Archive of Our Own ^beta

On the basis of those two attributes, I'm writing this essay to explore how F:NV (mis)handles the history and ongoing contemporary issues of the Southwest, in particular in relation to its representation of Native Americans. For some important background, I'm prefacing this with a section on in-game perspectives about the Mojave Desert, which also gets into how that relates back to real-world Native issues. From there, the analysis proceeds through the representation of Natives in the base game and then the Honest Hearts DLC. 

 

Table of Contents:

I. Patrolling The Mojave Almost Makes You Wish For Environmental Racism

II. The Wasteland & The Vanishing Native

III. Noble & Ignoble Natives in the Honest Hearts DLC

• Noble, Innocent, Ignorant: The Dead Horses & The Sorrows
• Ignoble, Violent, Savage: The White Legs

IV. Epilogue: Alternative Possibilities & Indigenous Futurisms

 

Patrolling The Mojave Almost Makes You Wish for Environmental Racism

It's one of the series' most iconic lines, stated ad nauseum by the NCR soldiers: "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter." The statement is intended as a joke about the weather -- i.e., it's so hot, the soldiers are desperate for any relief, almost to the point of wishing for nuclear winter. This term, for reference, is a name for the hypothetical effects of large-scale nuclear warfare, suspected to cause prolonged darkness and extreme temperatures, which of course would be lethal to most plant and animal life. 

So in other words, the NCR soldiers hate the Mojave weather so much that it has them contemplating mass environmental destruction.

It's a joke, yes. To my ears, it happens to be the kind of joke that summons ghosts, and to understand why, you have to understand a little about the legacy of nuclear technology in the American Southwest.  

In general, this disparaging attitude to the climate of the Southwest region fits into a longer, larger history of White settler perspectives on the desert as wasteland, both aesthetically ugly and strategically disposable, offering nothing of value. The desert does not count as arable farmland according to Western agricultural traditions -- not green, not "fertile," not life-giving, not useful -- and so symbolically, in the White imagination, the desert comes to stand for barrenness and death. I can think of no other landscape or climate so strongly associated with the imagery of the skull. A lone, single skull, typically bovine, representing the failure of Western agriculture practices, has become an iconic motif of the Southwestern desert, ranking up there with the saguaro cactus and the cowboy hat as instantly recognizable symbolism of the region. Over and over again, in many depictions, in many stories, the desert is represented in terms of the absence and termination of life.

This rhetorical process, called "wastelanding" by environmental scholar Traci Brynne Voyles, supports the enactment of environmental racism. In the settler imaginary, the desert becomes an acceptable place to poison, to pollute, to defile, to inflict with radiation, to strip mine, to bomb, to nuke, to destroy. It's a "wasteland" because it's okay to lay waste to. You can't kill what's already dead.

The history of wastelanding the Southwest is especially salient for the Fallout series because of the key role of the Southwest in U.S. nuclear history. In 1945, the U.S. military detonated a nuclear bomb at Trinity Site, New Mexico, in preparation for the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese civillians in World War II. You can read a relatively conservative take on the impact of the Trinity test here, but in short, the official account is that its effects were underestimated, and the location is still affected with above-average radioactivity to this day. Unofficially? People died. 

That experimental detonation, the Trinity test, marked the very first use of nuclear weapons in science history -- a U.S. military detonation of nuclear weapons on what the U.S. itself considers "U.S. soil." The location chosen for the Trinity Site was the Jornada Del Muerto desert region, and according to what I've been able to find, the basis for that decision was its flat topography, lack of windy conditions, and "isolation." "Isolation," though, seems to be a relative concept, considering the nearest town was located about twenty miles away.

Descendants of those who lived in the area have been experiencing abnormal health problems for generations ever since.

This isn't all distant history from before I was born, either. The wastelanding of the Southwest is an ongoing process, and it disproportionately impacts people of color in the region, including Native Americans. Here's an article from 2001 about Goshute opposition to a nuclear waste dump in Utah. Here's an article from 2015 about Shoshone opposition to a radioactive waste dump in Nevada. Here's an article from 2017 about the deaths linked to uranium contamination in Arizona. Here's some more information on the impact of uranium mining on the Diné/Navajo. The history of nuclear negligence in the Southwest isn't just settled in the dust of the past. These things continue into the present, too, and continue to kill people. 

These are the things I think about, the ghosts I hear, when Fallout NPCs joke about preferring nuclear destruction to preserving the natural state the desert. Because in real life, there are already people who would -- and have -- already wastelanded the Southwest.

 

The Wasteland & The Vanishing Native

Fallout, as a series, is about more than just nuclear warfare. More broadly, it's about imagining the bleak possibilities for the future and exploring how people remember the past. In Fallout: New Vegas, the player encounters a powerful faction that positions itself as essentially the new United States. Others draw inspiration from from historical figures as distant as Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. For setting flavor, some NPCs are characterized as cowboys, cattle barons, prospectors, and casino mob bosses. Even a small faction of Mormons still exist. Ideas warp and change and are sometimes misremembered, but the throughlines are still recognizable.

What I'm saying is, the setting of Fallout may be "the future," but that doesn't mean the past is irrelevant. In fact, it's extremely relevant, especially when handled in creative ways and taken in new directions. On that basis, I'd expect Fallout: New Vegas to engage with the history (or real-world present day) of its own particular setting, as well: the Mojave Desert, which is named after the Mojave people.

So, for me, that begs the question: Where are the Mojave in the Mojave? Where are the people this land is named for? Actually, where are any Native Americans at all? Where are the Paiute? The Diné? The Hopi? The Zuni? The Ute? The Shoshone? The Washoe? Any of 'em. Where are the Natives?

While playing the base game, I kept expecting to run into them, at some point. This is partly because, though technically set in 2281, the setting of F:NV still looks as though little has changed (which is something the later Fallout games have been criticized for, but that's a different topic). While wandering the Mojave Desert as the courier, I encountered billboards and relics of a bygone era, rusted cars, abandoned and not-so-abandoned buildings, old bottles of soda, boxes of bubblegum, and cans of beans. Fallout: New Vegas is rich with nostalgic, retro-flavored fragments of the distant past, in a way that feels enjoyably out of sync with linear time -- allowing you to carry futuristic laser weapons while exploring environments built hundreds of years before the player character was born. Overall, though, F:NV's Mojave Desert feels more reminiscent of the present and the past than the future.

So on that basis, I expected something of a Native presence. Not even necessarily in a positive or authentic way, either. Even just in the billboards and posters -- the Southwest especially is a region that has overwhelmingly capitalized and commercialized Native imagery to the extent that it can, and as stereotypical as they sometimes are, these depictions would have fit right in with Fallout's retrofuturistic 1950s kitsch, narratively speaking. F:NV even deliberately invokes some of the motifs and imagery of the western, a genre in which Natives have long played an important role, and any way you slice it, Natives are a part of what makes this region what it is. So where they are they?

Nowhere.

They're nowhere.

Even though F:NV's setting is littered with 1950s memorabilia, there's barely a trace of acknowledgement of any Native presence in the area, not even through a racist 1950s lens. Somehow, the nations of the Las Vegas area and surrounding region haven't made it to the future, if they even existed in this universe at all. In a game so overtly obsessed with the question of our possible futures and how we remember the past, the absence of Native nations, characters, and imagery is striking to me. It's as though Obsidian and Bethesda simply couldn't imagine any possibilities for Natives in the future. Which, implicitly, inflects the F:NV dystopia with unspoken meaning: the final, successful completion of Native genocide.

In other words, of all possible racist tropes to choose from, the one that the base game most strongly plays into is the narrative of the "vanishing Indian."

Ruth Miller Elson has written that nineteenth-century school readers, testaments of conventional wisdom, held the Indian's extinction to be "inevitable by mysterious decrees of God and nature"... The belief in the Vanishing American has had far-reaching ramifications. Based on what was thought to be irrefutable evidence, it became self-perpetuating. [...]

Poets, novelists, and essayists adopted a stylistic strategy that summed up Indian fate in images drawn from nature. The Indian was at the sunset of his existence; night was about to swallow a race fated to vanish "as snow melts before the sunbeam" or "like the morning dew, insensibly and mysteriously to disappear, before the lights of civilization and christianity." [...] A natural law was in operation, and no mortal could alter its course. The "inexorable destiny" of the Indians, like that of the wilderness with which they shared an almost symbiotic relationship, was to recede before civilization's advance.

--Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, 1982.

The  vanishing  Indian  concept  refers  to  a  literary,  historical,  and  cultural  understanding   of   the   clash   between   “civilized”   colonizers   and   “savage”   Indians.  The  concept  is  rooted  in  the  belief  that  in  the  face  of  “advancing  civilization,”   tribes   and   tribal   citizens   would   necessarily   and   inevitably   disappear. [...] Made  popular  in  society  through  bestselling  novels  like  James  Fenimore  Cooper’s  The  Pioneers,  the  understanding  that  Indians  would  necessarily  disappear  in  the  face  of  advancing  civilization  was  assumed and encouraged. [...]

The  role  of  the  vanishing  Indian  idea  in  society  also  shifted  with  time.  Different ideas of what should “be done” about the “Indian question” used the vanishing   Indian   in   different   ways.   For   example,   early   beliefs   about   “civilizing”  the  Indian  meant  that  Indian  tribes  would  eventually  disappear  as  organizing,  governing  bodies,  though  not  Indian  peoples.  Later  attempts  to  remove  tribes  west  both  vanished  Indian  peoples  and  tribes  from  the  land  coveted  by  settlers.  Still  others  believed  that  Indian  peoples  themselves  would disappear, through famine and war, as a natural part of their encounter with  “civilization.”  In  other  cases,  the  ideas  combined,  meaning  that  unless  the tribal members became “civilized” or were removed, they would surely all  die.  There  are  distinctions  in  these  ideas,  but  the  twin  ideas  of  the  Indian  belonging  to  the  past  and  the  erasure  of  tribes  as  organizing  entities  thread  through them all, emblematic of the vanishing Indian organizing framework.

--K. E. Fort, "The Vanishing Indian Returns: Tribes, Popular Originalism, and the Supreme Court," [pdf] 2012.

This is what I mean by the "vanishing Indian." By lacking any particular Native presence in the future it envisions for the Southwest, Fallout: New Vegas aligns itself with the narrative that Native Americans will necessarily and inevitably disappear before the dawn of the future.

That is, of course, until you get to Honest Hearts, which is where everything gets worse.

 

Noble & Ignoble Natives in the Honest Hearts DLC

In the base game, Native Americans are strangely absent from their own ancestral lands. In the Honest Hearts DLC, the story is more complicated: instead of being simply absent, Native NPCs are depicted in terms of the Noble and Ignobile dichotomy, an assortment of demeaning stereotypes with a long history in the popular and political depictions of Native Americans. Within this dichotomy, these characters are still characterized in terms of technological stagnation and an inevitable demise, two key aspects of the "vanishing Indian" concept.

Before we get into that, though, here's an explanation of why I'm referring to these as Native characters. I don't think anyone in the game ever refers to them as "Native Americans" outright, so let me run through some indicators of how these characters are racialized.

The Honest Hearts DLC introduces three Native American factions: the Sorrows, the Dead Horses, and the White Legs. All three speak some other language than English, and so for some of them, their English lines are voice-acted to sound more stilted and less fluent than all other NPCs. All three have figurative, naturalist names like Salt-Upon-Wounds and Follows-Chalk, which racially read a lot differently than names like Daniel or Joshua. All three are visually designed to read as "Indian" to the audience -- for instance, many are wearing feathers or adorned with face paint or tattoos. Waking Cloud is even dressed in what's essentially a cloth bikini for some reason. All three appear technologically limited, as well, compared to most other factions in the game; they take shelter in simple lean-tos and caves, and though they do have some access to guns, favored weapons include clubs and spears, as well as a gauntlet made out of an animal paw. None of these things are inherently Native American traits, but for anyone with the relevant cultural literacy, these characteristics are recognizeable as Native coding. 

Plus, it's also kind of canon. The Dead Horses are speculated to originally hail from a place called "Res," a term which in real life is sometimes used as a shortened form of "Reservation," as in Indian Reservation. Given the surrounding context, this does seem to imply that that the Dead Horses have Native ancestry. Joshua explains that the Dead Horses "speak a combination of Res and a language spoken by travelers who were visiting Res when the bombs fell." This blend of languages appears to include some Diné influence, since one of the greetings in the Dead Horses' language is "Ya ah tahg," much like the Diné greeting "Yá'át'ééh."

What these clues tell us is that the Dead Horses are not just coded in a coincidentally "Indian" way, but actually are supposed to be the future's Native Americans in Fallout: New Vegas. And as representations of Natives, these three factions exhibit the dichotomy of the "Noble Savage" and its inverse evil counterpart. 

Note, for more information on these archetypes, I recommend the following sources: 

• Berkhofer, Robert F. The white man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the present. Vintage, 2011.
• Gerster, Carole. "Native Resistance to Hollywood’s Persistence of Vision: Teaching Films about Contemporary American Indians." Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching, and Theory, 2013.
• O'Connor, John E. "The White Man’s Indian: An Institutional Approach." Hollywood's Indian: The portrayal of the Native American in film, 1998.
• Riley, Michael J. "Trapped in the history of film: Racial conflict and allure in the vanishing American." Hollywood's Indian: The portrayal of the Native American in film, 1998.
• Vickers, Scott B. "Wroughten Scoundrels: Bad Indians, Good Indians." Native American identities: From stereotype to archetype in art and literature, 1998.

 

Noble, Innocent, Ignorant: The Dead Horses & The Sorrows

Critical analysis of Native representation in fiction has identified a longstanding pattern generally known as the "Noble Savage" archetype. This concept technically traces back before the 18th century in European philosophy, and it was later applied to Europeans' understanding of Native nations, figuring them as apart from "civilization" and therefore more natural, noble, and innocent. On account of those aspects, the "Noble Savage" is sometimes considered a "positive" stereotype, but the grim underbelly of lies in its patronizing implications. For instance, this framework typically involves treating Native civilizations as if they don't count as civilizations, and from there, depicting Native people as categorically childlike, simple-minded, and naive, warranting the protection of a White Savior. So despite its seemingly-positive aspects, the archetype can be painfully demeaning. 

In the Honest Hearts DLC, the Sorrows and the Dead Horses factions are portrayed as vulnerable and impotent Noble Savages. The game characterizes them as childlike, naive, helpless, primitive, and superstitious, in need of the more experienced Mormons to take leadership positions and make decisions for them.

Both groups are consistently presented as morally pure yet vulnerable and naive. Daniel the missionary describes the Sorrows as having "sensitive souls" and as "innocent, if there is such a thing." Similarly, when speaking to the player, Joshua describes the Sorrows and the Dead Horses as "smart people, but not as worldly as you or I." In another line from Daniel, he indicates that the local tribes have been attacked many times by an assortment of various different groups, which he sums up as "Anyone who thinks they can exploit the ignorant and the innocent." Implicitly, then, the Native characters (apart from the White Legs) are being characterized as "ignorant and innocent."

More generally, the Sorrows and the Dead Horses are understood in terms of helplessness and ineptitude. Daniel and Joshua feel responsible for accidentally attracting trouble their way, and because of that, they've have decided to help them, believing the Sorrows incapable of handling the matter themselves. As Daniel put it, "The Lord helps those who help themselves, but the Sorrows don't know how. Joshua and I do. Since I got them into this mess, I need to get them out."

Technologically, as well, the Sorrows and the Dead Horses are portrayed as less knowledgeable and less capable than their Christian mentors. Joshua mentions that he's taught the Dead Horses "how to hunt more efficiently" and "how to maintain their weapons and Pre-War equipment." About the Sorrows, he says, "Even though they can hunt a full-grown Yao Guai [monster bear], they don't know how to deal with the White Legs. That's why we're here." If asked to compare the New Canaanites (Christians) to the other factions at Zion, Joshua says that "We wear more clothing than them and understand more about technology." I don't think there's any point in the game where Daniel or Joshua talk about what the Sorrows or Dead Horses might have taught *them* in the way of skills or wisdom. The teaching here is never reciprocal.

One of the Dead Horses, Follows-Chalk, even expresses apprehension about any transportational technology more advanced than walking. When he encounters the remains of a crashed bus, he says, "See this? This is why your own two feet are better than any cart, whether it's pulled by critters or goes on its own." This line positions him as apprehensive about the risks of technology, which furthers the characterization of the Dead Horses faction as "primitive."

It's also simply absurd. Even before the reintroduction of horses to the Americas, various different Native nations were already using their own forms of transportational technology, and in the modern day it's not like nobody who drives a car is Native. There's no reason for this attitude except to make the Native guy sound like a luddite.

While Follows-Chalk is just one individual, not necessarily speaking for all the Dead Horses, at the same time, lines like these deserve to be considered in context. Follows-Chalk's anti-bus worldview could be interpreted differently if the game presented Follows-Chalk as an outlier among his people. For example, we could witness or hear about some disagreement between him and another one of the Dead Horses (or even one of the Sorrows) to characterize him as excessively cautious compared to the others. Any indication that he's considered strange or irrational would do the trick. Since the game doesn't characterize him that way, though, there's not really anything to confirm the others think differently, especially since his people regard pre-War buildings as taboo. Between moments like these and the remarks from Joshua and Daniel, the Dead Horses and the Sorrows are thoroughly characterized as technologically limited, stagnant, and belonging to the past.

As if that wasn't insulting enough, the game introduces a very demeaning angle on their religious beliefs, as well. Daniel refers to the Sorrow's "Father of the Caves" legend as an "old superstition" -- and if you play through enough of the game, you'll uncover information that definitively debunks their beliefs about the Father, proving him to be just an ordinary human man. For comparison, Christian religious beliefs are discussed in this DLC too, and as a player character you're allowed to express some skepticism, but within the game, Christian doctrine is never factually disproven or given anywhere near the same treatment as the Sorrows' "supersititons."

At the intersection of all these characteristics -- innocent, naive, primitive, superstitious -- the Sorrows and the Dead Horses are characterized as Noble Savages who are reliant on the guidance and leadership of the Christian missionaries. 

 

Ignoble, Violent, Savage: The White Legs

In negative representations of Native Americans, the Noble Savage has an evil counterpart in the form of the ignoble, violent, barbaric aggressor. This archetype has gone by many names -- the Hostile Savage, the Vicious Savage, the Ignoble Savage, the Demon, the Bad Indian. Whatever you want to call it, there's a common thread:

In popular culture, The Demon is the marauding, untamable, hellish male who attacks wagon trains, murders children, and scalps women. He is the perpetual "red menace," a "godless heathen" totally lacking in trustworthiness, empathy and morality. In portraying The Demon, rarely are any social, political, or economic factors given to viewers to explain his behavior. He is simply evil, and he must be eradicated in order to make the West safe for White women and children (civilization).

--"The Ignoble Savage: The Demon," Native Americans & American Popular Culture

In Honest Hearts, the faction that fills this trope is called the White Legs, a viciously violent group of raiders who have been attempting to wipe out the Sorrows, the Dead Horses, and the New Canaanites. This makes them a fairly straightforward example of the type.

In typical Christian faction, Joshua even describes their leader leader Salt-Upon-Wounds in demonic terms: "He's a butcher. Believe me, I know the godless fire that burns in his heart. [...] He's not the kind to let his subordinates do all the killing. No, he likes to have a hand in it, with that spear of his. He's fashioned himself an abomination before the eyes of the Lord."

Not only are the White Legs a very by-the-numbers example of violent "savages," but they also tie back into the "vanishing Indian" theme, as well. According to Daniel and Joshua, the White Legs aren't long for this world, because attacking and stealing are literally their only survival skills. Daniel explains at length:

If they can't join Caesar's Legion, they'll die out in a generation. They've never learned how to survive. Food preservation, tanning, even basic hunting and cooking seem beyond them. They only survive by scavenging and raiding, but that can't last. [...] They're hateful savages who live only to plunder and destroy. Their leader is a devil called Salt-Upon-Wounds. War is all he knows. Everything he has, everything that tribe has, was taken by force, raiding and scavenging.

Joshua, similarly, remarks, "They don't know how to survive on their own, so they have to raid."

In that case, it's a wonder they even lasted this long at all. The White Legs' extreme reliance on raiding doesn't just mark them as ignorant and technologically limited; explicitly, they are expected to "die out" very soon -- unless they are assimilated by Caesar's Legion, an imperial force drawing inspiration from the Roman Empire. Assimilation or death. Those are their only possible futures. Which leaves the White Legs as yet another way that F:NV is vanishing its Indians. 

 

Epilogue: Alternative Possibilities & Indigenous Futurisms

It's the pattern of depictions like these, the "vanishing Indian" trope, that creates so much weight for indigenous futurisms (or artistic explorations of indigenous futures), which imagine possibilities outside of death or assimilation. 

As a work of speculative fiction, especially one about nuclear fallout, especially one set in the Southwest, Fallout: New Vegas could have gone in many new directions instead of just returning to the same old extinction narrative. Given the history of the area, there's a lot of potential to be explored. Alternatively, they just as well could have set that aside and simply integrated more Native-coded characters depicted as technologically capable and innovative. The legacy of anti-Native racism could have gone unremarked upon, with Natives represented in more nuanced ways without reference to or contrast against racist ideas, or that racism could have been more deliberately satirized. Considering at all the retro memorabilia littered over the Wasteland, I can imagine, for instance, a Native character repurposing and remixing what was once a racist-themed tourist trap, in the same spirit as A Tribe Called Red's remix of the Tomahawk Chop theme -- or the sonic & visual remixing in NDNs From All Directions.

As just one example of how the post-apocalyptic action/adventure genre can combine with more rich and textured Native representation, I recommend looking at Trail of Lightning & Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse. The story of these two books depicts a post-apocalyptic world where not only do the Diné get to see the future, but they also end up one of the stronger, healthier factions that remain in the wake of the U.S.A.'s dissolution.  Just as the world of Fallout imagines a world rising from the ashes of nuclear warfare, Roanhorse's series draws on the threat of climate change and major flooding to imagine the end of the world as we know it -- and the beginning of another. Although it's no benevolent utopia, this story depicts an important role for Native Americans in the future, instead of locking them off as some stagnant and fading relic of the past. 

This story couldn't easily be reskinned as a Fallout story, so I'm not suggesting that F:NV should have done something exactly the same, but I think it makes sense to point out as a strong example of what's possible to do with the genre. By instead falling back on the old narrative of inevitable doom, Fallout: New Vegas didn't just foreclose more creative possibilities in favor of something boring. As a reiteration of racist archetypes, especially the wastelanding of the desert and the narrative of the inevitable demise, F:NV participates in an active ideological tradition whose radiation still stains the Southwest.