At some point in the early 1970s, post the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), post-BILLY JACK (1971), post-Wounded Knee ’73, post-Sacheen Littlefeather, Native Americans began to percolate into pop culture as totems of white guilt and to serve as conduits between a modernized, secularized present and what was perceived to be a more holistic, harmonic past.  While it is inarguable that First Nationers are the true, original Americans (even if we owe the words “American” and “Indian” to Italians), it became a kind of inverse racism to suddenly elevate Natives to demigod status, making them sexy objets d’art at the cost of their complex humanity, bypassing their own right to anger in favor of channeling those emotions to purposes that comforted white liberals.   As if overnight, the stereotyped image of the monosyllabic Tonto or the whooping Geronimo was replaced by the kick-ass, aphorism-spouting Billy Jack and assorted shirtless copycats.  On the radio, The Cowsills had a hit with “Indian Lake,” a ditty not demonstrably preoccupied with Native American life but which describes an idyllic recreational area in which whites can “make the way the Indians do.”  (No, I don’t know what that means either.)  In 1971, The Raiders had a hit with a rerecording of John Loudermilk’s “Indian Reservation: The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian.”  The song had first hit the airwaves in 1959 as “The Pale Faced Indian” by Marvin Rainwater and a 1970 cover by Don Fardon (of the proto-punk band The Sorrows) charted at No. 20 on Billboard‘s Hot 100.  “Indian Reservation” had been a solo session for Paul Revere and the Raiders’ lead singer Mark Lindsay but was released under the aegis of the band (now proceeding under a shortened, retooled version of their original name) to hit the No. 1 spot for a week in July.

The biggest Indian-themed hit of this era was undoubtedly Cher’s “Half-Breed,” from the 1973 album of the same name.  The chart topper detailed the troubles of a half-Cherokee woman  (the singer herself is part Cherokee on her mother’s side) torn between worlds that view her either as “an Indian squaw” or, in the eyes of the Cherokee nation, “white by law.”  Marvin Rainwater (a quarter Cherokee who often performed in Native costumes) had recorded an unrelated song titled “Halfbreed” (also written by John Loudermilk) in 1959 that was later covered by Ricky Nelson, whose song list later included “Big Chief Buffalo Nickel.”  Indian-themed tunes were nothing new in country and western music but it took Cher’s hit “Half-Breed” to jump the subject out of the peacepipe kitsch of Hank Williams’ “Kaw-Liga,” Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” and Larry Verne’s “Mr. Custer” and into the mainstream… for all the actual good it did actual Indians.

Given the currency of Indianismo in American pop culture by 1970, it’s not surprising that Native Americans were linked to conservation efforts.  A famous TV spot produced by the Keep America Beautiful Foundation was keyed to the celebration of Earth Day in 1971.  The public service announcement featured actor Iron Eyes Cody as an unnamed and perhaps even ancient/spirit Indian canoeing through the industrial wasteland of North America and shedding a tear at the aggregation of waste and pollution.  The spot was widely influential and has, of course, also been widely parodied.  Iron Eyes Cody had played Indians in Hollywood since the early sound era, appearing as Crazy Horse in John Wayne’s first movie THE BIG TRAIL (1930).  In many ways, Cody was the go-to Indian for white Americans but what wasn’t widely known, even at the time of his death in 1993, was that Cody was an Italian-American.  The son of Sicilian grocers who set up shop in Gueydan, Louisiana, Espera Oscar de Corti encountered anti-Italian prejudice as a young man and identified with local Indians.  Changing his name to Tony Cody, the actor married a Native woman and identified himself as an American Indian for the rest of his life.  Yet given the jump start of the partnership of Native Americans and Ecology, it took nearly the whole of the decade for these two great tastes to taste great together in the setting of a horror film.

1979 was a big year for horror, Native Americans and ecology with the summer release of both Arthur Hiller’s NIGHTWING from Columbia Pictures and John Frankenheimer’s PROPHECY from Paramount Pictures.  (Also released that year was Stuart Rosenberg’s THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, based on the best seller by Jay Anson which alleged – falsely – that the haunted Long Island home stood on Indian burial ground… a plot point that didn’t make it into the movie.)   Neither Arthur Hiller nor John Frankenheimer was known for his work in the genre (although THE HOSPITAL [1970] and SECONDS [1966] are both, in their own way, truly nightmarish) and their detractors will tell you it shows in the finished films – but I like these oddball movies anyway, both as dumb-ass Revenge of Nature flicks and as examples of how Hollywood tried to shoehorn Natives into the spookshow mixture.  In NIGHTWING, a plague of vampire bats swarm like killer bees (the lead bat even rates a few close-ups, snarling into the camera like Billy Idol) into desert territory belonging to the Maski tribe, whose sacred grounds boast reserves of shale oil that are deemed desirable by the outside world.  Non-Native actors Nick Mancuso and Stephen Macht have the featured Indian roles here, their ethnic deficiencies compensated for by sun tans, vests and shaggy Osmond Brothers haircuts.  Based on the novel by Martin Cruz Smith (whose own adaptation was reworked by Steve Shagan and Bud Shrake), the film is BIRDSy and JAWSy in the extreme with a crucial difference being that the story’s central conflict (the bats notwithstanding) is intra-racial.  While the more traditional, superstitious Maski want to preserve their reservation as it has always been, the upwardly mobile Pahana tribe wants to bring modernity to the Res, ostesibly to show “that Indians can do more than make dolls” but also to cash in on the American Dream.  Sadly, these tensions go unexercised in the film’s last act, which finds Mancuso’s angry protag dosing himself on datura (aka “The Devil’s Cucumber”) to initiate a state of hyper-awareness, all the better to assist vampire bat swatter David Warner in exterminating the brutes.

Key to the NIGHTWING narrative is the belief of aged shaman Abner Tasupi (George Clutesi) that the bats are the expediters of an Armageddon that will destroy the white world and restore the primacy of the First Nation.  A renowned writer and painter in his native Canada, Clutesi also appears in PROPHECY, again as an Original Person (or “Opie”) who believes the monster-on-the-loose is the personification of the god Katahdin, come to protect North East aboriginals from the interference, racism and pollution of the white race.  Turns out he’s wrong – that particular critter is a bear mutated horrifically by generations of industrial methyl-mercury poisoning and not at all discriminating in his snacking.  Scripted by David Seltzer (sitting fat from his profits from THE OMEN), PROPHECY is an ungainly mix of monster movie and eco-think piece, where once again the central Native American character is played by a Caucasian… Irish-Italian Armand Assante.

In Seltzer’s novelization of the film, John Hawks is revealed to be half white and his education paid for by the logging company, in hopes that he will be a cooperative go-between between Industry and the indigenous people.  This bit of backstory never makes it into the film, in which Assante fronts unconvincingly for a number of genuine Native extras and day players.  Somewhat refreshing is that Seltzer has Assante’s mulish eco-agitator and Richard Dysart’s crusty industrial front man (who spouts the expected racist rebop but turns heroic in his final moments) put aside their differences for the greater good… only to die horribly, the pair of them.  It’s a bracing bucket of tough love in what has been up to that point a kind of a tree hugger of a fright flick, although the film is conventional enough to make survivors of peevish white protagonist Robert Foxworth (sporting a beard of Biblical proportions) and pregnant wife Talia Shire (in ultra-sensitive sharer mode).

Ecology and racism went hand in hand again in the Roger Corman-produced HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980), in which local fisherman/bigots (headed by hater Vic Morrow) in the Pacific Northwest are at loggerheads with the indigenous people (represented by non-Native actor Anthony Pena, as Johnny Eagle) even before a string of surfside assaults turns a handful of local boys into hamburger and their girlfriends into unwed mothers.  Turns out, of course, that it’s just Big Science doing its overreaching thing, with scientists supersizing DNA of the neighborhood salmon to cure world hunger – resulting in monsterism of the first water.  (The monster suits were the work of rising SFX star Rob Bottin, who graduated to John Carpenter’s THE THING, ROBOCOP, SE7EN and many other fine films.)  The race card thing is rotely played here but the film is a bona fide guilty pleasure, with one of the great exploitation film climaxes of all time – making jaw-droppingly explicit what was always coyly implicit about monster-and-the-girl movies like KING KONG (1933) and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954); Corman reportedly had the film’s copious nudity edited in after original director Barbara Peeters demurred – but the final result is cinematic gold.  Perhaps the must-read website Kindertrauma put it best:  “Let’s be honest, this is one cult favorite where nobody’s clamoring to view the original director’s cut.”

Straight up racism with no ecological chaser is the bear of Jim Sotos’ SWEET SIXTEEN (1983), in which Native handyman Jason Longshadow (Don Shanks) is suspected of a string of heinous murders bedeviling the residents of a small Texas town and adjacent Indian reservation.  Longshadow is an interesting character, in that he is etched initially as an angry loner of the Billy Jack mold; he postures convincingly and has a badass in-your-face stare but in the final set-to he’s knocked out with a single blow… only to awaken when the central mystery has been solved in his favor.  Of Cherokee-Choctaw blood, Shanks played Dan Haggerty’s Opie amanuensis for 36 episodes of the TV series THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS.  The Illinois native (literally) has since played First Americans in a number of prestigious films for big screens and little but he’s worth mentioning in this discussion because of his connection to one of the most successful horror franchises of all time.  The 6′ 1″ actor-stunt man filled the coveralls of Michael Myers, the indestructible, indefatigable Illinois boogeyman in HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1989).  Was Shanks able to imbue the “character” with any notable Native nuance?  No… but it’s still pretty cool that there’s a real red Indian under the William Shatner mask, just as it was when Glenn Strange (an eighth generation grandchild of of Pocahontas) played the Frankenstein monster in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945) and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948).

Released in the summer of 1981, after Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING and a few weeks ahead of John Landis’ AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, Michael Wadleigh’s WOLFEN has a reputation among horror fans for being neither fish nor fowl.  A brainy lycanthrope movie without show-stopping special effects to transform man into beast, the film is nonetheless a thoughtful and engaging modern day horror film that takes the genre in a new direction while incorporating the Indian issue in some unexpected and gratifying ways.  Based on a novel by Whitley Streiber, the film begins in whodunit mode as a prominent real estate tycoon and his wife are ripped apart while frolicking in Battery Park, near a facsimile of New Amsterdam’s first windmill.  Turns out said tycoon is an heir to one of Manhattan’s founding fathers and NYPD burn-out Albert Finney is assigned to the case.  Briskly directed by Wadleigh (the only narrative feature film from the director of WOODSTOCK [1970]), WOLFEN charges ahead, peppering its plot with intriguing asides about domestic terrorism (the Twin Towers of the now-gone World Trade Center figure frequently in the mise-en-scene), immigration, assimilation and, yes, ecology.  Once again, Native Americans are suspected of committing the crimes (which branch out to include other victims), all strangely centered around a seemingly worthless patch of the South Bronx.  Finney’s character interrogates some local Natives, the sons (figuratively, if not literally) of the high steel workers who built the skyscraping peaks of New York City’s urban canyons, who turn him on to the likely culprits.

Mexican-American actor Edward James Olmos plays Eddie Holt, initially the prime suspect in the case, whom Finney’s character refers to as “the Crazy Horse of the Seventies… the only one of our local militants left alive who’s not making money off of Levis commercials.”  Having once conspired to blow up the federal building housing Peter Minuit’s original $24 deed for the sale of Manhattan island from the Canarsie Indians, Eddie is generally believed to be capable of anything.  But by 1981, we know it’s not Natives, and it is Eddie who schools the protagonist on what’s really going on.  It’s “survival of the shiftiest” as a race of beings known as the Wolfen have been driven into the shadows by urban renewal, content to sit out “the Genocide Express” that has wiped out wolves, buffalo and redskins alike, to turn American cities into the new wilderness and the most blighted areas of the grid into their hunting grounds.  “You got your technology,” Eddie tells the cops, “but you lost… you lost your senses.”

So, yeah, in some ways it’s the same old, same old New Age malarkey and WOLFEN is at its worst when a climactically enlightened Finney drones on about what eco-losers we white devils are, with only ourselves to blame for yadda yadda yadda.  The film excels, however, in how it works into an intriguing horror premise an honest depiction of our patchwork, melting pot, mosaic, slumgullion society, whose tangled skeins of faith and ideology describe in their seeming incompatibility the American condition.  This is a rare horror film about dreamers – dreamers who strive to understand, to empathize, to stay true to their ideals, to stay true to themselves, to coexist – with terror arising not in allegiance to a rote syllabus of prefab frissons but from the intersection of cultures, belief systems, appetites and lifestyle choices believed (erroneously, we hope) to be mutually exclusive.  I love how Wadleigh stages the first killings at the southern tip of Manhattan, behind the Statue of Liberty, who seems to have turned her back to the slaughter for fear of becoming involved.

The final part of this essay, a discussion of “Helpful Indians” in horror films, will appear next Friday.

Special thanks to a number of colleagues who helped with materials or observations during the writing of this piece: Paul Gaita, Stephen Bissette, C. Courtney Joyner, Bill Cooke, Kim Newman, Robert Richardson, David Konow, Craig Blamer and Howard S. Berger.

Special thanks also to my part-Shinnecock wife, Barb,  for her love and support and for giving me two blue-eyed savages.  The beat goes on.