IS IT BOLLOCKS?

Film Buff investigates the facts behind outlandish movie plots.

Q

In numerous Westerns, Native Americans are portrayed being able to track people or animals by putting an ear to the ground or a railroad track. Historically accurate or bollocks?

A

JOY PORTER, PROFESSOR OF INDIGENOUS HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF HULL, AUTHOR OF NATIVE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS @TREATIEDSPACES

Indigenous Americans were and still are excellent trackers – from the ‘skulking’ way of war practised in early America, through to the scouts used in WW1, to today’s ‘Shadow Wolves’, who patrol Tohono O’odham Nation land in southern Arizona and track drug smugglers and aliens using traditional methods. Members of indigenous tribes have also been used by the US government as scouts for the army right back to the American Revolution. Famously, Apache trackers tracked Geronimo in the 1890s. Indigenous trackers are still among the best in the world, tracking collectively and analysing signs wherever they find them, either from high-tech surveillance tools or the natural world.

The issue of putting your head to the ground to track is more complex. Associating that exclusively with indigenous Americans is rooted more in non-indigenous accounts from the 18th Century rather than in any recorded indigenous traditions, transposed to the dime novel and then developed as a myth in early-20th Century movies. As indigenous lands were stolen and indigenous peoples themselves displaced, they were credited in the western imagination with having mystic capabilities. Indigenous peoples were and are ‘close to the land’ in ways the non-indigenous are not, but representing them as ‘supernatural’ was part of a wider set of ideas that linked indigenous peoples to a ‘vanishing’ past, to a pre-modern reality that justified their ongoing dispossession and forced assimilation.