Narrative Mediatics and Environmental Ethics: A Historico-cultural Mise-en-intrigue in Some Native American Docudramas

Abstract The image of a stereotypical American Indian entity and the sad demise of this noble savage increasingly got normalized in the twentieth century. However, the historical and contemporary facts about American and Canadian First Nations state a different perspective. While the mediatic theoretical model of a vanishing Indian start, roughly speaking, from films like The Indian Wars Refought (1914) and the 1925 movie The Vanishing American, the existence of American Indians helps us understand the implications of these and other narrative mediatics. This paper studies how the auteurs of some docudramas navigate through the mediatics of ecriture with the perspective of environmentally ethical mise-en-intrigue about the Native Americans. Using the theoretical nexus of docudrama, narrative mediatics, and environmental ethics, this paper discusses five docudramas as case studies. Tracing the trajectory of a symbiosis between a conceived idea’s writing and its media representation, this research examines how resilience and environmental ethics are recurring patterns in the mise-en-intrigue or story-making of the narrative media in selected Native American documentaries. The invoked environmental ethics in these docudramas may serve as a historically informed environmentalism for other lands and consequently aim for a balanced and sustainable future of all sorts of existence on earth.