The Indian in the Cupboard

In the mid-20th century, stories about the American West of the late 1800s—its settlers and Native Americans—were popular in books, movies, and TV shows. The romance of frontier life captured people’s imaginations in the US and elsewhere. Children played “Cowboys and Indians,” usually as armed fights between the two groups. This game focused on a specific time and place in American history, the region west of the Mississippi River and east of the California’s Sierra Nevada between the end of the US Civil War and roughly 1900. This was when white settlers, especially ranchers and their cowboy employees, began to move into Indigenous territory and claim it for themselves.

The resulting battles were immortalized in fiction, much of which put Indigenous Americans in the role of evil antagonists who try to kill the “innocent” white invaders. More recently, films and books have revised that viewpoint by introducing ideas about cruel settlers, the unfairness of their incursion, and the tragic nature of the conflict.

During the mid-20th century and beyond, small plastic toys became popular, including two-to-three-inch-tall figurines that resembled people of all types. Especially popular were soldiers and warriors. Also common were horses, cowboys, cows, settlers, and “Indians.” These plastic figurines descend from the age-old art of fashioning and painting tiny military figurines made of lead, which can be arrayed on a map or miniature landscape and used as characters in a war game. In the 21st century, this hobby is still alive, and players refer to the figurines as “lead,” though today they are made of many different materials. For most kids, however, inexpensive, mass-produced plastic figures serve a similar purpose.

Omri’s views of Indigenous Americans are shaped largely by his toys and by movie Westerns, which for many decades perpetuated simplistic views of American “Indians” (Boyd, Julia. “An Examination of Native Americans in Film and Rise of Native Filmmakers.” The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2015). Omri thus has little understanding of native groups who lived in the American East during Colonial times. He thinks all Indigenous Americans slept in tepees; Little Bear corrects him on that point. Omri gives the Iroquois a horse, which isn’t part of the man’s culture at all.

Little Bear adapts to both horse and tepee in his own way, building a longhouse that opens Omri’s eyes to the uniqueness of Iroquois and other Indigenous cultures. This inspires Omri to obtain a library book explaining many of the cultural complexities of the Iroquois people.

The Indian in the Cupboard makes it clear that the toys and movies on which children in 1980 formed their views of Indigenous Americans were seriously lacking in context, and that there is much more to Native societies than outsiders commonly believe.