Actors playing Plains Indians in huge feather headdresses faked versions of Lakota or Sioux to varying degrees of accuracy, or, as the 2008 documentary “Reel Injun” recounts, spoke random off-script dialogue in their own languages. In the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, cowboy westerns made the occasional half-hearted effort at realism. Early silent films had passed the buck entirely: Title cards with grunts-“Ugh!”-stood in for Native dialogue, according to Washington and Lee anthropologist Harvey Markowitz co-Įditor of a new anthology called “Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixelated Skins.” The questionable Native vocabulary of the original “Lone Ranger” was typical for a period when Hollywood used indigenous languages like warpaint or feathers to vaguely signal “Indian” without regard for geography or ethnicity. How the filmmakers handle this dilemma reveals much about Hollywood’s uneasy, evolving relationship to the languages spoken here for millennia before English. Tonto (who in the original story was Potawatomi, not Comanche) is a central figure in the Lone Ranger story at the same time, with his pidgin dialect, he represents the lamest stereotype of Hollywood Indian. Kemosabe is just part of the dubious linguistic freight involved in remaking “The Lone Ranger” for 2013.
In this summer’s version, Tonto makes his own suggestion: “Wrong brother,” he says, referring to a running joke that the Ranger’s brother would have made a better hero. Theories on kemosabe’s origin have ranged from the name of a summer camp attended by Fran Striker, the writer of the series, to an Indian-ish term for “faithful friend,” to a corruption of the Spanish phrase “quien no sabe”-he who doesn’t understand.
WHO WAS THE LONE RANGER SERIES
In a scene from the new “The Lone Ranger” movie, Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger turns to his Comanche sidekick, Johnny Depp’s Tonto, and asks a question that’s been bedeviling fans and linguists since the series first came on the radio in 1933: What does kemosabe, Tonto’s nickname for the masked man of justice, actually mean?