The (Un)Covered Wagon: An Arapaho Filmmaker Unpacks the Complexities of an Early Western

Filmmaker Missy Whiteman and her family have a complicated relationship to The Covered Wagon, a 1923 silent film considered one of the first westerns: it’s deeply racist in its stereotyped depictions of Native people, yet it’s a source of pride among her Northern Arapaho people, because—thanks to casting by Tim McCoy, a respected figure at the time for his sensitive (and, in this case, historic) attention to representation of Indigenous people in Hollywood—many people in the community appeared as extras. As guest curator of INDIgenesis: GEN2, the Walker’s recurring Indigenous film festival, she selected the film for opening night, where it will be recontextualized through an original contemporary score performed live by Anishinaabe musician Michael Wilson (which incorporates recordings of traditional Arapaho songs), cast members’ stories, and a presentation of historic photos shared by her father, artist and former Walker Education staffer Ernest Whiteman. The photos offer a frame for her understanding of the legacy of her people, her family history, and her work as a media educator and filmmaker today. Here, she shares these images along with music, text, and audio from a recent conversation with her father about The Covered Wagonand its meaning then and now.

When I was a small child my father, Ernest Whiteman, kept a brown attache case filled with photographs of our Arapaho relations, reaching back to my great-grandfather, Charlie Whiteman, from whom my family’s last name originated. Through sepia-toned archival photographs, my father taught me who I am as an Hiinono (Arapaho), and I learned the stories of the people who came before. Through seeing the faces of my great-grandparents, I came to better understand my lineage.

Jon Whiteman with other students at St. Stephen’s Catholic Boarding School, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

As my life moved on, I became interested in documenting my family’s history and the effects of colonization and historical trauma. This helps me, but it also helps other people understand how experiences such as boarding school, Spiritual Prohibition in the United States, and even media have shaped how we see ourselves today.

Missy Whiteman: What does Spiritual Prohibition mean for people who don’t know what it is? Where does it come from and why?

Ernest Whiteman: Well, I don’t really know exactly if it was made into a law, but these were laws that were understood and particularly reinforced by boarding schools. Well, spiritual prohibition is probably one of the things that were set out to eliminate all of our ways. Particularly the language, the loss of language, the loss of ceremony, the loss of family, the loss of spiritual ways. A lot of those ways were ways that were inflicted on us and taught to us. We were punished in the schools for these things. I don’t know how severely people were punished outside of schools for doing these things, but I know they played an important role in educating us and putting fear factor into us and teaching us that these are all things that we’re doing are wrong.

One of the most intriguing stories in our photographs are related to The Covered Wagon, a silent film produced in 1923 and directed by James Cruze. How this connects to my history today can only be explained as fortuitous.

Poster for The Covered Wagon

This stereotypical and at times racist film—which tells the story of “How the West Was Won” from a one-sided perspective—was one of the first westerns to be produced by the Hollywood film industry. What I find to be most fascinating is the fact that my ancestors had a huge role in helping to produce this film, due in large part to the relationship of Tim McCoy to Arapaho people. Without this relationship, I feel that this film would not have the richness of natives people representing themselves.

Missy Whiteman: The Covered Wagon is a very racist film, and very stereotypical. That’s something that, to this day, if you look at the movie Wind River, and you look at some of the cultural inaccuracies that were in that movie about our Arapaho people, but most importantly the amount of violence in these movies, then look at this film, the Tim McCoy film, and the fact that a lot of us are really, even to this day, we’re proud of our family for being a part of this film for a lot of different reasons: Why is that complexity there?

Ernest Whiteman: My uncle Mike, who was a young man then, he talked about how they went out to California and how they lived on set, but it was also kind of a fine line of being a celebrity and being a novelty, because he was a young boy and he was taken care of. So he kind of romanticized elements of the whole thing, being in camp there and being in the movies and going to events and people feeding you. They all were flattered, and sometimes when this flattery gets to be too much, then we don’t even see it. We don’t see what the intent is of being used, sometimes. It was a double-edged sword in the fact that they were being exploited, but they were also very proud of their culture and how they lived.

Mike Whiteman on location during filming of The Covered Wagon. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

I don’t think that Tim McCoy in any way was—now I could be wrong—utilizing the people for his benefit. Because I have read memoirs of him. I have read articles by him. I have read articles about him. He was very sincere. He was very, very well known by all the Native people that went to Hollywood with him. Now, I don’t know if they were all that happy, all of the people that were there in the movies, because not everybody played a role. Everybody was an extra. So if you’re an extra, you’re not really visible. You’re just part of a crowd.

Northern Arapaho extras in Hollywood for The Covered Wagon, circa 1920. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

It’s going to be a perpetual thing. It’s like, whenever you go to a movie, and you watch a movie on war, you watch a movie on fighting, there’s always going to be a good guy, and there’s always going to be a bad guy, and you’re always going to see them fighting. If you look at the history of Western cowboy and Indian movies, the Natives were the bad guys. That’s the way they have portrayed Native people in movies, that we have been the bad guy. We have been the one that has stopped. We have been the ones that have held back progress. We’re the ones that prevented all this stuff. So we were killed. We were sought after, we were who the government or who the military was trying to overthrow.

Northern Arapaho Men and Tim McCoy on the location of The Covered Wagon, circa 1920. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

Missy Whiteman: For us, The Covered Wagon is a little more complex because of Charlie Whiteman, and even our last name, and where that comes from, and even the important part of his position in our tribal community, or in our nation, and what that was and what that meant. Especially in this film, an Indian, a white guy playing an Indian playing an Indian. A white man playing an Indian who’s actually a white man, but who is really an Indian. So that’s pretty complex.

Ernest Whiteman: That’s very complex. Think about it.

Missy Whiteman: Can you tell us how Charlie came to our people, and also what his role became once things were more colonized, especially in the government, and even his role in the Ghost Dance?

Ernest Whiteman: Okay. Some of the earliest things that were told to me were that Charlie, this white man, my great grandfather, was captured, and he was captured by the Utes, the Ute Indians of Utah, the native people from Utah. Somewhere, when he was quite young, he was either traded or given to the Arapahos, probably when he was a child or a baby because he spoke very little English. His English was not very good. He spoke Arapaho. He was fluent in Arapaho. He became a leader. He became a leader with the people, not only in politics but also in spirituality. He became an important man in the Sun Dance. He was very high ranking in the Sun Dance. He was a tribal chairman. He was a healer. He had connections with the Ghost Dance. Charlie Whiteman was no longer a white man when he came to the Wind River people, the Arapahos, at the time. He was an Arapaho. He lived his whole life, and that’s who he was, Charlie Whiteman.

Charlie Whiteman, namesake of the Whiteman family and Missy Whiteman’s great-great-grandfather. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

Missy Whiteman: Yes. So I wonder what that has to do with the Ghost Dance. If that has anything to do with the Ghost Dance and when that was and if because of what the government feared.

Ernest Whiteman: If you realize, the Ghost Dance was not understood by dominant culture in the sense that they thought that it was a military movement against the United States Government but in all due respect, the Ghost Dance was a religious movement and it was nonviolent and it was to restore things that had been lost or taken from, particularly our land, our animals, and our people. That they would all come back. Everything would be returned to normal if we did this dance.

And so this Ghost Dance spread like wildfire across the West, and the government became fearful when it started reaching a lot of the Plains tribes, because they had just gone through a lot of wars with them and they thought that this was gonna be a resurgence or an uprising. If you looked at Standing Rock. That was a spiritual movement, too. It was not a military movement. We weren’t trying to overthrow the government. We had no weapons. It’s the same way with the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance was the same way.

Standing L–R: Charlie Whiteman (Arapaho), Rising Buffalo (Arapaho), Red Pipe (Arapaho), William Penn (Arapaho), George Shake Spear (Arapaho), Night Horse (Arapaho), Painted Wolf (Arapaho), Little Ant (Arapaho), Goes In Lodge (Arapaho). Sitting: Wovoka (aka The Cutter, aka Big Rumbling Belly, aka Jack Wilson: Paiute), circa 1923. Photo courtesy Ernest Whiteman

Flash forward to today: I would have never imagined that this movie, The Covered Wagon, could also be a channel for healing and also a means to honor my ancestors. The opening night of INDIgenesis, The Covered Wagon: Recontextualized, will change this narrative and give new meaning to this film through electronic music, sampling, and other surprising elements to their soundscape, which will be performed live by Michael Wilson (Anishinaabe), a musician who also scored The Coyote Way and live-scored (with Jonathan Ford) The Daughter of Dawn (scored with Jonathan Ford), two films featured in INDIgenesis 2017.

In this way, we are taking our identity in the film back by naming the nameless faces in the crowd and giving them a new life and connection to the present day. Today, as Indigenous filmmakers, we must stand in the face of what has deeply hurt, oppressed, and demonized our culture, religion, and identity for generations. We stand together knowing that our ancestors stand with us and behind us as we heal through the creative process, change the way films are produced, change the industry, and take back our identity in mainstream media.

The vision for INDIgenesis: GEN2 is to create a platform for the voices of the unseen and most misrepresented people of America. To tell the stories of past and future that awaken and inspire all audiences. This year’s series is dedicated to the future generation of youth and emerging filmmakers.

Listen: Excerpt from Michael Wilson’s score for Recontextualized: The Covered Wagon