SOURCE: “Simplifying the Native American: Wild West Shows Exhibit the ‘Indian,’” in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 9-17.

In the following essay, Blackstone examines the Wild West Show of 1880-1920 in which Native Americans were exhibited as examples of both the noble savage and the bloodthirsty barbarian.

The dominant white culture in American has long been content to view the Native American as a representative of a single homogeneous culture (Indian), and within the binary construct of noble savage/barbarian. Native Americans have not often been portrayed as, or considered to be, complex individuals who are members of many complex cultures. This strategy of marginalizing and simplifying the Native American began with the first European explorers and continues in the 1990s.¹

This practice developed out of the complex relationships formed among Native Americans and the settlers and...