Summary Of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

Native What?

As a Mexican immigrant to the United States, one of the aspects from the American culture that shocked me the most was the importance the society gives to race. This is not something that arose overnight; it has a background that explains why a belief in white supremacy has existed throughout the years. A way this can be seen is through the media, and one of the ethnic group that has been affected the most by this racial system, which classifies the Caucasian race as superior, is the Native American community. In particular, Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969), produced by Abraham Polonsky, shows how the white supremacist movie industry has negatively portrayed Native Americans in California.

Ever since Caucasians crossed the

108). However, the movie portrays the story as Caucasians against Native American savagery because it adds more murders to Willie Boy’s record, and at the end, the Caucasian sheriff is able to encounter Willie Boy and kill him. The main point this story implies is how wild Native Americans are even among their culture, and how they need the order established by the Caucasian community. However, facts demonstrate that Caucasians are not as guiltless as the media has portrayed them to be. White supremacy governed the state of California during the late 19th century, when the state held a campaign to exterminate Native Americans. To enforce this campaign, the state legalized the kidnapping and sale of Native American children (Horsman, 1981, p. 105). Also, the state “reimbursed Indian hunters for more than one million dollars in expenses in 1850” (Horsman, 1981, p. 105). Moreover, Native Americans in California were not only killed using gun-power, but also with infectious diseases such as malaria, cholera, syphilis, etc., upon the arrival of easterners to the west during the

Even though Theodora many times wrote in favor of Native Americans (Starn, 2004, p. 98). She still underestimated Native Americans. First, Theodora “shows a boyish, kneeling Ishi reaching out gently with two hands to a rabbit like an Indian St. Francis,” on her book cover (Starn, 2004, p. 68). In addition, in another book she wrote, she stated that Ishi had “refused to eat anything during his first days of captivity, while newspapers and eye witness accounts said that he was captured the evening before and that he ate donuts, beans, etc.,” which worsen Ishi’s image as an uncivilized Native American (Starn, 2004, p.99). Throughout the early twentieth century, it is shown through media that many Caucasians continued to enforce the ideology that other races were inferior to their own by constantly creating the image that Native Americans were naïve and