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Exhibit: "Kaw-Liga"

The stoic—or "wooden"—Indian has been a central fixture among Native stereotypes. (Uh—like, there was no LANGUAGE problem?) This is Hank Williams' original version (1952), complete with tom-tom. (Charlie Pride's later version [1969] is even more histrionic & reprehensible, especially since Charlie is African-American.)

MP3 excerpt from "Kaw-Liga"
(music & lyrics: Hank Williams[1952])

Kaw-liga was a wooden Indian standing by the door--
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store--
Kaw-liga--just stood there and never let it show,
So she could never answer "yes" or "no."

He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tommy-hawk--
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped some day he'd talk--
Kaw-liga--too stubborn to ever show a sign,
Because his heart was made of knotty pine. . . .
 

Exhibit: Why does the "Injun" say "How"? (I mean, "Hau"?)

Among the many troublesome Native stereotypes in Disney's Peter Pan (1953), the worst involve that insipid tune, "What Made the Red Man Red." (Hau is Lakota for "Hello," etc., but also the crux of many an egregious Euro-American movie misunderstanding or pun.)

Exhibit: Crayola Crayons

From 1949 to 1962, Crayola's crayon choices included "Flesh," eventually renamed "Peach," as "a way of recognizing that skin comes in a variety of shades[!]." From 1958 to 1999, the "Indian Red" crayon was available, renamed "Chestnut," despite feeble disclaimers that the epithet actually referred to an oil pigment associated with India. But the ideology was obvious: there was "regular/normal" skin, and there was "red-skin."
 

Exhibit: Leave It to Beaver

America's beloved sitcom from the late 1950's and early 1960's seemed so innocuously "homey" that passing exchanges like this could fly under the radar and sound perfectly "natural" within a bourgeois discourse of saccharine domesticity [dialogue recalled from memory]: