Cinematic Comanches

For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops with the so-called fall of the Comanche empire in 1875, when Quanah Parker led Comanches onto the reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches, the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity. Co-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney’s The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Tahmahkera’s extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today.    

"Extensively researched and thoroughly theorized, Cinematic Comanches seeks to answer the question of why the Comanche Nation is currently experiencing cultural resurgence. Tahmahkera finds that strength scattered throughout the 20th century, in films and elsewhere, connecting the dots of Comanche survivance from the past into the present. This powerful intervention by a Comanche about Comanches is a must-read for anyone interested in representations of Native people in America."—Liza Black, Tribal College Journal, "Media scholars, Indigenous and settler studies folks, popular culture buffs, and anyone with interests in decolonization and image sovereignty will find much here to interest and intrigue them. It is exemplary."—Jennifer L. Jenkins, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, “Exceptional. . . . Written with energy and a capacious critical sensibility, Cinematic Comanches feels like the ‘Yes, we can!’ of Indigenous film and media criticism. It is also voraciously interdisciplinary and beautifully executes some of the primary challenges of public intellectual work—to be both learned and hip, both theoretically sophisticated and accessible for undergraduates, both deeply historical and relevant to this very moment.”—Joanna Hearne, author of Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western, “Tahmahkera writes in an engaging and sometimes humorous style that is generally devoid of academic jargon, which makes it accessible to students yet sophisticated enough in its theoretical grounding to appeal to scholars of Indigenous and media studies.”—Dominique Brégent-Heald, author of Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era

Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche) is the Wick Cary Chair of Native American Cultural Studies in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms.