For many years, as a Crow Indian, I could not grasp the idea that white men held love for any woman. I had to talk myself into the belief over a period of decades. You see, outside of the worlds of the dominant culture the view of them is nothing akin to what they like to believe. John Wayne may have been a great movie star and movie symbol of rugged manhood, but he was to us Indians and Blacks the boogey man in our stories from our parents and grandparents. He was the 'what not to do' and the 'who not to be' character.
We watched his movies willingly, but our parents' words were instructing us to pay attention to the illusions and not fall into the dream of how whites wanted us to remember them during their wars on our people! When I became a police man my mother used the spectre of John Wayne to destroy my machismo!
Anyway, this photo is striking! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (Dawn Wolf) 5/19/17
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| John Wayne & Robert Mitchum with their Mothers on the set of El Dorado. |
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