Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks in 1974 with writing assistance from Richard Pryor, was critically acclaimed for its satirical take on Hollywood’s Wild West. While I cannot speak to the whole movie, since I haven’t seen it, let us analyze this particular scene. In an Indian version of black face minstrelsy, Mel Brooks plays Indian by putting on a headdress, painting his face and speaking Yiddish. The only English that he speaks is, “They darker than us! Woof!” after he allows the black family to continue on their route unscathed. This complicated scene turns the white-on-black oppression of colonists excluding Sheriff Bart and his family into a flash of luck, a classic joke creating method (Dean) while also essentializing Native Americans in just the same ways as serious Wild West movies did. One may make the argument that in speaking Yiddish, Brooks is clearly calling out the problems in Hollywood’s representations of Native Americans, but as far as I can tell, he did not go to the trouble of hiring Native American actors and he did not include Native Americans in the plot beyond this scene. To me, Brooks centers white-on-black racism as the butt of the jokes in many scenes of this movie, but when it comes to white-on-Indian racism his critique is quite lacking.