Presenter: Anna Peckinpah
Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies
Oral Presentation
Major: English
In the United States alone, currently more than 183 million people play videogames. When it comes to producing cultural ideology that leads to consequential discourse and stereotypes in video games, one of the most problematic depictions of minority characters occurs with the depiction of First Nation people. Due to the closely tied correlations of cinematic film tropes to videogames, westerns and other films featuring indigenous identity inaccurately illustrate Native women and negatively impact how games depict aboriginality. Often, the harmful game portrayals follow the cinematic precedents of either the explicitly racist caricature of the ignoble savage “squaw” and/or the hyper- sexualized and fetishized “Indian princess”. With non-natives depicting Native female identity with the ideological approach of the ignoble versus noble, videogames continue the legacy of so many films and television series that bastardize the accuracy and nuanced uniqueness of each First Nation woman’s identity and history by conglomerating common tropes of westernized perceptions of “Indianness”. The only way to counteract the harm caused by such misrepresentation requires Native videogame makers to reassert their sovereignty and control over telling their history and experiences without catering to colonial desires or tropes. A careful examination will emerge on how certain cinematic narrative techniques and tropes in games affect the progression from explicitly racist and violently sexist portrayals of Native women in videogames, to a sympathetic but still sexually objectifying and inaccurate rendering of indigeneity that still relies on distorted versions of history to alleviate colonial guilt. A final critical move illustrates how Native-produced games challenge such conventions via the creation of nuanced, humanized, and thoroughly researched and authentically historic depictions of First Nation female identity and uniqueness.