a man named cody with the iron eyes
stood by the freeway and started to cry
shareBoth his parents were Italian.
sharei wonder was there ever any controversy, or did people not care cause his message was good?
shareHE STARTED PLAYING THE CHARACTER IN A BOB HOPE FLICK IN THE 40S...BECAME HIS THING...WE ALWAYS CLAIMED TO BE NATIVE AMERICAN,RIGHT UP UNTIL HIS DEATH...DENIED ANY CLAIM OTHERWISE,EVEN BY HIS SISTER...IT WOULDN'T WORK THESE DAYS,BUT THAT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME.
shareI was surprised to learn a few years ago he was really Sicilian but they say he really adopted the Native American way of life.
shareIt wasn't until the mid-1990s (by which time Cody was retired from acting) that a journalist tracked down his Sicilian-American relatives and reported Cody's upbringing in an immigrant household. Until then it seems the world at large had no idea Cody had fabricated his early life to claim he was indigenous.
Claiming to be the real deal clearly helped his acting career and his public persona (e.g. he got to meet Presidents Carter and Reagan, as well as Pope John Paul II.) But he also seemed to *want* to be Native American ever since childhood. Hollywood gave him the opportunity to embrace a fictional version of his life as well as make a living off of it. His wife was actually indigenous, as were their adopted children, and he certainly did help promote Native American organizations and causes. Yet he clearly lied and benefited from American pop culture's fascination with the "vanishing Indian."
Name a Native American by birth in the 20th century who did more to promote NA awareness than this Italian guy did.
shareAs I wrote, "he certainly did help promote Native American organizations and causes." I'm not trying to posthumously "cancel" him or whatever, just pointing to a certain ambiguity about his life.
He did do good things with his fame, but at the end of the day the closest thing America had to an unofficial representative of all that is Native American was a guy who was no more indigenous than Columbus and who lied in order to get into a position where he could "promote NA awareness."
Maybe it would have been different if a Native American had stood up and took it upon themself to take that role. You cannot say that racism of the time would not have allowed for that, because everyone thought Iron Eyes was a real Native American.
shareYes, as I said, claiming to be a "real Indian" evidently helped his career and public persona. If he had said he was an Italian-American who really, really liked Native American culture, it seems safe to say his filmography would have been shorter and his role in pop culture not nearly as significant.
I don't understand your point that, conceivably, an actual indigenous person could have obtained Cody's film and TV roles if things had been different. It doesn't change the fact that precisely because there were people in Hollywood willing to hire indigenous actors, Cody took advantage of this situation by pretending to be indigenous. Likewise I'm sure the people behind the Crying Indian ad wanted a "real Indian" in the role.
There's no contradiction between him being a liar and also doing good things. There were Native Americans who knew Cody and who felt that he deserved to be considered an honorary Native American. I think this is an understandable point of view. But there are also Native Americans who are more critical, and I think that's also understandable. Plenty of historical figures, including many actors, were flawed individuals.
The point is, that you wrote "... but at the end of the day the closest thing America had to an unofficial representative of all that is Native American was a guy who was no more indigenous than Columbus and who lied in order to get into a position where he could "promote NA awareness." as if this was some sort of scathing indictment of the systemic racism of mid-20th century America. It's not as though the directors said "Well, we need to cast this Indian role, but of course, we could never cast a real one! Let's use this fine white Italian fellow, instead." Cody was, as far as they knew, a real Native American.
There were indeed genuine Native American actors working at that time, but none of them chose to present themselves in the role of a representative, as did Cody.
I said nothing about "systemic racism." I said that Cody took advantage of Hollywood's willingness to hire Native Americans for Native American roles, not that there was a racist conspiracy to elevate him above actually indigenous actors.
If you can't see the problem with America's best-known Native American being someone who lied about being indigenous, I don't know what to tell you. As I said, it doesn't negate the good he did, but it is certainly grounds for criticism.
How is it a problem when the people who assigned him to that role had been deceived that he was a real Native, and no real Natives were interested in the job?
share.... because people were deceived by a man who claimed to be something he wasn't, and whose fame and livelihood was largely based on a lie. Do you really see nothing at all objectionable in what he did?
I don't know why you write "no real Natives were interested in the job" (I assume the "job" being the most famous living Native American.) It isn't as if "famous person" is something you fill out an application form for. Cody was a veteran Hollywood actor who ended up starring in a commercial that became incredibly popular. There were certainly figures like Russell Means who would have been willing to take Cody's stature in American pop culture (hell, Means even took up acting later in life.)
According to his autobiography ("My Life as a Hollywood Indian," pp. 268-269), a photographer from a New York ad agency had asked him to star in said commercial. Cody replied, "Tell them I know plenty of Indian actors who'd more than welcome the chance to be in a campaign like this." But the photographer later insisted Cody take the role. Thus, by Cody's own acknowledgement, an indigenous actor easily could have gotten the part.
Of course, as an actor who did a great job playing into American pop culture conventions about how "real Indians" look, dress, and behave, it isn't surprising that Cody became as famous as he did. I'm certainly not questioning his skills in that regard.
Any blame is on him, and not the society as a whole. Nobody in the business had any idea he was not a genuine Native. In any case, as you say, he himself even tried to get the agencies interested in other real Native actors.
In the end, his deception did far more to promote the image and the cause of Native Americans than to harm them. I'd be willing to bet that Native Americans are better off today in American society than they would have been in a world where Iron Eyes Cody was simply an Italian-American actor.
I can't see anything objectionable in the fact that people thought he was the real thing. Were they supposed to completely vet every actor claiming to be NA?
And I think Russell Means was way too controversial in the early 1970s due to his involvement in militant movements to have been a realistic choice for an acting role. His acting career didn't take off until much later.
I wasn't talking about "society as a whole," I'm focusing on the man himself. Nor do I dispute that he did good, as I've repeatedly noted. We're both going around in circles at this point making basically the same statements.
As for not seeing "anything objectionable in the fact that people thought he was the real thing," it depends. A common criticism is that both on and off screen he portrayed a Hollywood version of what a "real Indian" is like. This undoubtedly fascinated a lot of non-indigenous Americans and encouraged them to learn more about Native American cultures and causes, but it also contributed to portraying Natives as exotic figures who are "one with nature" and other noble savage stereotypes that annoy plenty of indigenous people because it leads to assumptions about how "real Indians" look and behave.
There were also, apparently, actual indigenous actors in 1930s-50s Hollywood who took issue. The son of one of them claimed, "While there were various stories during the many years about Iron Eyes, the image makers in Hollywood were able to dispel any criticism of him. Instead those Indians who criticized Iron Eyes soon left Hollywood." (quoted in Michelle Raheja, "Reservation Reelism," p. 132) But as I've noted, there were also Native Americans (like filmmaker Bob Hicks) who knew Cody as a friend and didn't mind that he wasn't actually indigenous.
I used Means as an example of why it doesn't make sense to imply, as you did, that there weren't any Native Americans who (as you put it in an earlier post) "stood up and took it upon themself to" become the best-known Native American in the country. The fact Cody became as famous as he did was a combination of his own talent, his "inoffensive" life (working for Hollywood and Disney is evidently different from working for groups like the American Indian Movement), and of being able to star in an incredibly popular ad campaign.
he was a white savior
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