Lillian St. Cyr debuted on stage at age 5—and was mentioned by name in a Philadelphia newspaper review of the show. St. Cyr was Native American, born on the Nebraska Ho-Chunk reservation but sent, like many native children in the early 20th century, to an Indian boarding school. Although the Carlisle Indian School wanted to assimilate its students into White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society, as a student Cyr began to craft the persona of an Indian “princess” that served her well in the era’s traveling Wild West shows. Calling herself Red Wing, she found her way into the movies, a bit part in The White Squaw (1908), shot like many early pictures in Fort Lee, NJ.
Linda M. Waggoner did a lot of digging to reconstruct the Native actress’ story in Starring Red Wing! The Incredible Career of Lillian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star. Contemporary technology helped. Waggoner was able to scroll through hundreds of digitalized pages from early movie magazines, following clues to compile a probable yet still uncertain filmography. She ran movie ads through iPhoto facial identification softwear and “used my own facial recognition abilities to try to confirm who was who” in the cast photos.
Despite Waggoner’s tireless efforts, “presumably” and “perhaps” appear on many pages. American’s pre-Hollywood film industry remains largely a lost continent. Starring Red Wing! sheds light into the nascent western genre at a time when cowboy and Indian pictures were made back East.
By 1909 she found a small role in a Cecil B. De Mille flick starring Mary Pickford as a Native woman. Interestingly, the villains of that movie, The Mended Lute, were white and the Indians triumphed in the end. According to Starring Red Wing! St. Cyr also served as a consultant on pops and Indian customs. From 1909-1915 St. Cyr may have appeared in over 100 films, most of them short by later measures but often in key roles.
From 1911 she was in California during Hollywood’s pioneering days, when working ranches with real cowboys were just down the road. But St. Cyr’s stardom was brief. In 1915 she appeared in only two films. Waggoner explains, “She began to show her age and she had put on weight,” no longer fitting her “Indian maiden” image of a few years earlier. She lived until 1974, making handicrafts and becoming an activist in the first stirrings of Red Power.
Much of Starring Red Wing! is devoted to Ho-Chunk history, which during the 19th century became a sad chronicle of massacres, ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide and poverty. History provides the context. Whether portraying a romanticized version of Native womanhood or crafting artifacts for the tourist trade, St. Cyr found ways of turning her ethnicity (and gender) into an opportunity for financial independence. While maintaining her dignity, she knew what her white audience wanted.
