Native Epistemology (Primary Title)
Larry McNeil, Tlingit/Nisga'a, born 1955 (Artist)
Lone Ranger: Now I remember you! You’re Tonto!
Tonto: Ugh. Me call you Kemo Sabay.
—Lone Ranger comic series, 1940s
Larry McNeil has held a long-standing fascination with American mythological stories, particularly those that presented cowboys as rebellious individualists who “wrestled the frontier into submission.” The heroic cowboy trope set the stage for industrialists to follow, but according to McNeil, “This mythological story was flawed from the beginning.”
One of the most famous of the cowboy-heroes was the Lone Ranger, first brought to life in a 1933 radio broadcast. He and his Native American sidekick, Tonto, would later become film, television, and comic-book icons. In Native Epistemology, McNeil transforms Tonto from the Lone Ranger’s less-educated but loyal companion into an Indigenous intellectual, using sarcasm and humor to point out just how little the hero, and by extension all those who admired him, actually understood.
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