Perhaps this wouldn’t have struck me as so very important not long ago: but since I just finished read Vincent Brown’s remarkable book The Reaper's Garden, I noticed when John Wayne, not a half-hour into The Searchers, shoots the eyes out of a dead Comanche’s head—because they believe such desecration will cause the spirit to wander forever, he says. This, I think, is exactly what Brown was talking about. Mortuary politics indeed.
