1926, Jan 30 – Indians decline to be Killed

          Indians don’t like to die – for the motion picture camera.

          This fact was discovered during the filming of “The Scarlet West,” a First National picture …  Frank J Carroll, who produced the picture, utilized two thousand Indians in its making and he is ready to say “never again” on the subject.

          For the Indian is too temperamental for him. The big stars of the screen are notorious for their temperament, but Carroll says they are outdone by the red man.

          One of the big sequences of the picture is that showing the historic last stand of General Custer and his soldiers. A suitable location for this scene had been found after considerable traveling, and then the producer started to rehearse the memorable battle. It was at this point that he encountered difficulty.

          Every Indian refused to ‘be killed.’ They absolutely would not agree to ‘play dead.’ It was a matter of superstition with them, for their medicine man had told them that ‘once dead, always dead,’ and they didn’t seem to prefer to give up their present existence for their ‘happy hunting ground’

          It wouldn’t do to stage a battle with only Custer’s soldiers ‘biting the dust,’ and every Indian getting away without a scar, so Carroll had to disguise white men as Indians, and they were the ones who toppled off the horses encircling the little band of troopers. – Source: The Independent Record. Jan 30, 1926. 

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Now, I read this and I thought- ummm... maybe they don't want to always be killed in movies - BECAUSE THEY WERE ALWAYS GETTING KILLED IN MOVIES!

There was actually a policy that when kids played cowboys and Indians, or books with them fighting, or movies - that the Indians had to die. I'm not kidding. I'll look around and when I find the articles, I'll post them. But it's true. 

1926, Jan 30   The Independent Record