FRAMING RACE IN THE ARIZONA BORDERLANDS: The Western Ways Apache Scouts and Sells Indian Rodeo Films

In 1940, the Tucson-based Western Ways Features Service filmedLast of the Indian Scouts, a short feature about Apache Scouts at the Buffalo Soldier army post at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. This depiction of a multicultural borderlands post captures surprising performances of indigeneity that were part of the Scouts' regular duties on post. A second Western Ways film records Native veterans at the 1945 Papago Rodeo in Sells, Arizona. The two films serve as bookends to Native Arizonans' involvement in World War II and depict notably different aspects of indigenous representation in the pre- and postwar eras, separated as they are by five years, 130 miles of Arizona terrain, and distinct cultural differences between their subjects. The Apache Scouts film is anchored in at least a century's worth of inherited tropes of Indian performance, displayed with some irony to the camera; the Papago Rodeo film reveals a postwar world in which horsemanship and military service are foregrounded and ethnicity is present but normative in the visual narrative.