In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today. Historian Pekka Hmlinen, in his 2009 book The Comanche Empire, writes of Comanche uses of slavery during their period of dominance of the American Southwest between 17. The Comanche are a Native American nation of the Great Plains whose historic territory ranged from present-day north-central Texas, eastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma, and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. They also had vassals, with about 20 other tribes acknowledging Comanche supremacy. The Comanches controlled about 250,000 square miles, including parts of five eventual states (Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas). The Comanche and their Kiowa and Kiowa Apache allies carried out large-scale raids hundreds of miles deep into Mexico killing thousands of people and stealing hundreds of thousands of cattle and horses. When Americans began venturing west and finally brushed up against the Comancheria in the 1820s, it was an empire.
Comanche empire series#
Tahmahkera’s extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. The ComancheMexico Wars was the Mexican theater of the Comanche Wars, a series of conflicts from 1821 to 1870.
From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney’s The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity.Ĭo-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. In Cinematic Comanches, the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. This work aims to recast the history of the conquest of North America, in which Native Americans are assumed as destined to be conquered by the encroachment of European civilization, by emphasizing the considerable political and military power of various indigenous empires, such as the Great Sioux Nation and the Comanche empire. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops with the so-called fall of the Comanche empire in 1875, when Quanah Parker led Comanches onto the reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations.
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