Scholarship on the sympathetic western has rightly presumed the studio system to be a non-Indigenous project. Most Indigenous actors had little power to influence the scripts they were hired to perform (if they had any lines at all) or the social practices of production itself. While some directors claimed to have Indigenous heritage, such as James Cruze and Victor Fleming, most such stories are not only apocryphal but also conflate two related but distinct forms of Indigenous identity: Indigenous heritage (a Native American ancestor) and tribal enrollment—that is, citizenship in a specific Indigenous nation. Wallace W. Fox and his brothers Finis Fox and Edwin Carewe (stage name for Jay Fox)—citizens of the Chickasaw Nation—are among the very few Native people to occupy positions of creative control in Hollywood, working behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Like his older brothers, Wallace Fox was born and raised in the Chickasaw Nation in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) just before the transition to statehood, and along with their father Frank M. Fox, all three brothers are named and identified as Chickasaw on the 1907 “Final Rolls of the Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory,” or Dawes Rolls. With their intermarried family origins—enrolled members of the Chickasaw Nation but with white settler ancestry as well—the brothers could have “passed” as white, but chose not to hide their Chickasaw identities. Finis Fox had been active in the Chickasaw legislature before moving to Los Angeles, and Edwin Carewe, especially, publicized his Chickasaw heritage as part of his marketing campaign for his 1928 film adaptation of Ramona, about California settlement and injustices towards Native Nations. Yet the brothers’ identities were neither accomplished facts nor stable platforms but rather were produced in contexts of instability, coming out of the multiple displacements of settler immigration, Chickasaw Removal, and frequent family relocations that ultimately led them to the multi-ethnic metropole of Los Angeles.

While Fox directed films across a number of genres, his work for Universal in the mid-1940s included many B-western films, a few of which involve or directly address “Indian subjects.” This chapter takes up two such films, Wild Beauty and Gun Town, both 1946, asking whether and how the post-WWII B-film industry, with its highly commercialized organizational constraints, offered a space for progressive (though not necessarily transgressive) work for those who could wield the conventions of the genre.