Ex-Slave Exacts Vengeance in Homage to Spaghetti Westerns
There’s a sensible reason why nobody ever wanted to be an Indian
whenever we played Cowboys and Indians as kids. That’s because
the white man was invariably the hero of the Westerns on which
we’d been weaned, while the red man had always been presented as
a wild savage dismissed by the dehumanizing affirmation that,
“The only good Injun is a dead Injun.”   Sure, a few films, such
as Apaches (1973), The Sons of Great Bear (1966) and
Chingachgook: The Great Snake (1967), flipped the script by
portraying Native Americans as the good guys and the European
settlers as the bad guys. But those productions were few and far
between.  Hollywood has also promoted a set of stereotypes when
it comes to the depictions of black-white race relations during
slavery, with classics like The Birth of the Nation (1915) and
Gone with the Wind (1939) setting the tone. Consequently, most
movies have by-and-large suggested that it was a benign
institution under which docile