we seem to be being brought face-to-face
with the complexity of early twentieth-century Germany. Yet, for non-
European subjects, portraiture tended to subjugate complexity. By
creating higher and lower “racial types,” the logic of modernity was
also the logic of racism, and worked to assign non-Europeans certain
“race-typical” forms of expression. Thus, for example, although
Morton’s skull measurements of Native Americans did not spell
out any correlating facial expressions, his “discovery” of this group’s
limited cranial capacity and hence intelligence (see Banton 1987,
and Gould 1981, for discussion) helped to sanction the narrow and
clichéd range of expressions ascribed to “Indians.”
However, facial expression was not easily digested by racial
science (in contrast to the arts and other areas of science; see
Hartley 2001). The crude “facts” of physiognomy appeared to be
amenable to racial categorization but different groups’ use of the
face remained a topic harder to broach “scientifically.” Indeed, the
clearest argument concerning facial expressions from the Victorian
period reminds us that “racial science” was always a contested
CULTURAL POLITICS
terrain. The notion that expression was not racially varied but
universal was one of the central contentions of The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1999; first published 1872) by Charles
Darwin. Darwin used this argument to confirm the monogenist line
against the polygenist claim that racial divisions suggested that
humankind was made up of several species.
I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail that all the

chief expressions exhibited by man are the same throughout
324
the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument

PALE FACE, RED MASK
in favour of several races being descended from a single parent-

stock. (Darwin 1999: 355)
Whether or not we accept that facial expressions are universal, it is

clear that they proved resilient to attempts to categorize people into a
hierarchy of races. This historical function helps explain some of the
passion in the long-running anthropological debate on the universality
of facial expression (Ekman 1972, 1989, 1999). Crosscutting with
and, in part, inspiring the anthropological discussion are universal
psychological models of expression, most notably Silan Tomkins’
affect theory (Tomkins 1995). For Tomkins, humans have innate
primary affects, emotional states that can be recognized by typical
facial expressions. Thus, for example, the “negative affect” of “anger-
rage” is expressed by “frown,” “clenched jaw,” and “red face.” Of
course, this illustration immediately throws up questions about the
transcultural validity of Tomkins’ affect theory. For the last forty years
or so, research on facial expression has been split between those
who see facial expressions as “readouts” of universal emotions
(Ekman 1999), and those who see them as “social signals” which
are culturally relative (Fridlund 1994). The increasing tendency today
is to admit something of both positions (Chan 1985; Wierzbicka
1999); thus allowing that there are some “basic” expressions, such
as laughter, that connote a similar emotional state across cultures,
whilst understanding the difficulties of claiming that the meaning of
any expression – or the notion of “emotion” – is simply or entirely
equivalent between cultures.
When the hierarchies of racial science gave way to the compar-
ative methodologies of “crosscultural” research, it became possible
for ambivalently positioned phenomenon, such as facial expression,
to gain research recognition. The difficulty and indigestibility of facial
expression shifted: it is the categorization, not of cadavers, but
of cultural meaning, that is troublesome today. Colonization and
globalization have made the conceptual separation of cultures
appear increasingly anachronistic. The identification of acts of
cultural adoption has become more urgent, yet more complex. To
imitate an ethnic group’s facial expression is a particularly tricky
performance. The universality that appears to be at work within facial
gesture means that one must adopt visual or aural clues so as to let
CULTURAL POLITICS
one’s audience know what (and who) one is “doing.” Audiences knew
Grey Owl’s facial expression was “Indian” because of his costume,
long hair, and verbal intonation. Similarly, Chief Buffalo Child Long
Lance, an African American who, a few years earlier than Grey Owl,
also won fame through a pretense that he was a “Red Indian” (see
Long Lance 1928), needed to dress up, and adopt a deep and slow
“Indian voice,” if his posture and expression were to be read as he
intended (figure 3). On its own, facial expression is rarely enough. To
take another type of example, English people know when an English
325
person is trying to impersonate a French person not simply because

ALASTAIR BONNETT
Figure 3
Long Lance, 1923
(courtesy Glenbow
Museum).
Source: Francis, D. 1995

The Imaginary Indian
Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp
Press
they are likely to twist their face into a nonchalant, disdainful grimace,
with the mouth, typically, turned down, but also because they tend to
utter some “French-sounding” noise. Indeed, there is a whole range
of racialized facial expressions that act as corporeal incarnations, as
bodily fixings, of stereotypical accents (some simultaneously facial
and oral impersonations you might encounter in England include
the squeezed mouth and screwed-up eyes that accompany many
a lampooned Irish accent and the severe jaw and angry, clenched
teeth that, apparently, are demanded of those who utter English
with a German accent). The fact that the racial meaning of facial
expression relies upon these other clues provides another indication
of its unreliability as an ethnic marker.
All racial demarcations are, at some point, unreliable. The white
British comedian “Ali G” established a career, in the late 1990s,
almost entirely on the humor that arises when we watch people
CULTURAL POLITICS
being disoriented by carefully chosen contradictory racialized cues.

(Looking at Grey Owl’s defiant glare I cannot help thinking of Ali G’s
browbeating catchphrase of racial authenticity, “is it ‘cos I is black?”)
The racialization of facial expression is distinct and, for antiracists,
of interest, because of the extraordinary scale of its inadequacy.
By its evident insufficiency, it provides a glaring example of both
the absurdity of all such demarcations and a further clue as to how
the act of ethnic and racial stereotyping is always also an act of
transposition, a reflection more of oneself than the apparent object
326
of one’s attentions.

PALE FACE, RED MASK
THE GENESIS OF THE “INDIAN’S” NOBLE LOOK

What does a “Red Indian” look like in the imagination of the
West? Broadly speaking, from the eighteenth century onwards,
representations fall into two types.2 On the one hand, there is a
tradition of the noble and solemn look, dignified, mouth firmly shut,
eyes direct and intense. The alternative convention is to depict the
“Indian” as out of control, as yelling his (and less often her) head off,
as aggressive and loud. Although these two depictions have often
gone hand in hand, Europeans have long been especially fascinated
with the possibility of the “Indian’s” sublime nobility. For one of the
founders of racial classification, the Comte de Buffon (1997: 16;
first published 1748) the “savages” of Canada (who he says “occupy
the whole territory as far as the Gulf of Mexico”) are “hardy, bold,
grave, and moderate.” Kant’s depiction of “national characteristics”
(1997: 56; first published 1764) includes an account of the “sub-
lime . . . mental character” of the “savages” of “North America.” His
description associates the “Indians” with an extreme and intense
thirst for adventure and valor. Such anthropological conventions were
developed in visual form within Paul Kane’s romantic paintings from
the mid-nineteenth century. They also help structure the conventions
of Indian portraiture seen in Edmund Morris’s (McGill 1984) and
Edward Curtis’s (1907–1930) photographic portrayals from the start
of the twentieth century.
The myth of the “noble savage” was generated as a critique of
European decadence and dishonesty (Cro 1990; Kiernan 1990).
The nobility ascribed to the “savage” was something that Europeans
understood themselves to have fallen from, something that evoked
a prelapsarian idyll, yet could also be striven for, and remained
an inherent possibility of European society. In their different ways,
Montaigne, Voltaire, and Rousseau all offered the undespotic and
honest disposition of indigenous Americans, not as unique and
inimitable, but as illustrative of what Europeans once had and could
obtain again.3 As this implies, when the “noble savage” came to be
depicted, when his (sic) look came to be painted or drawn, it was as
much an image of the “noble European” that artists had in mind as
any great concern to portray indigenous peoples accurately.
Because the notion of “savage nobility” relied upon the belief that
“Indians” were extreme figures, given to sharply polarized moods, the
CULTURAL POLITICS
sternness of the “Indian look” always contained a thrilling “edge,”

a sense that at any moment the solemn face would give way to a
fierce face. Francis Parkman’s The Conspiracy of the Pontiac (1898;
first published 1851) shows us how nobility and ferocity could be
tied together:
Over all emotion he throws the veil of an iron self-control, orig-

inating in a peculiar form of pride, and fostered by rigorous
discipline from childhood upward, he is trained to conceal
327
passion, and not subdue it . . . This shallow self-mastery serves

ALASTAIR BONNETT
to give dignity to public deliberation, and harmony to social

life. (Parkman 1898: 48)
The mixing of wild and noble implied an ambiguous relationship

to European ideals. The idea that the “Indian” was “like us” but “not
like us” established a logic of fascination, a fascination that was
reflected in the often lengthy treatments “American Indians” were
accorded in popular anthropology. A typical popular encyclopedia
of racial types from the turn of the nineteenth century, The Living
Races of Mankind by H.N. Hutchinson (no date, circa 1900), is, like
other volumes of this kind (for example, Hammerton 1922), full of
photographs of faces representing different racial and national types.
They stare at us from every page, looking generally miserable. The
author devotes one of his longest commentaries to the “American
Indian,” of whom he notes “the extraordinary uniformity in physical
character and appearance represented by them from one extremity
of their habitat to another” (n.d.: 530). Hutchinson does not discuss
the science of racial craniology. Rather, he considers what he calls
“the features” of the different races. What is termed “the general
cast of features” of “American Indians” is said to include a prominent
nose (“bold development of the nose”) and brow, black, deep-set
eyes, and high cheekbones. The “American Indian” is also said to
possess a European-like “aquiline” profile. In summary, the two
clearest elements that emerge from Hutchinson’s depiction are 1)
the similarity of “Indian” features to those of the European, and 2)
the possession by the “American Indian” of certain distinctly “bold”
facial elements, particularly the eyes, nose, brow, and cheek. It is
also worthy of note that the author of The Living Races of Mankind
did not allow his white and Anglo-Saxon suprematicism to be diluted
by any romantic attachment to “primitives”: he found little nobility in
any of his non-European subjects and certainly did not consider them
worthy of emulation. The closest he came to a positive representation
of “American Indians” was to suggest that a “reserved and moody
temperament is highly characteristic of the typical North American
Indian, who on all occasions endeavours to preserve an impassive
external demeanour” (Hutchinson n.d.: 547).
Indian “wild faces” would have been familiar to Archie Belaney
as a boy in Hastings, largely through their prominent part in the
CULTURAL POLITICS
spectacle and advertising associated with his favorite entertainment,

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. Moreover, the “woodcraft” handbook
and children’s novel that greatly impressed the young Archie, Edward
Seton’s, Two Little Savages (1903), relies on the idea that to imitate
“Indians” one must yell and whoop, that one must become excited
and expressive. A suspicion of underlying fierceness gave Grey Owl’s
noble, solemn public face a large part of its emotional charge. His
publicist, Lovat Dickson, was fully aware of the ways these noble
and fierce roles interacted and created visual excitement. The
328
clamor associated with Grey Owl’s two speaking tours of Britain (in

PALE FACE, RED MASK
1935–1936 and 1937) reflected a popular glee at his evident and

visually proven genuineness. As Grey Owl started his first British
lecturing tour in 1935, Dickson noted,
He photographed magnificently, and the fiercer and angrier

he looked the more Indian and exotic he looked. Day after
day his picture appeared in one or other, sometimes in several,
of the London papers . . . I could see that there was a wild
streak in him somewhere. (1976: 236–37)
Native Americans’ ascribed possession of both European fea-

tures (for example, the “aquiline” profile mentioned by Hutchinson),
and a “bold,” “striking” aspect, considerably eased their incorporation
into a Western myth of the noble savage, a figure within whom
Europeans could simultaneously “see themselves” and see their
exotic “other.” The class and gender particularity to this process
allowed for a crisis of identity within an aspirational middle class
and a set of concerns about the feminization of European society
to be played out in the portrayal of “Indian” men as expressing
a natural nobility and natural masculinity. Thoreau’s (1906: 172)
desire to “live so sturdily and Spartan-like” as to rid oneself of the
“ornamentation” and “effeminate” ways of the city may be seen as
an early expression of this grim mimicry of what he called “Indian
wisdom.” It is not coincidental that the stereotypical stern/fierce
“Indian look” is very similar to the ideal military look. The training of
boys and men into military discipline within, for example, the Scout
movement, established the “Indian brave” as a role model (see Jeal
1990). Connell (1995: 195) picks out this appropriation as evidence
of an early twentieth-century “struggle” to “control and direct the
reproduction of masculinity.” He implies that it reflected a desire to
shore up masculinity, to reconstruct something thought to be under
threat. By contrast, in Sons of Empire, Robert MacDonald (1993)
elucidates what has become an increasingly common alternative
emphasis on the transgressive and taboo-breaking nature of the
empire’s racial “cross-dressers.” He casts the Scouts as ambiguous
deserters from Victorian civilization. For MacDonald, dressing up in
“buckskins and moccasins” (1993: 143) was not merely a matter of
reproducing the existing social order but also of escaping from it.
In part, Native Americans served as attractive objects for such
CULTURAL POLITICS
fantasies because they had come to be seen, in Britain and elsewhere,

as both an essentially masculine and as an essentially American
race. The images of “Red Indians” that would have been familiar to
the young Archie Belaney were inseparable from the iconography of
the USA as a “manly” and energetic new nation. Rayna Green (1988:
30) makes the point that within the USA itself “playing Indian” is
one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cult-

329
ural expression, indeed one of the oldest forms of affinity with

American culture at a national level.

ALASTAIR BONNETT
The dignity of the warrior, of the brave and fearless man of honor, is
etched too deep in the noble savage’s visage for this look (or this new
nation?) to be available to women. In their study of postcard images
of Native American women, Albers and James (1987: 35) conclude
that the representation of Native American women has been less
stable and more uncertain than that of Native American men: “if a
uniform caricature has existed, it has been the image of the Indian
‘princess’” (see also Sneve 1987; Valaskakis 1993). Although this
role may be taken to offer another avenue of racialized fantasy, it
was shaped by a conservative interpretation of what “natural” gender
relations should look like. This also suggests that the expression of
“Indian” women was relatively mobile only, or largely, because it was
accorded the supporting and reactive role of admiring and amplifying
the masculinity of “Indian” men. Thus, for example, although it is true
that photographs of Pauline Johnson, the popular turn-of-the-century
“Indian poetess,” do depict her, when in performance (in her Indian
costume), with a melodramatic, messianic stare, her material makes
it clear where the roots of this expressive gesture may be found. Her
“Indian face” was necessary for the telling of such poems as “As
Red Men Die.” It is a story of a Mohawk brave who prefers death to
submission: “He – who despises pain and sneers at grief/. . . loyal
to his race/He bends to death – but never to disgrace” (Johnson
1912: 6–7).
The popularity of Johnson’s works at the turn of the nineteenth
century came during a boom period in the production of romantic
images of Native Americans. The rise of Social Darwinism and the
related notion that Native Americans were unable to pose a threat
to the inevitable expansion of European settlement in America – that
they were a “dying race” – enabled an aura of pity to develop around
their representation. The elegiac photographs of Edward Curtis and
Edmund Morris provide clear testaments of this developing mood
(see Gidley 1992). The very first image in Curtis’s multivolume The
North American Indian (twenty volumes published between 1907
and 1930), which showed a group of Navajo horsemen, is titled
“The Vanishing Race.” The pathos of racial disappearance gave a
sense of tragic depth to, and hence heightened, already established
notions of “Indian” nobility. Yet, the tragic image was never pushed
beyond the point where Western audiences would stop identifying
CULTURAL POLITICS
with native nobility (hence, however sad his state, the “Indian” is
always cast as dignified and, therefore, a fit subject for admiration
and empathy). After all, the pleasure at meeting the gaze of the noble
savage was one of self-affirmation; to see the “Indian look” was to
see something of oneself.
GREY OWL’S GAZE: THE EUROPEAN FACE IN CRISIS

Modernity and antimodernity are racially coded. The desire to escape
whiteness and immerse oneself, if only momentarily, in racialized
330
exoticism may also be described as the pull of the “primitive.” In the

PALE FACE, RED MASK
twentieth century, the intersection of these themes can be traced

within cultural currents as diverse as Dadaism and the mythopoetic
men’s movement (see Bonnett 2000; Torgovnick 1990). As this
implies, Grey Owl’s “Indian face” must be placed within a politically
wide-ranging tradition of imperial power, a tradition that established
the “Indian” as both site of racial supremacy and antimodern
fantasy.
In the books that influenced Archie Belaney it tends to be the
liberatory, wild side of the “Indian” image that is most evident. It
is only by playing at Indians that the boys depicted in Two Little
Savages (Seton 1903) could feel truly alive. “Whoop[ing] an Indian
war chant,” one “little savage” finds that “as he pranced around in
step his whole nature seemed to respond; he felt himself a part
of that dance. It was in himself; it thrilled him through and through
and sent his blood exulting” (1903: 326). The possibility that whites
can find “exultation” by fleeing whiteness, that they can choose to
adopt (and by implication, at any time choose to discard), the ways
of “the tribal,” “the natural,” the “less sophisticated” peoples of
the earth is a testament to the racialized confidence of this group.
Whether it is Tarzan “revelling in the freedom of the fierce, wild life
he loved” (Burroughs 1963: 149), or Kim’s ability to integrate in any
aspect of the culture of India (more particularly to dress like and,
hence, become a native boy: “a demon woke up and sang with joy
as he put on the changing dress and changed speech and gesture
therewith” Kipling 1912: 226), the white desire to imitate implies
white power, white control. But it also implies a sense of inadequacy,
an underlying belief that the ways of whiteness are sterile, alienating,
and antihuman. The incentive to impersonate others relies on the
notion that by imitating others one can regain one’s own humanity;
that one can become more like oneself. This in turn implies the
need for careful control over the production of images of those racial
“others” considered worthy of emulation.
Yet the process of exploring and displaying one’s real self by copying
the habits of those assumed not to be a part of one’s own race or
culture, demands such a strict regulation over the representation
of this “other group” that the threat of inauthentic examples, of the
noble savage, as it were, “letting us down,” becomes an ever-present,
indeed a structural, problem. Real Native Americans have the habit
CULTURAL POLITICS
of employing a full range of facial expressions; they disappoint by

failing to look the part. The “Red Indian” best placed to appreciate
and negotiate this dilemma and give Western audiences what they
want is the white faker, the pale face with the red mask. On his first
meeting with Grey Owl, the Canadian writer Lloyd Roberts was, like
many white journalists who had gone before him, greatly impressed
by Grey Owl’s authenticity, his ability to “get it right.”
[He was] the first Indian [I had met] that really looked like
331
an Indian – an Indian from those thrilling Wild West days of

ALASTAIR BONNETT
covered wagons, buffalos, and Sitting Bulls. The stamp of his

fierce Apache ancestors showed in his tall, gaunt physique, his
angular features, his keen eyes, even in his two braids dangling
down his fringed buckskin shirt. (Lloyd Roberts’ description of
meeting Grey Owl, cited by Dickson 1976: 214)
Within the misrecognition of Grey Owl as authentic, there is also

a clear recognition that “the authentic Indian” is a cliché unlikely
ever to be encountered in real life. This then is an act of wishful
misrecognition. In the search for racial authenticity people are willing
to be deceived. Lovat Dickson emphasizes time and again that
Grey Owl’s enormous popularity relied on, what was for Dickson,
an unexpected, public appetite for precisely such a figure. “His
appearance in London in October 1935 created a sensation,” he
notes (see also Dickson 1938, 1939): “Not only did he look romantic,
he spoke pure romance. His thrilling voice brought the wilderness
and its inhabitants, animal and Indian, alive for audiences” (1976:
4–5). “There Never Came a Redder Red Indian to Britain,” enthused
the Sunday Express (April 24, 1938).
Grey Owl’s books, when read today, tacitly reveal a man worrying
away at the ambiguities of his “secret” and his new role. One of
the chapters of Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) is devoted to an
encounter with an isolated ex-trapper, “the Sage of Pelican Lake.”
This man of nature turns out to be “a white man, a circumstance
that had been none too evident at first” (1936: 56).
Figure 4
The Sage of Pelican Lake
(courtesy National Parks
of Canada).
Source: Grey Owl 1936

Tales of an Empty Cabin
London, Lovat Dickson
CULTURAL POLITICS
332

PALE FACE, RED MASK
Grey Owl pours over the details of the Sage’s authenticity, his
mastery of multiple “Indian” languages, his effortless grasp of native
customs. His authenticity is also written in his face:
Seldom have I seen a face so seamed and weatherbeaten. The

wrinkles that furrowed his rugged features were bitten deeply
in, and from this mass of corrugation there looked out at me
eyes of a deep and brooding melancholy. Yet in his calm and
level, comprehending gaze, I somehow sensed a world of kindly
tolerance and understanding. (1936: 55)
Grey Owl searches out every last scrap of authenticity within the
Sage. Yet his account, along with his photograph, leaves us with the
impression that Grey Owl is exploring his own concerns. Indeed, the
expression of the Sage in the photograph Grey Owl provides (figure
4) is one of faint uncertainty, as if unsure of his strange guest’s
obsession with all things “Indian.” The whiteness of “the Sage” was
of course key to Grey Owl’s interest in him. By turning “the Sage” into
a symbol of nature itself, of an authentic life in the wilderness, the
Sage offered a role model for Grey Owl’s redemption from his own
lies. The “greening” of Grey Owl’s reputation since the 1970s may be
said to have fulfilled this wish. During the twentieth century and, in
part, because of the activities of Grey Owl, the “Indian look” became
bound up with the celebration of nature. Grey Owl was viewed as a
spokesman for the wilderness, as the representative of an emergent
awareness of the need to protect the world’s wildernesses. Thus his
look, his “wise appearance,” could be interpreted as reflecting the
sagacity of a man who knows Nature, of someone who is in touch with
forces that are being destroyed by and are alienated from “modern
man.” Today Grey Owl’s once-popular books of native anecdote and
lore (1931, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937) are regarded as classic
statements of green philosophy. His works were reprinted in the
early 1970s. Moreover, his cabin, Beaver Lodge in Saskatchewan,
was restored in 1988, to be made the centerpiece of a wilderness
sanctuary. Francis (1992: 140) notes that the
greening of the Indian begins with Grey Owl. To him belongs

the credit for affirming, if not creating, the image of the Indian
CULTURAL POLITICS
as the original environmentalist, an image which has gained

strength in the years since he expressed it.
Thus, another layer of meaning has come to be imposed upon

Grey Owl’s “Indian face.” It is an interpretative inflection that has
profoundly influenced the representation of Native Americans in the
mid and late twentieth century (Krech 1999). It is a stereotype that
performs the dual function of being entirely accessible to white
emulation (and empathetic “understanding”) and of appearing
333
as a source of unalienated critique, an origin point for the kind of

ALASTAIR BONNETT
spiritual power that can only come from outside the cage of Western
instrumentalism. Thus, within today’s green movement as well as
within mainstream films (most famously, Dances with Wolves) and
other contemporary green-tinged currents such as the mythopoetic
men’s movement, the conceit of the “Indian look” is employed, as
it was in the past, to reflect the preoccupations of “white society.” It
is a cliché that is still found useful. A cliché that connotes “respect”
for non-European traditions yet denies the normal range of human
expression, the range that we all share, to those communities
saddled with the burden of symbolizing Nature.
CONCLUSIONS
Grey Owl was a hoax. Or at least that is what the English press
proclaimed him to be in 1938, the year of his death4 and the year
that his “real identity” was revealed. “GREY OWL WAS NOT A RED
INDIAN – HE WAS A SUSSEX MAN” proclaimed the headline in the
local paper of the town where he was born (the Hastings’ Argus
cited by Smith 1990: 211). Grey Owl’s fakery was exposed and
ridiculed. Yet, Grey Owl’s act of deception was enabled by the racial
stereotypes and mythologies of his audience. It was they who saw
authenticity in his appearance; it was they who were so convinced by
that “Indian face.” The racialization of facial expression seems both
a doomed and, in the context of the racialized nature of modernity,
an inevitable process. In large part, we all share the same range
of facial expressions. The act of imagining that one group has a
wise or noble look, or indeed a stupid and ignoble one, inevitably
collapses into explicit contradiction. It is an absurd idea. Yet, it has
been and continues to be an influential one. We might, of course, say
the same for all attempts to view people in racial terms. However,
it is the evident and accepted commonality of facial expressions
and related insufficiency of attempts to imitate other races through
them that makes the use of the face such a distinct and intriguing
area to approach the issue of racialization.
The “Indian look” is the corporeal incarnation of white, Western
concerns about modern life (more specifically, concerns about
alienation and the environment). It is simultaneously universally
available (anyone can do it) and highly Eurocentric and racialized.
This interpretative fluidity is suggestive of other elements within
CULTURAL POLITICS
this narrative: of the playfulness of imitation and of the pleasures

of racial transgression. A related line of argument emphasizes the
destabilizing, subversive nature of colonial mimicry, a position often
associated with Bhabha’s (1984) evaluation of colonized peoples’
relationship to colonial power (see also Bate 1993; Taussig 1993).
However, although the history related here may appear to contain
such political possibilities, it is more incisively and accurately
summed up as a story of domination and destruction. The sadness
of that “Indian look” is that it represents the erasure of the real
334
faces of Native Americans. All the extraordinary diversity, all the

PALE FACE, RED MASK
grinning, grimacing plurality that is accorded to the “normal” (i.e.,

European) face is erased, displaced by a toxic mix of sentimentality
and racial stereotype. The redemptive possibility seized upon by
Grey Owl, that the “Indian look” could also be the look of a visionary
environmentalist, suggests how the racialization of facial expressions
can be sustained and yet mutated, turned to new ends. Yet, it is a
melancholic redemption. That “Indian look” is directed not to the
future but to the past, to a vast sense of loss. If you look closely,
you will see that the history of modernity is written in the face.
NOTES
1. It was Donald Smith who first made this point about this image.
In his biography of Grey Owl he notes of this photograph: “He
does not have his ‘Indian face’ on for this photo” (1990: 131).
2. The illustrations that Theodore de Bry, a contemporary of
Montaigne, provided for Historia Americae (fourteen volumes,
published from 1590; see Alexander 1976) indicate that the
“noble savage’s” facial expression had not yet been translated
into visual form. Aside from their nakedness and costume, Bry’s
“Americans” look very much like Europeans, and display a wide
range of gestures and facial expressions.
3. See Montaigne’s essay “On the Cannibals” (1993, first published
1580), Voltaire’s l’Ingénu (1964, first published 1756), and
Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality (1984, first published
1755).
4. Less than a month after his last lecture, in Toronto (March, 26),
Grey Owl went into a coma, apparently caused by exhaustion. He
died on April 13, 1938.
REFERENCES
Albers, P. and James, W. 1987. “Illusion and Illumination: Visual
Images of American Indian Women in the West.” In S. Armitage
and E. Jameson (eds), The Women’s West. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Alexander, M. 1976. Discovering the New World: Based on the Works
of Theodore de Bry. London: London Editions.
Banton, M. 1987. Racial Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
CULTURAL POLITICS
Bate, D. 1993. “Photography and the Colonial Vision.” Third Text

22: 81–91.
Beddoe, J. 1971. The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthro-
pology of Western Europe. London: Hutchinson.
Bell, C. 1844. Anatomy and Philosophy Of Expression. London: John
Murray.
Bhabha, H. 1984. “On Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse.” October 28: 125–33.
Bonnett, A. 2000. White Identities: Historical and International
335
Perspectives. Harlow: Pearson.

ALASTAIR BONNETT
de Buffon, G.-L. 1997. “The Geographical and Cultural Distribution of

Mankind.” In E. Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Burroughs, E. 1963. The Return of Tarzan. New York: Ballantine.
Camper, P. 1794. The Works of the Late Professor Camper. London:
Dilly.
Chan, D. 1985. “Perception and Judgement of Facial Expressions
among the Chinese.” International Journal of Psychology 20:
681–92.
Connell, R. 1995. Masculinities. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin.
Cro, S. 1990. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom. Waterloo:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Curtis, E. 1907–1930. The North American Indian. Cambridge/
Norwood: Frederick Wenn Hodge.
Dammann, C. and Dammann, F. 1876. Ethnological Photographic
Gallery of the Various Races of Man. London: Trubner.
Darwin, C. 1999. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:
Third Edition with an Introduction, Afterword and Commentaries by
Paul Ekman. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Dickson, L. (ed.). 1938. The Green Leaf. A Tribute to Grey Owl.
London: Lovat Dickson.
—— 1939. Half-Breed, The Story of Grey Owl. London: Peter
Davies.
—— 1976. Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl. London:
Sphere Books.
Ekman, P. (ed.). 1972. Emotion in the Human Face: Second Edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—— 1989. “The Argument and Evidence about Universals in Facial
Expressions of Emotion.” In H. Wagner and A. Manstead (eds),
Handbook of Social Psychology. Chichester: John Wiley.
—— 1999. “Afterword: Universality of Emotional Expression? A
Personal History of the Dispute.” In C. Darwin, The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals: Third Edition with an Intro-
duction, Afterword and Commentaries by Paul Ekman. London:
HarperCollins Publishers.
Essed, P. and Goldberg, D. (eds). 2002. Race: Critical Theories.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Finot, J. 1906. Race Prejudice. New York: E.P. Dutton.
CULTURAL POLITICS
Francis, D. 1992. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in

Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Fridlund, A. 1994. Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View.
London: Academic Press.
Gidley, M. 1992. “Edward S. Curtis’s Indian Photographs: A National
Enterprise.” In M. Gidley (ed.), Representing Others: White Views
of Indigenous Peoples, pp. 103–19. Exeter: Exeter University
Press.
Gilroy, P. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of
336
Race. London: Penguin.

PALE FACE, RED MASK
Gould, S. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. Harmondswor th:

Penguin.
Green, R. 1988. “The Tribe called Wannabee: Playing Indian in
America and Europe.” Folklore 99(1): 30–55
Grey Owl. 1931. The Men of the Last Frontier. London: Country
Life.
—— 1934. Pilgrims of the Wild. Toronto: Macmillan.
—— 1935. The Adventures of Sajo and her People. London: Lovat
Dickson.
—— 1936. Tales of an Empty Cabin. London: Lovat Dickson.
—— 1937. The Tree. London: Lovat Dickson.
Hammerton, J. (ed.). 1922. Peoples of all Nations. London: The
Amalgamated Press.
Hartley, L. 2001. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in
Nineteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hutchinson, H. no date. The Living Races of Mankind. London:
Hutchinson.
Huxley, J. and Haddon, A. 1939. We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial”
Problems. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ignatiev, N. and Garvey, J. (eds). 1996. Race Traitor. New York:
Routledge.
Jeal, T. 1990. The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. New York:
William Morrow.
Johnson, P. 1912. Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline
Johnson (Tekahionwake). Toronto: The Mission Book Company.
Kant, I. 1997. “Immanuel Kant, ‘On the Different Races of Man’.”
In E. Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kiernan, V. 1990. “Noble and Ignoble Savages.” In G. Rousseau
and R. Porter (eds), Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Kipling, R. 1912. Kim. London: Macmillan.
Krech, S. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Lange, S. and Contrath-Scholl, G. (eds). 2002. August Sander: People
of the 20th Century. New York: Abrams.
Lombroso, C. 1911. Criminal Man According to the Classification of
CULTURAL POLITICS
Cesare Lombroso. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child. 1928. Long Lance. New York:
Cosmopolitan Book Corp.
MacDonald, R. 1993. Sons of Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout
Movement 1890–1910. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McGill, J. 1984. Edmund Morris: Frontier Artist. Toronto: Dundurn
Press.
Montaigne, M. 1993. The Complete Essays. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
337

ALASTAIR BONNETT
Morton, S. 1839. Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the

Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America:
To which is prefixed an Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species.
London: Simpkin, Marshall.
Murji, K. and Solomos, J. 2005. Racialization: Studies in Theory and
Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parkman, F. 1898. The Works of Francis Parkman: Volume 1. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company.
Pick, D. 1989. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–
c.1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. 1984. A Discourse on Inequality. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Segrest, M. 1994. Memoir of a Race Traitor. Boston: South End
Press.
Seton, E. 1903. Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two
Boys who Lived as Indians and What they Learned. London: Grant
Richards.
Smith, D. 1990. From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl.
Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books.
Sneve, V. 1987. “Remembering Minnehaha.” Country Living,
November: 72.
Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the
Senses. New York: Routledge.
Thoreau, H. 1906. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Vol. Five:
Excursions and Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Tomkins, S. 1995. Exploring Affect: Selected Writings of Silvan S.
Tomkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Torgovnick, M. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Trachtenberg, A. 2000. “Lincoln’s Smile: Ambiguities of the Face in
Photography.” Social Research 67(1): 1–23.
Tyler, E. 1876. “Dammann’s Race-portraits.” Nature 6: 184–85.
Valaskakis, G. 1993. “Parallel Voices: Indian and Others: Narratives
of Cultural Struggle.” Canadian Journal of Communication 18(3),
http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewarticle.php?id=179&layout=html,
accessed 23/05/2005.
Voltaire. 1964. Zadig/l”Ingénu. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ware, V. and Back, L. 2002. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and
CULTURAL POLITICS
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wierzbicka, A. 1999. Emotions Across Languages and Cultures:
Diversity and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Williams, G. 1996. Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White
Boy who Discovered he was Black. New York: Plume/Penguin.
338


Pale Face Red Racial Ambiguity Racial Expressions

Încărcat de

Informații document

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Pale Face Red Racial Ambiguity Racial Expressions

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3 REPRINTS AVAILABLE PHOTOCOPYING © BERG 2006

PP 319–338 DIRECTLY FROM THE PERMITTED BY LICENSE PRINTED IN THE UK

PALE FACE, RED MASK

ALASTAIR BONNETT ABSTRACT Drawing on examples of

account of Grey Owl’s capacity to look

There Never Came a Redder Red Indian

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

> To mimic an “American Indian” is more than a matter

Source: Dickson, L. 1976

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

Source: Grey Owl 1936

focused, and self-contained, silent yet powerful, staring manfully

used to unsettle other attempts to employ exotic bodies as sites of

Anglo-American ethnic and racial studies (Gilroy 2000; Essed and

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

Goldberg 2002) at roughly the same moment that a so-called

native nobility. All we are left with is a wooden version of a familiar

very different. He was snapped stepping down from a train, as he

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

arrived at Southampton on October 17, 1935, as part of his speaking

RACIALIZING FACIAL EXPRESSIONS: UNCERTAIN ACTS

and Knox, the extrapolation of such work to the racial codification

criminality,” and Dammann’s (Dammann and Dammann 1876)

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

photographical gallery of races (or even Beddoe’s The Races of

Looking at photographed faces, tokens of familiarity and celeb-

This observation suggests the ability of the photographic portrait

I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail that all the

the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argument

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

in favour of several races being descended from a single parent-

Whether or not we accept that facial expressions are universal, it is

person is trying to impersonate a French person not simply because

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

Source: Francis, D. 1995

being disoriented by carefully chosen contradictory racialized cues.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

THE GENESIS OF THE “INDIAN’S” NOBLE LOOK

sternness of the “Indian look” always contained a thrilling “edge,”

Over all emotion he throws the veil of an iron self-control, orig-

passion, and not subdue it . . . This shallow self-mastery serves

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

to give dignity to public deliberation, and harmony to social

The mixing of wild and noble implied an ambiguous relationship

spectacle and advertising associated with his favorite entertainment,

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

1935–1936 and 1937) reflected a popular glee at his evident and

He photographed magnificently, and the fiercer and angrier

Native Americans’ ascribed possession of both European fea-

fantasies because they had come to be seen, in Britain and elsewhere,

one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cult-

ural expression, indeed one of the oldest forms of affinity with

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

GREY OWL’S GAZE: THE EUROPEAN FACE IN CRISIS

exoticism may also be described as the pull of the “primitive.” In the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

twentieth century, the intersection of these themes can be traced

of employing a full range of facial expressions; they disappoint by

an Indian – an Indian from those thrilling Wild West days of

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf

covered wagons, buffalos, and Sitting Bulls. The stamp of his

Within the misrecognition of Grey Owl as authentic, there is also

Source: Grey Owl 1936

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/2/3/319/246369/319.pdf