A Film That Wanted Peace More Than Justice

There is a moment late in Redskin when the screen quite literally grows larger. The image expands, the music swells, and the film announces that something final has been achieved. Prosperity has arrived. Conflict has been resolved. Everyone, we are told, should now feel relief.

That choice matters more than it seems.

Released in 1929, at the edge of the silent era and the beginning of sound, Redskin is a film preoccupied with resolution. It wants to smooth the fracture, to make opposing worlds fit inside a single frame. Education and tradition. Modern systems and ancient ties. White law and Native life. What it never fully confronts is who gets to define what resolution means, and who bears the cost of that definition.

The film follows Wing Foot, a Native man educated in the East, who returned home carrying a knowledge that does not translate cleanly. White society refuses him outright. His own people see him as changed, compromised, no longer fully of them. This double rejection is presented as a tragedy, but crucially, it is framed as a personal rather than a structural problem. The harm is internalized. The system remains unnamed.

From its opening passages, the film asks the viewer to sympathize, and that sympathy is sincere. But it is also tightly controlled. Wing Foot is played by white actor Richard Dix, who performs a Native identity through makeup and gesture. Today, that choice is rightly recognized as deeply problematic. It cannot be separated from the film’s meaning. The story of Native displacement is filtered through a face the industry already trusted, already understood, already owned.

At the same time, the film makes a striking visual argument. When Wing Foot is in the East, attending school and navigating white institutions, the image drains of color. Those sequences are photographed in black and white and printed in sepiatone, flattening the world into order, routine, and emotional distance. When the film returns to Native land, Technicolor floods the frame. Landscape, ceremony, dress, and movement are rendered with care and expense. This was not a financial compromise. It was an artistic decision.

Color here signals value, but not control. Native life is treated as vivid and meaningful, yet it remains contained within the realm of image and feeling. Authority lives elsewhere. The white world governs through law, ownership, and bureaucracy. The Native world is allowed beauty and depth, but not decision-making power. One determines outcomes. The other enriches the screen.

That division sharpens when oil enters the story. Wing Foot’s redemption does not come through resistance or collective self-determination. It comes through speed, paperwork, and participation in white legal systems. He races white prospectors to the claim office and wins by filing first. Justice arrives not because the system is questioned, but because it briefly works in his favor.

The implication is quiet but firm. Survival depends on learning how to operate inside structures built by others.

Even the film’s grand gestures reinforce this logic. The final six minutes were projected in Magnascope, enlarging the image at the moment of reconciliation and promised prosperity. The screen expands as if scale itself could resolve the contradiction. The audience is guided, visually and emotionally, toward closure. The film does not ask whether the ending is just. It instructs us to feel that it is.

There are reasons historians have often described Redskin as unusually sympathetic for its era. Supporting Native characters are treated seriously rather than ridiculed. The film was shot on location in Canyon de Chelly, grounding its imagery in a real and historically charged landscape. Ritual and belief are not mocked. They are presented with respect.

That sympathy is real. It is also bounded.

The film honors Native life as culture, as emotion, as spectacle. It does not imagine Native life as authority. The future it offers is one in which reconciliation occurs only after Native people successfully adapt to settler systems, not after those systems are reexamined. The care stops just short of reckoning.

Even the film’s afterlife echoes this tension. For decades, its soundtrack survived only in fragments, leaving much of the film effectively voiceless. Restoration efforts eventually recovered the missing music, making the soundtrack complete by 2016. The film now exists in its entirety, preserved by the Library of Congress, with its argument intact and available for scrutiny. What remains is not a damaged artifact but a finished statement from its time.

There is no responsible way to discuss this film without acknowledging the harm embedded in its very title and casting. The language it uses is now widely understood as offensive, and the choice to center a white actor in a Native role is not incidental. It shapes the film’s entire point of view. Naming that does not require erasure. It requires honesty.

What Redskin ultimately reveals is not cruelty but limitation. It shows how early American cinema could recognize injustice, feel discomfort about it, and still fail to imagine a future beyond colonial logic. The film reaches for reconciliation, but it confuses reassurance with equity.

Watching it now is not an exercise in condemnation. It is an exercise in attention. It asks us to consider how often sympathy is offered in place of agency, how often care is extended without surrendering control. Those patterns did not end in 1929. They simply learned new vocabulary.

The screen grows larger at the end of Redskin, inviting the audience to believe that something has been settled. What lingers, nearly a century later, is the sense that the most important questions were never allowed to enter the frame at all.

Julie Carter and Richard Dix in Redskin (1929), dir. Victor Schertzinger, Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.
Richard Dix in Redskin (1929), dir. Victor Schertzinger, Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.
Julie Carter and Richard Dix in Redskin (1929), dir. Victor Schertzinger, Paramount Famous Lasky Corp.