Turning to the television western’s familiar cowboy-Indian dichotomy and its underlying media violence, Kennedy joked that he had shifted his viewer subjectivity from settler to Indian. But his attempt to amuse the audience, New York Times columnist Frank Rich observes, “landed with a thud.”² At a time when three settler-dominated westerns—Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Have Gun Will Travel—topped television ratings, the senator’s allegiance to an indigenous “our” may have alarmed Paar’s presumably white studio audience, who spent time in their safe viewing confines each week with TV cowboy actors James Arness, Ward Bond, and Richard Boone and cinematic western icon John Wayne. While Kennedy appeared to treat his “honorary Indian” status with more amusement than honor, he did recognize television westerns’ recurring settler-versus-Indian story line and the genre’s interpellative insistence on whom to identify with: white cowboy heroes overflowing with on-screen bravado.

Kennedy “was made an honorary Indian” in at least two states during campaign stops. In Wisconsin, Paul Boller reports, “Kennedy was made honorary chieftain of an Indian tribe.” Wearing a headdress, Kennedy foreshadowed his Tonight Show line but this time among an indigenous audience: “Next time I go to the movies to see cowboys and Indians, I’ll be us.” In South Dakota he wore another headdress, this time for Lakotas.³ As Robert Burnette, former Rosebud Sioux chairman, would later recall, “When John F. Kennedy flew into Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1960, I met him at the airport and had the privilege of introducing him to the entire state. He put a war bonnet on his head, and he left it on for a few minutes. This encounter set the stage for the future.”⁴

For a presidential candidate to meet and converse with Native Peoples in Indian Country is, indeed, a rarity and can be perceived as commendable for showing, as Kennedy did, a willingness to listen to Native voters’ concerns, though the politician surely desired their votes in return. Kennedy’s stops in Indian Country most likely provided him with a stark contrast between the real-life recognizably Native and Hollywood’s fictional recognizably Indian. As Kennedy’s early primary sources for knowing Indians, film and television offered common ground for discussion between Kennedy and Native Peoples. Early in his presidency, Kennedy would connect Indians and media again in his introduction to The American Heritage Book of Indians, which he begins, “For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.”⁵ Like his campaign trail rhetoric, in which he privileged televisual Indians over real-life Native Peoples, the introduction speaks to Kennedy’s recognition of Hollywood’s influence on non-Native American (mis)understandings of the indigenous.

Yet “the stage for the future” between Kennedy’s administration and Natives would be one not only of occasional meetings, brief tribal addresses, photo opportunities (with headdress or not), and acknowledged misunderstandings but also fraught with controversy in conflicting stances on “issues central to the survival of American Indian communities, including treaty rights, self-determination, tribal sovereignty, and cultural integrity” during what is known as the administration’s New Frontier or, as it was called in Indian affairs, the New Trail.⁶ As outlined by several scholars, Kennedy’s New Trail—supposedly tailored toward strengthening tribal self-determination and diminishing threats of termination—provided a series of accordances and conundrums between his rhetoric and policy directed at Native Peoples. The 1961 “American Indian Task Force Report,” released by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, states, “The proper role of the Federal government is to help Indians find their way along a new trail—one which leads to equal citizenship, maximum self-sufficiency and full participation in American life.”⁷ In historian Thomas Cowger’s opinion, “The task force report communicated a mixed message. While encouraging self-determination, it also seemed to endorse goals of termination.”⁸ George Pierre Castile pinpoints “development” and “inclusion” as the New Trail era’s two most prominent themes in early 1960s speeches of Philleo Nash, Kennedy’s commissioner of Indian Affairs. “Nowhere,” Castile adds, “was heard that discouraging word termination despite its status as congressional policy.”⁹ Nash’s stated “insistence on the inclusion of an Indian voice” contrasts with Castile’s contention “that JFK and his core staff were not very concerned with the Native Americans.” Thomas Clarkin likewise observes increased calls for indigenous involvement in policy but concludes that “the Kennedy administration ignored issues central to the survival of American Indian communities.” Naming Kennedy a “hollow icon,” M. Annette Jaimes offers the most scathing account. Whereas Castile says the term “New Frontier” could conjure Natives’ “bad memories of the old frontier,” Jaimes calls “New Trail,” its rhetorical replacement, “a phrase smacking of the same assimilationist mentality which had so recently marked the termination and relocation policies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.”¹⁰ She adds, “The gist of [Kennedy’s] federal Indian policy,” led by Nash and fellow Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) colleagues Stewart Udall and James Officer, “was to get American Indians into the Euroamerican mainstream even at the expense of their cultural preservation of traditional indigenous norms and practices.”¹¹ In the words of an immediate retort to Udall’s report, Mel Thom, a Paiute and cofounder and first president of the National Indian Youth Council, asked, “How many Indians want to fully participate in American life? Indians have a life.”¹²

Kennedy and the controversial New Trail provide entry into interpreting politicized televisual spaces of the 1960s. In her book Welcome to the Dreamhouse, Lynn Spigel deftly interprets 1960s sitcoms and their representations of othered characters through the New Frontier discourse concerning space exploration and Kennedy’s mission to land an American on the moon. In conversation with her work, I look at the administration’s frontiersman rhetoric and roles in tribal–U.S. government relations in tandem with 1960s sitcom representations of the recognizably Indian and Indian-settler encounters.¹³ “Although in distorted and circuitous ways,” Spigel argues, “the progressive spirit of the New Frontier and its focus on space-age imagery served as a launching pad for significant revisions in television’s fictional forms.” Similarly, I turn to the “distorted and circuitous” in the context of extending New Frontier discourse to analysis of Indian and settler formations in sitcoms. Both JFK and sitcoms may have shown only an occasional interest in Indians, but the occasions swirl into a set of fictional and nonfictional cultural discourses on Indian-settler interculturality. Threading together New Trail Indian policy and rhetoric and New Frontier televisual discourse through a case study of the recognizably Indian in episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and other series, I suggest that the New Frontier ethos and rhetoric of shifting Indian-settler relations and imagery served as a “launching pad” for shaping, to borrow from Kennedy, the “worked and reworked” televisions of New Frontier sitcom Indians.¹⁴

When extended to the mid- and late 1960s, Indian affairs in this televisual context concerns more than Kennedy’s New Frontier/New Trail relationship with sitcoms. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency until 1969. In addition to continuing and passing Kennedy’s proposed legislation on civil rights and other pending laws, Johnson adapted the New Frontier into what he branded the Great Society. Declaring in January 1964 an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment,” Johnson soon signed the Economic Opportunity Act to create social programs across the United States, including, even if by default in the locating of impoverished sites, numerous reservations.¹⁵ Standing two weeks later before the National Congress of American Indians, Johnson “pledged a continued effort to eradicate poverty and to provide new opportunity for the first citizens of America.”¹⁶ While historians generally agree that Johnson would go on to show scant interest in Native issues, his Office of Economic Opportunity, a bold initiative in the Great Society’s arsenal, notably bypassed the BIA and allocated funds directly to indigenous nations for business start-up and economic growth.¹⁷

Following Kennedy’s and Johnson’s economic initiatives, sitcoms increasingly envisioned Indians attempting to earn income, mainly in business partnerships with settlers. Sitcoms gestured toward collaboration as a resolution to Indian poverty. To represent Indians in economic ventures potentially disrupted perceptions of Indians as predominantly poor and shiftless, yet the representations are not without performative and ideological circumstances. The recurring implication in these mid-1960s episodes is that for sitcom Indians to gain on-screen business opportunities, they must perform to settler expectations, in appearance and speech, of the recognizably Indian. Disallowed to be indigenous and modern, sitcom Indians in buckskin and broken English also tend to find themselves working in cahoots with crooked settlers or, worse in the context of indigenous self-determination, working under the control of shady settler bosses. Sitcoms, then, configured 1960s mainstream political calls for development as further assimilation into a dominant American framework that dictated the boundaries of Indian performance and working-class citizenship. As a state of unequal interdependence, in other words, sitcoms’ inclusion of cooperative and entrepreneurial Indians considerably translated as representations of submissive and near-cultureless Indians.

Looking to the tribal televisions of the indigenous and indigenous-settler encounters in 1960s sitcoms, I ask how producers representationally tuned in 1960s U.S. policy on Indian affairs. How, in particular, was Kennedy’s New Frontier vision of America represented in the televisions of American sitcoms? How did sitcom producers forge a political new trail onto the small screen suggestive of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ calls for Native-settler cooperation and Native self-determination (over termination) in governance and economic development?¹⁸ How did Johnson’s Great Society encourage TV representations of entrepreneurial and employed Indians? Were “notions of the Old Frontier,” to extend Horace Newcomb’s take on 1950s westerns to sitcoms, “being rechanneled into something new”?¹⁹ Or did producers masquerade and guard old ideological and representational boundaries over how to televise indigenous-settler histories and Indian inclusion?

Within the performative context of a settler colonial continuum between old and new frontiers, in which modern-day white sitcom characters cite dated pioneer perceptions of Indianness, reenact the settlers’ skewed historical encounters with the indigenous, or otherwise perpetuate anti-indigenous acts and discourse, I trace sitcoms’ shifts in the 1950s and early 1960s from exclusion and erasure to inclusion and re-visioning of the indigenous through the distorted televisions of cross-cultural cooperation and indigenous development. In comparison to readings that stack representations of Indians in The Andy Griffith Show and other 1960s sitcoms into a heap of degrading, homogeneous stereotypes, the sitcom frontier that I delineate suggests notable shifts in its televisions. After a predominant discursive and visual absence of the indigenous in 1950s sitcoms, save mostly for a couple of episodes of I Love Lucy, that coincided with the 1950s termination and federal relocation era (that is, policy efforts to entice the indigenous to move from reservations to urban cities and assimilate) during the Eisenhower administration, early 1960s sitcoms included recurring Indian-settler representations of violence, namely visual Native erasure anxiously punctuated by settler characters’ discursive violence—savage speech acts—aimed at non-Native characters posing as Indians.²⁰ Sitcoms then appeared to tune in and construct variants of the Kennedy administration’s New Trail policy buzzwords of “inclusion” and “development.”²¹ By mid-decade, the settlers’ violent speech began to subside for noticeable but still problematic representations of physical inclusion, marked by an Indian-settler cooperation that attempted to mask assimilation and racial hierarchies. Amid Johnson’s Great Society, economic development for the indigenous also became a prime example of inclusion through sitcoms’ Indian-settler cooperative ventures accompanied by inferiority and limited agency for Indian characters whose primary concern, especially in episodes of F Troop, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The Munsters airing from 1964 to 1966, is maintaining an employment dependence on the starring settler characters in sitcom Indians’ pursuits of prosperity through peddling cultural, and cultural-less items, such as tomahawks and jewelry made locally and abroad, and performing Indian shows and historical reenactments. Overall, what unfolds is a televisual tapestry of intertextual convergences between New Frontier sitcoms and politics.

In his acceptance speech, Ken...