Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn

Abstract

Abstract: “Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn ” discusses how Kiowa and Comanche actors embedded their respective material cultures in the 1920 silent film The Daughter of Dawn . Filmed in the Wichita Wildlife Refuge and featuring an all-Indigenous cast, this film is a unique entry in the canon of silent Westerns produced in Oklahoma during its nascent statehood. The author illustrates how the Kiowa and Comanche cast enacted what Michelle Raheja calls “visual sovereignty,” engaging in traditional cultural practices, both on and off camera, which were under attack by settler institutions. The performance and recording of these dynamic instances of buffalo culture, traditional dance, and Plains Indian Sign Language, which the author collectively refers to as “celluloid mobilities,” constituted an embodied refusal of settler-colonial interference in Indigenous cultural continuance.