DVDs & BOOKS

Vanishing Redmen Net Vanishing Salmon! (1938)
Production Companies: Hearst Metrotone News, Inc. Producer: William Randolph Hearst. Transfer Note: Copied at 24 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Running Time: 45 seconds.

American Indians were scarce in early newsreels and generally earned appearances only when decked out in warrior regalia. Although that’s not the case here, this newsreel still relies on the convenient nostalgia of the “vanishing American.”

Depression unemployment had brought a push throughout the Northwest for public works projects to tame rivers and generate cheap hydroelectric power—with at best mixed results for Native Americans. Several distortions underpin Vanishing Redmen Net Vanishing Salmon!, its spectacular images of fishing at Celilo Falls notwithstanding. Bonneville Dam, just completed about 60 miles downstream, restricted the salmon run and created a 40-mile lake behind it, but it would be another two decades before the waters of The Dalles Dam actually submerged Celilo, probably the oldest continually occupied community in North America, and made its fishing paradise vanish.—Scott Simmon

Further Reading
Two engaging recent surveys of the representation of Native Americans in film are Angela Aleiss’s Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Praeger Publishers, 2005) and Edward Buscombe’s “Injuns!”: Native Americans in the Movies (Reaktion Books, 2006).