In spite of its revisionist narrative, it would no doubt be erroneous to consider The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw to be a perfect filmic representation of Native Americans. Although the two speaking Native parts in the film were given to indigenous actors of Cree descent, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the vast majority of those involved in the movie’s creation were white, as is the case in all of the films examined in this essay. As the Ojibwa film scholar Jesse Wente notes in the 2009 documentary Reel Injun, this is problematic because white productions about Native Americans are doomed to always be made from an outsider’s perspective. Not only does this perpetuate the idea that the film industry is off limits to Native talent, it also situates indigenous people as an object the white gaze, appropriating and trivializing such sacred garments as the war bonnet (worn in The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw by Running Deer/Jonas Applegarth) and rituals such as the pow-wow for entertainment…show more content… Nevertheless, considering the extent to which the American film industry of the 1950s was preoccupied with depicting Native people as an uncivilized and malicious obstruction to human progress, it would be unreasonable to be wholly dismissive of The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw on the basis of its comparatively few
