Legendary filmmaker John Ford became acquainted with the Diné culture after he began making movies in Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation. According to Bette L Stanton’s book Where God Put the West Ford was dismayed by some Hollywood depictions that portrayed Native Americans as “savage” in so-called “historical” westerns. Subsequently, in the movie Cheyenne Autumn Ford attempted to present the Native Americans’ point of view, writes Stanton.

Indian people were often offered acting parts in the films made on their home turf. They found the movie-making business both entertaining, and sometimes hilarious, wrote Stanton. To film anywhere on the reservation permits were required from the land use office at the Tribal capital in Window Rock, Arizona.

Lee Bradley, an English-speaking Navajo man from Kayenta, was the first local Indian to be offered an acting role in 1925, in The Vanishing American. Bradley went on to do more acting, and also worked as a technical advisor and interpreter for all Hollywood studios making Westerns in Utah and northern Arizona.

By the time Bradley finished working on the film Smoke Signal in 1954, he had acted in 57 movies. He had an almost fulltime movie career without ever having traveled to Hollywood.

Other Navajos also found occasional work acting in films – not always portraying their own culture. To their amusement Navajo people acted as Apaches, Mexican Federales, and members of a Mongolian army, according to Stanton. In Where God Put the West the author shows the Navajos’ sense of humor with an anecdote where a young Navajo portraying an Apache warrior is bucked off his horse while riding bareback: He gets up and says “If I’d been a Navajo, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Not all Indians involved in the film industry had acting roles or worked as interpreters. A medicine man named Hosteen Tso – known among the Navajo people as “Mr. Big” ended up working alongside Ford for more than a decade. In Where God Put the West Stanton describes how during the filming of Stagecoach trading post owner Harry Goulding, while “speaking in jest,” told Ford to put in his request for weather – for a scene that called for thunderstorms one day, followed by a day of blue sky and a dust storm. Ford was startled when the weather appeared to comply with Mr. Big’s “sorcery.” Hosteen Tso became known as “special effects technician.”