Leonard Nimoy was one of the most beloved television actors of the 20th century, but despite growing up the son of Jewish immigrants in the Ukraine, his career predates Star Trek. He also admitted this in interviews over the years. Days of playing Native American characters. Among other instances of “blushing,” he played a Comanche warrior on the TV show “Tate,” and a character named Chief Blackhawk in the film “The Old Overland Trail,” in which he played a character named Chief Black Hawk, a man killed in an incident by a white friend. He played the role of a mysterious native who seeks justice. An episode of the popular show “Gunsmoke.”
Nimoy spoke fondly of his role on Gunsmoke in an interview. american television archives Back in 2000 (he passed away in 2015). The actor recalled meeting James Arness, star of the long-running Western series, many years ago when they were both in the same troupe. Although Nimoy eventually joined the military, he continued to keep in touch with Arness, who told him one day that he had been cast as the lead role in the television version of the popular radio show Gunsmoke. Nimoy made several appearances on the show over the years, but his most memorable was his final appearance in 1966…and the most controversial today.
“Guest starring on ‘Gunsmoke’ was the last job I did right before I started filming ‘Star Trek,'” Nimoy explained in a retrospective interview. “I had already been in the Star Trek pilot and was hired to play an Indian character in this story.” Specifically, Nimoy played a man named John Walking Fox, who was cast in season 11. He earned his own episode title, “The Treasure of John Walking Fox.” once nimoy told PBS He said he did the show while waiting to hear whether Star Trek would eventually be picked up after the pilot failed, and praised the episode’s “clever” script by Clyde Ware. But looking back decades later, this story seems more misguided and guilty of racial stereotypes than it is clever.
Nimoy played the mysterious Native American John Walking Fox.
“The story, as I recall, was about an Indian fur trapper who was very close to a white man who was doing the same thing and would often go hunting with him,” Nimoy said. told TV Archive. The white man ultimately died in the confrontation with the broker, but according to the actor, “There was something about this friend of John Walking Fox that said there was no room for justice.” The indigenous character saves the day by paying for his friend’s funeral, and eventually orchestrates an internal conflict between the town’s criminals (including his friend’s killer) by pretending to have a gold treasure. did. The culprit was eventually killed in a dispute over John’s treasure. “There’s no treasure, but he built this story,” Nimoy said. “So this is a kind of ironic way of achieving social justice.”
Social justice is an ironic word to use here. As early as the 1960s, many Native American activists were fighting for recognition and equity, all the while non-Native people were being portrayed as cartoon versions of themselves on television. Nimoy told PBS, “This character is [of John Walking Fox] It was designed to be enigmatic and shares some traits with Star Trek hero Spock. This, of course, plays into the stereotype of mysterious, stoic natives that was prevalent in the Western genre at the time (read more about this here). While not particularly shocking, what Nimoy said about being typecast as a Native American was, “I’ve played some Indians before. “I think it’s the most important role I’ve ever had for an Indian,” Nimoy told PBS in the 2010s, “and most of them weren’t that significant.”
The actor had a problematic attitude when discussing Indigenous roles.
Looking back decades later, one might think Nimoy would have a better understanding of why it is misleading to talk about playing Native American roles as if he were calling for better ethnic representation on screen. No, but Nimoy never seems to have come to that realization. In Abigail Pobegrin’s book Star of David, Nimoy speaks even more harshly about being stereotyped into racial roles that didn’t fit him.According to the Atlantic). “Guys like me were playing all the ethnic roles, usually the heavyweights, the bad Mexicans, the bad Italians,” Nimoy explained. “And those were jobs that I took and that I was happy to get for a long time. I played Indians in Westerns many times.”
Disturbingly, Nimoy even claims in the book that the first Native American role he ever accepted was one that a Native American turned down because the Indian character was too irredeemably bad. There is. But he didn’t mind the poor presentation, because, as he said, “I was happy to get the job, thank you very much.” This is a heart-wrenching, upsetting story, presented as light-hearted. This is because it sounds like the scriptwriters of the project in question ignored the legitimate concerns of the Indigenous actors who originally offered the project, choosing instead to leave the script as is and give the job to a non-Indigenous man. It’s heartbreaking. Nimoy also positioned this unknown Indigenous actor as ungrateful for what he was given, rather than as a brave person standing up against the harmful and reductive stereotypes that dominated the industry at the time, which is frustrating. is. Essentially, this story is, in a nutshell, everything that was wrong with Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans in the 20th century.
Hollywood cast few Native American actors for decades
I wish there was a “but” at the end of this story, or that this deeply beloved and talented actor would later in life find himself actively preventing Native actors from getting roles. I wish there had been a moment when I felt closer to Jesus, like when I realized that I was. If it exists, it’s not mentioned in any interviews I’ve found. Years before his death, Nimoy spoke positively to PBS about getting Native American roles. Although the actor is guilty of his own actions, he was also part of a larger racist system. In Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Martha Kleipe de Montaño’s 1998 book, Native American Yearbook: A Portrait of Today’s Native Americans, the authors list a wide range of non-Native actors who have played Native roles. There is a list but it is incomplete. “Never before has a group been so misrepresented in so many movies for so long,” they wrote. “Many Indians feel that indigenous actors occupy a single niche in casting because, until recently, Indians were rarely cast in Indian roles. An Indian star got a major Indian role.”
Of course, Nimoy’s name is also on the list. However, Gunsmoke appears to be one of the last times the actor played a Native American on screen. Star Trek quickly became popular, his name became famous, and his habit of taking on Native American roles with impunity became a thing of the past. In 2011, the actor made a joke. wall street journal We thought it made sense to move from one classified role to another. He worked on Westerns and “most of the time I played Indians,” he told the outlet. ”[So,] Naturally, when I got interested in science fiction, I had to play an alien. ”
