Barks' Depiction of Native Americans

[rivers]

Hello All,

I'm going to be one of those "new people" popping out of the woodwork, so ahead of time, my apologies. I've perused a couple of thread and it looks like you have a nice little community here.  I have loved Barks (and Disney comics in general) since I was about 11-12 and now I find myself in a graduate class (History and Popular Culture) where I can shoehorn my interested in Barks with my academic work. I have decided to focus on comparing Barks' depictions of Native Americans (specifically indigenous groups in North America) with other Golden Era comics. I have a few questions and I'm wondering if there's any super Barks fans that can help me out or point me in the right direction. 


As far as I have learned these are all the stories featuring "Native American" people/animals:  

"In Old California!"

"Land of Totem Poles"

"Trail Tycoon" 

"Black Wednesday"

"Mystery of the Swamp"

"Land of the Pygmy Indians"

"Canyon Cavemen"

Am I missing any other titles? Even if they are in periphery of the story, it could be helpful to me. 

I already own prints of most of them but I am missing "Trail Tycoon" (Uncle Scrooge/Grandma Duck), "Black Wednesday" (US and Donald) and "Canyon Cavemen". If anyone is willing to share a more detailed synopsis, images or details...please share them here. I don't believe either of those three have been availble in the new Carl Barks Library editions either and I have found a copy of "Trail Tycoon" on Amazon but it was over $30 dollars and I have already sunk about $100 in other books for the project so it's getting harder for me to justify purchasing more! :/ 

Any comments about Barks' depictions, etc. are welcomed. You probably wouldn't be surprised but as distrubing and discomforting as some of the images Barks created about Native Americans....they compare quite favorably and are portrayed more empathetically than in other Golden Era comics. In general, how uncomfortable do these images make you?

When I share them with my African American son, I just skip stories that I know have problematic images. That said, I am proud that he loves Barks' work! In fact, I am off to tuck him in now, we're finishing up  "A Cold Bargain" tonight! 

Thanks ahead of time 

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Trail Tycoon features Scrooge and Elvira on a wagon trail; this was originally within one of those anthology-with-a-linking-story books, with the characters visiting a somewhat magical version of Disneyland — so that within the context of the book, by wandering in the “Frontierland”, the two ducks are genuinely plunged in an authentic Wild West adventure, to scale. If one wants to remove the story from its context, it is best treated as a “historical” story, though it falls to individual preference at which point in his life Scrooge might have been on a wagon trail with Elvira at a point where he already knows her as “Grandma”.

At any rate, they encounter some attacking Native riders. Scrooge pays them in cash to leave the convoy alone, remarking, in what is certainly not his finest moment, that “money even works wonders with primitive savages”. Quoth the rider who received the payment: “This be-um first sensible gift me ever got-um from white intruders”, which would be more empowering — pidgin aside — if not for the eventual joke that justifies the story: that he had assumed Scrooge had given him a sack of buttons. But even this, I'd argue, is meant to come across as more a judgement on Scrooge and on western civilization in general; one is reminded somewhat of Bottlecaps for Tralla La. 

Lost Frontier (or “Canyon Cavemen”) doesn't actually feature Native Americans to any meaningful degree; instead, it deals with the discovery (Lost World-style) of some Neanderthal-like cavemen living in a canyon. Now alright, those are technically indigenous Americans, but they are mercifully not drawn in any way connected to actual Native Americans, they're just your usual beastly cartoon cavemen.

As for my general thoughts… 

It rather depended on the story, but most of the time it seems to me that Barks fell squarely within a sort of benevolent if vaguely patronizing attitude to Native Americans that is also in evidence in, among others, Disney's own Davy Crockett.

I'd define it as a view that is blithely uncritical of the European colonization, and has a very theme-parky idea of what Native American tribes are like, reconstructed from western yarns rather than lived experience, let alone up-to-date — but where the (silly and oversimplified) “Indian culture” is seen as something which might seem eccentric, but which the enlightened hero understands and respects. These depictions are also generally free of outright racist caricature in the sense of depicting caricatured “redskins” with cartoonish square noses and cheekbones, or otherwise of implying that they are inferior by birth to white men (…or ducks), although in a looser sense of the word "racism" they certainly parroted stereotypes bound up in the general racism against Native Americans ("talking-um like-um this-um", for example, which is all over the place in e.g. the Little Hiawatha comics, even though those use admittedly-cartoonish Native Americans as the default human characters and certainly aren't trying to depict them as mentally stunted by the standards of the main human characters of a comedic strip).

There was a way to go yet, but I feel like, yeah, this was probably the sort of position you could expect the majority of non-Native American citizens to espouse if they were decent, reasonably-progressive people without being radicals, or otherwise having a personal reason to be invested in the Native cause in particular. Barks, I say, is generally off the hook there by the standards of his time; rarely going above and beyond with it, but nowhere near the excesses of e.g. Peter Pan either. 

[rivers]

Thanks Scrooge MacDuck ! That is certainly helpful. I thought what was most interesting was that at least in some of the stories (in particular "Land of Pygmy Indians")  the ducks are the interlopers and usually the cause of the conflict. In other words, the Native Americans have a reason to be in conflict with the ducks. In many other non-Disney Golden comics, it's the standard "red savage"; their motivation is only vengeance or just outright villainy.  In "Pygmy" the nephews (the conscience of the audience) makes it clear that Scrooge is in the wrong. And I agree, Barks wasn't going to win any awards for his presentation but it was as close to "sympathetic" that it could be for the time.

Are you familiar with "Black Wednesday" at all? 

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Indeed; as I said, I think these generally fall within "Davy Crockett rules" where the native characters are a noble if "primitive" culture, which commands respect and which it is wicked to corrupt with western ways. 

Of course, while it's certainly interesting in terms of his attitude to the aesthetics of Native Americans, I don't think the Peeweegahs can quite be considered to be Native American characters on the same terms as the fellows in e.g. Trail Tycoon. They are clearly not quite human beings — I've seen them summarized as spirits of nature, fae-type beings who adopted the broad customs of the humans they were familiar with, but who are ultimately more like Smurfs than like human beings. Or, for a Barksian point of comparison, the Peeweegahs are the Northern American versions of the Menehunes (also drawn by Barks to look like mini-native Hawaiians, in their one-pane onscreen appearance!).

As concerns Black Wednesday, I'll refer you to GeoX's revue of the story on Duck Comics Revue, where he dwells for a time on the depiction of the Natives. Suffice it to say it's not one of the good ones, as Barks stories involving Natives go. Scrooge is once more the interloper, going in with intent to trick the tribe, but this story plays by Voodoo Hoodoo rules — sure, what happens to Scrooge is karmic punishment for trying to trick the natives, but this karmic punishment comes in the form of the ‘cruel savages’ roused like a nest of hornets, not in terms of the Native victims of the scam being seen as having legitimate grievances as individuals.

[Matilda]

Welcome to the forum, rivers, and best of luck on your paper! Yes, Pygmy Indians is the best of the bunch, putting the nephews on the side of the good-guy Indians and against Scrooge. You might point out for your presumably ignorant audience that the miniature size of these Indians is not a matter of dissing them in any way--that Barks consciously chose to often make the peoples the Ducks encounter smaller than the Ducks, to make the Ducks more of a menace. (I can find the quotation in the Barks interview book, if you need it.)

It would be a good idea for you to be able to get a copy of Black Wednesday, though. It's in vol 39 of the Gladstone paperback album series of Barks' stories from Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, and by putting "Carl Barks 39" into eBay's search engine I found a couple of inexpensive copies of that volume. The cover has Donald punching at a TV screen showing a boxing match. Do you know how to use the amazing fan-maintained online index of Disney comics worldwide, INDUCKS?

[rivers]

Yes, I was just digging into INDUCKS for the first time the other day. Thanks for your help, Matilda! 

[That Duckfan]

Welcome, rivers! Peter Kjelling's Barks website is anothing great resource. He has some pages on Amerinds, Indians, and Indian stories, but I don't think they're exhaustive. Note that he freely mixes South American natives (real or imagined) with Native Americans and First Nations peoples (from the north).

Some stories that might interest you:

Luck of the North features a group of Inuit. Gladstone Gander cons them into trading a rabbit's foot for a kayak. The next visitors to the village (Donald and the nephews) have to pay dearly for a kayak that turns out to be hopelessly broken.

The Seven Cities of Cibola doesn't feature any live American Indians, but does explore a lost civilization they left behind. It also features the first appearance of the idol-boulder mechanism that inspired that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (by way of another Barks story, The Prize of Pizarro).

Lost in the Andes! may be set in Peru, but it stretches the imagination of "the South" by taking Southern culture (USA) to South America (the continent) by way of Professor Rhutt Betler (har har) of the University of Burmingham, Alabama.

Kakimaw Country sees Donald become a rainmaker.

Salmon Derby features a Native American woman.

Spending Money features some Native Americans selling arrowheads at ludicrous prices to Scrooge (but they turn out to be his employees).

Gyro's Imagination Invention briefly features one on horseback.

[Matilda]

Speaking of rainmaking, the Barks-written Junior Woodchucks story Storm Dancers also represents rain dancing as A Thing according to the JW Guidebook. No actual Native Americans in sight, however.

[Matilda]

As for "how uncomfortable do these depictions make you?", I'd say, Pygmy Indians aside, very uncomfortable indeed, if I think of contemporary young children seeing them. In historical context, they are understandable but still not excusable. Merely saying "almost everyone in the dominant culture did this kind of thing" doesn't mean it's not systemic racism for which we all including Unca Carl should be held to account. I don't say he was a racist, I say the culture in which I grew up was more blithely and pervasively racist than contemporary USA culture. Racist jokes were like sexist jokes: if a person in the category being mocked expressed discomfort or anger at the stereotype, they were being oversensitive, because It Was Just a Joke.

Pygmy Indians is a more complex case. As MacDuck says, one can view the PIs as the local fairy-folk rather than as a human tribal group, though the human/fae divide is not all that clear in the comics. And their moral superiority in-universe doesn't mean they're stereotype-free. At the time of writing, I do think it likely rated as one of the more relatively enlightened uses of the Native American (or First Nations, I suppose would be the term, as they're in Canada!) image in popular culture.

One of the children I have successfully hooked on Duck comics is the son of a Native American from the Pacific Northwest, "totem poles" and all. I do not look forward to the day when he discovers Unca Carl's depictions of Northwestern Native folks. But by that time he will probably be aware of the whole phenomenon of Hollywood Injuns and the pervasiveness in mid-20th century American popular culture of primitive Indians speaking Injun-English. Not to mention the fact that I myself played "Cowboys and Indians" in my childhood, and the groups were equivalent as "good guys" and "bad guys" to "cops and robbers" (which we also played).

[Matilda]

I gave a copy of Lost in the Andes to the son of a father who is leftist/liberal like me, and he thought it was reprehensible in its representation of the natives and their relationship to the visitors. That one has never struck me as a story about silly, primitive native peoples, though--it's always felt to me like Gulliver's Travels, a clear comment on contemporary American society (and its mindless faddishness) via the invented other. The Plain Awfultonians did not seem like a depiction of actual South American Native people. There are other stories that have that: The Gilded Man and The Secret of Hondorica. Though even when Barks uses "primitive native" tropes like the acceptance of a visiting "white" man as a god, he often does give the natives the dignity of not being complete pushovers. In Hondorica they demand proof before they accept the Gander/Duck as a god; in Luck of the North they learn from being ripped off by their first visitor (Gladstone) and do not make the same mistake twice.

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Jun 15, 2020 23:26:33 GMT Matilda said:

I gave a copy of Lost in the Andes to the son of a father who is leftist/liberal like me, and he thought it was reprehensible in its representation of the natives and their relationship to the visitors. That one has never struck me as a story about silly, primitive native peoples, though--

Because the part of your brains responsible for the human capacity of contextualisation of things seems to still function, unlike for your leftist/liberal acquittance.

Also, what exactly is a correct representation of South American for a fantastic duck story? Modern south Americans? Like, Donald goes to Perù and finds regular people going to the grocery store and walking their dogs... and that's it? Or was your friend expecting a historic representation of ancient South American civilisation, half naked people hunting all the time and now and then making some human sacrifice?
I don't get some people sometimes. You put in front of 'em some greatest piece of American literature and they see reprehensible representations. Bah. 

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Jun 15, 2020 23:26:33 GMT Matilda said:

I gave a copy of Lost in the Andes to the son of a father who is leftist/liberal like me, and he thought it was reprehensible in its representation of the natives and their relationship to the visitors. That one has never struck me as a story about silly, primitive native peoples, though--it's always felt to me like Gulliver's Travels, a clear comment on contemporary American society (and its mindless faddishness) via the invented other. The Plain Awfultonians did not seem like a depiction of actual South American Native people. There are other stories that have that: The Gilded Man and The Secret of Hondorica. Though even when Barks uses "primitive native" tropes like the acceptance of a visiting "white" man as a god, he often does give the natives the dignity of not being complete pushovers. In Hondorica they demand proof before they accept the Gander/Duck as a god; in Luck of the North they learn from being ripped off by their first visitor (Gladstone) and do not make the same mistake twice.

Ahm… thinking about it, I think you do have to grant to your acquaintance that there's a bit of that. That is to say, Barks is using the broad idea of “native people who are in a naïve state-of-nature ready to be influenced in bad or good by the White Man” only because it makes them perfect to use for Jonathan Swift-esque satire of the contemporary U.S.A. — but that does not mean the basic trope isn't a little sketchy. Especially in The Gilded Man, I would argue. El Dorado in that character isn't a character with agency, he's a video game boss. 

But all the same, while I do see what your acquaintance saw, it's only there in trace amounts. If he balks at that, I fear he will be unable to enjoy any non-Native-written story involving Native Americans from before 2010 or so. And I suppose a militant anti-racist might say, “well, good. Throw out the whole rotten lot.” But unless you're that radical, the fact that no mainstream 1950's American comic book is going to be quite free of prejudice is something one just has to accept and move on from.

Speaking of which—

Jun 16, 2020 1:38:43 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Also, what exactly is a correct representation of South American for a fantastic duck story? Modern south Americans? Like, Donald goes to Perù and finds regular people going to the grocery store and walking their dogs... and that's it? Or was your friend expecting a historic representation of ancient South American civilisation, half naked people hunting all the time and now and then making some human sacrifice? 

—I think you're being a bit deliberately difficult here. What such people ostensibly want is for South American populations to be treated as equals to the Americans, rather than a mirror to them. When the Ducks travel to Italy or Germany, it isn't so that the locals can use as caricatured Others to use in a satire of American vices — rather, it just adds a bit of local colour but the individuals involved are treated first and foremost as just people. 

It's also quite a bizarre view of Pre-Columbian civilizations you must hold. There's no great love lost between me and the “human sacrifices” bit, of course, but… first, they weren't “ancient” civilizations, they were medieval at the earliest. It's funny how people keep getting that wrong; I get why — Pyramids, High Priests, God-Kings, the aesthetics are very Egyptian, aren't they? — but the Incan Empire rose to prominence in the 12th century and its golden age was between 1430 and 1540. And second, they were very much civilizations, starting with the fact that they had large states rather than isolated communities, that their life revolved around agriculture, that they had sophisticated architecture, even administrative systems. You seem to be picturing “half-naked hunter-gatherers” and that is not it at all.

Certainly in some respects the Incas, Aztecs or Mayas were morally abhorrent by our standards, and their technology was less advanced than that of their European contemporaries, but there is little more than 16th-century Spanish propaganda to support the idea that they were just so many uncivilized cavemen as you seem to believe.

And…

Jun 16, 2020 1:38:43 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Because the part of your brains responsible for the human capacity of contextualisation of things seems to still function, unlike for your leftist/liberal acquittance.

…look, political discourse on the Internet is always a gamble. We knew the risks going in. But I expected better from this community. Polite disagreement should always be permitted, but suggesting that leftists and liberals are automatically cerebrally-impaired seemed like the sort of partisan nastiness that we want to keep the heck away from if we are to allow ourselves to discuss the more sensitive aspects of Disney comics. Discussing Barks's treatment of Native American characters and how it well fared for something of its time is something we should be able to discuss on a well-rounded Disney Comics Forum, and I don't see how we can do that if you're going to insult people for disagreeing with you. 

[That Duckfan]

Barks' work in particular is classic orientalism. I think that's something to keep in mind when reviewing Barks stories. He liked to draw on exotic elements to make his adventures more appealing, as was common in his time. The depiction of these oriental/non-Western elements is not the object of Barks' story, the way a racist caricature in a cartoon exists solely to make fun that racial stereotype. Rather, Barks' depictions are generally subject to the story he sets out to tell. That's why they're changeable. You can't tell Barks' ideas about Native Americans from his stories in this way.
There is an element of interchangeability between the exotic peoples in Barks stories -- the area or culture or landscape is often essential to the story, yes, but in principle there's no difference between Barks' depiction of Inuit in Luck of the North and his depiction of ancient Persians a year later in Ancient Persia. They both provide a certain comic role in a story that's not about them.

You can see this in stories where Barks re-uses story elements, such as the salesman stories: Salesman Donald (WDC 39), Land of the Totem Poles (FC 250), and City of the Golden Roofs (US 20). In each story, Donald wants to show that he's the better salesman. In the first story, Donald is selling egg-beaters around Duckburg/Burbank, until I crosses paths with a stubborn hermit. The hermit type reappears in the second story, where Donald and the nephews are selling a steam organ and soap, respectively, in the Pacific Northwest. The steam organ turns into a hanger heater for the third story, where Donald and Scrooge go to Indochina. To whom they're selling is tied to the story, but interchangeable overall.

My problem from a modern perspective is that the Native Americans rarely have any agency. I believe that nobody has the right to be spared in comedy, but you have to give characters something kind of motivation before they can get their comeuppance, and Barks' indigenous peoples are too often simple background fodder. Barks was extremely capable having fortune turn on a dime, and he really knows how to humanize a character if he wants to (In Old California! is arguably the epitome of that).
But he was a man of his time. He rarely traveled much, visiting a foreign country for the first time when he was 93. He got everything from National Geographic, not from life.

I find it difficult to enjoy stories where the Native Americans are nothing more than dumb savages, such as Land of the Totem Poles. You could argue that Barks' Duckburg was just as impulsive at times, which is fair, but doing it to a specificially created other carries a punch of a very different kind.
Land of the Pygmy Indians has a different thing going (Scrooge MacDuck's comparision with the Menehunes is very apt), but I don't feel 100% comfortable about them either. They're a bit too "Magical Negro" for me. Like there's some big lesson we can learn from Native Americans, to become one with nature again after we white people have been corrupted by capitalism, all that guff. Because they're not semi-fantastical creatures, it straddles the line for me, but I'm entirely certain this is the way to go. There's still an layer of cultural fetishization underneath that stops them from being fully autonomous.

[rivers]

Everyone's input has been great and given me something to think about for the paper. I really didn't know what to expect when I came here but I think I will stick around for awhile.

As That Duckfan stated above there's this general infantilization that goes on with these depictions that robs the natives of their agency. Just as they are usually the victims of the ducks (Western culture) they are victims to the plot....they are reactive, and are not fully realized as "humans". I was originally going to write about Barks' depiction of non-white foreigners but it felt way too un-focused but before I gave that up, I had mapped non-white foreigners into four lens that Barks used, in which multiple lens could apply in any given story. Basically, there was the Naïve Natives, the Villains, the Idiots or Savages. So you take a story like "Land of Totem Poles" and Barks applied the Idiot and Savage lens, etc. 

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Jun 16, 2020 11:04:03 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Jun 15, 2020 23:26:33 GMT Matilda said:

Jun 16, 2020 1:38:43 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Because the part of your brains responsible for the human capacity of contextualisation of things seems to still function, unlike for your leftist/liberal acquittance.

…look, political discourse on the Internet is always a gamble. We knew the risks going in. But I expected better from this community. Polite disagreement should always be permitted, but suggesting that leftists and liberals are automatically cerebrally-impaired seemed like the sort of partisan nastiness that we want to keep the heck away from if we are to allow ourselves to discuss the more sensitive aspects of Disney comics. 

I am a leftist/liberal, and I don't think myself as a cerebrally-impaired. As I don't think Matilda is neither (the very content of my quote here above), and she also describes herself as leftist/liberal. So I really don't know what you are talking about.

And it goes without saying that I do not literally believe that the specific acquittance of hers that she was referring to is cerebrally-impaired. It was a hyperbole to point out that some people are clearly unable to properly contextualise things. In this specific case, a father of children that fails in seeing what Lost in the andes really is about, with an attitude that goes dangerously close to functional illitteracy, since clearly there is only one Souther American depicted in that story- the guy that gives the ducks directions - and all the square headed people is a totally different narrative matter.