Politics & Power Quote by Buffalo Bill

Buffalo Bill wraps spectacle in the language of benevolence, and that’s the tell. He casts himself as a civilizing tour guide, “giving them a correct idea” of white American life, as if the problem were simply ignorance that could be fixed with better sightseeing. The phrasing flatters the “pale faces” as the benchmark of reality and reduces Indigenous people to students in someone else’s classroom. Even the word “benefiting” works like a receipt: proof that profit and moral purpose can be tallied in the same ledger.

The intent is promotional as much as paternal. Cody’s Wild West shows depended on a public hungry for frontier drama and on Native performers whose presence authenticated the fantasy. By framing the tours as educational, he launders the ethical discomfort of putting colonized people on display. It’s not exploitation, he implies; it’s outreach. That logic conveniently aligns with federal assimilation policy of the era, which also sold itself as uplift while dismantling languages, land claims, and autonomy.

The subtext is a confidence trick that doesn’t need to announce itself. “Correct idea” suggests there’s a single, authoritative story about American “customs” worth carrying back to the reservation, as if Indigenous cultures exist to be updated rather than respected. Cody isn’t only managing performers; he’s managing interpretation, preemptively steering audiences away from the possibility that Native participants might see the United States and name it differently: not as modernity, but as occupation.