Tonto & The Lone Ranger

In recent years rebooting old and forgotten franchises and movies has been all the rage. Some of these films do incredible at the box office, while others tend to fall rather flat. One example of a redoing of an old property was the 2013 Disney film The Lone Ranger. The original Lone Ranger was a 1920’s radio program that was then made into a 1950’s TV show. Both follow the adventures of the Lone Ranger and his Native American sidekick and tracker Tonto.  Now back in the 20’s and 50’s the depiction of Tonto was what helped the media stereotypes of Native Americans today.  He spoke in the deep voiced broken English that most cliché native characters now do, and even used the term kemosabe to the point it became part of the American vocabulary.  And the idea that the name Tonto given to the character on the shows is derived from the Spanish word for stupid, some also say kemosabe is a Native American name for stupid, but no one can actually seem to figure out where it came from.[1]

But in the new Disney reboot there was to be none of these derogatory ideals attached to the new Tonto. But this new Tonto was played by, Johnny Depp..?    Johnny Depp as I’m sure many of you may know is not Native American however. And this is an example of Native Americans being portrayed by people not of their race in Hollywood. (The original Tonto was portrayed by Jay Silverheels, a First Nation actor).[2] In the new reboot the character of Tonto is still not very progressive,  despite the studio’s attempt to do so. [3]  The blame for this though is not really falling on Johnny Depp as an actor, as Kevin Gover (Pawnee) is the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, states “”The Lone Ranger” should be understood simply as a vehicle for Johnny Depp to create an iconic character and carry a summer blockbuster, no more, no less.” [4]. The actor is not the problem but, it’s the material itself.

The material itself is just from a different time, a time when sadly it was a lot more acceptable in American society to be racist and derogatory towards minorities.  It’s hard to take material that was written in such a different time and adopt it to a modern narrative, especially when a derogatory character was such a big part of it.  As Aisha Harris says “”Depp’sattempt to be a ‘warrior’ role modelto all the American Indian kids lucky enough to watch him save the day fails—and for the simple reason that the original material is too entrenched in an essentially racist ideology.” [3] And these sort of racist quirks then get applied to the whole of a the population because Tonto is one of the few native characters in pop culture so “Tonto is less of an individual character than he is a key piece of the popular image of a large and diverse population” [3], says Adrienne Keene of Native Appropriations.  The material itself being potentially to racist The depiction of natives in this sense in Hollywood and other forms of pop culture shows how not only America is able to accept the stereotypes that have been created but also how entrenched they’ve become in our culture, looking back to kemosabe as an example.  So in the end, the movie of the Lone Ranger may have been a cause for debate about a non Indian actor playing an Indian with potentially racist quirks in a reboot no-one really was asking for. But there is work being done to help fight these sort of stereotypes that continue to occur in Hollywood “The work of reforming the portrayal of Indians in the movies remains where it has long been: with the Indian actors and film-makers who labor—largely anonymously for the moment—to make movies that accurately portray Indians as they were and are.”[4]

[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/26/kemosabe_meaning_origin_and_history_of_tonto_s_word_in_lone_ranger.html

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Silverheels

[3]http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/07/08/real-problem-lone-ranger-movie-its-racism-stupid-150323

[4]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/johnny-depps-tonto-isnt-offensive-just-weird-says-the-director-of-the-american-indian-museum-7999455/?no-ist