Buffalo Bill & Wild West Shows
The theme of “Wild West” is one that has been coined for entertainment purposes for over one hundred years. The origin of this phrase dates back to 1883 with the creation of the first Wild West show by William “Buffalo Bill” Fredrick Cody. Cody was given the name Buffalo Bill because in a little over a year and a half, he had hunted and killed over 4,820 buffalo. He created the first Wild West show and titled it “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” He subsequently spent years performing this show with various groups of people, including a group of Lakota people who were less than thrilled about Cody’s take on entrepreneurship. Cody eventually decided that since his “Wild West” show was so popular, he would film a movie titled The Indian Wars, where he would enlist the help of the U.S. army and a large group of Lakota people to help him film and act out his vision. He became so enthralled with the accuracy of the movie that he insisted the reenactment of the battle of Wounded Knee be filmed on the actual battle site. This was incredibly problematic as the battlefield was now a mass grave of natives who had not survived the fight, and many of the native people Cody had recruited refused to participate if this was to be the filming site. “Buffalo Bill” decided that the best way around this little “bump in the road” was to coerce and bribe the Lakota people into filming on site. The Lakota actors were also quite unhappy about the portrayal of the battle. Rather than depicting the actual massacre that had occurred at Wounded Knee, Cody characterized the event as a fair and dangerous battle with losses on both sides and, of course, a colonizer victory. (Deloria, Phillip)
Cody’s movie was not the first, nor the last example of the metaphorical trampling of native culture in the “Wild West.” These shows continued long after “Buffalo Bill” had died, and some are still active today, as seen for example in THIS video.
Depictions of Native culture are largely conducted by white people. This is an issue for many reasons, the first being that it is not the place of outsiders to dictate how Indigenous cultures are shared. Since the founding of this country, white people as a whole have been extracting the culture and livelihood of Native people and putting it on display either as a warning to non-white people, for example the idea of scalping in the 1800s, or using it as an attraction for profit, such as Wild West shows. These depictions are directly harmful to Native people because not only have they often been excluded from the conversation around their own culture, but they have been massacred for centuries because of it. Putting these atrocities on display in often barbaric manners creates a cycle of trauma and appropriation with no sympathy or retribution for those represented.