Childhood Indians

Using race theory, film studies, colonialist and post-colonialist literature, while studying a cross-section of cinematic Indian depictions in westerns aired over the past seven decades, Raul Chavez has sought to explain how the western film genre have influenced viewers, in particular the Baby-Boomer generation of the 1950s, '60s and '70s to internalize the misrepresented movie depiction of Indians as representative of the real "Indian." These Indian depictions, his "childhood Indians," sustain the subliminally accepted white supremacist imagery that deny Natives their rightful place in American society.