The racist literary origins of Indiana Jones, The Great White Thief

Classics such as King Solomon’s Mines make the hero out to simply be a dashing man of science, even though he's stealing the treasures of indigenous peoples

Author of the article:Gerry Canavan, Washington Post
Published Jul 01, 2023 

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, stealing a valuable relic of indigenous people in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the film that started the franchise. 

PHOTO BY LUCASFILM

To the contemporary viewer, the Indiana Jones franchise feels like a genre unto itself — or at least like the origin of one. By now, our whip-wielding hero’s adventures have inspired countless others, including the tomb-raiding Lara Croft, the Declaration of Independence-stealing Benjamin Franklin Gates in National Treasure, the Mummy franchise, Uncharted and Duck Tales.

Of course, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and their Indiana Jones collaborators drew heavily on the adventure stories of their childhoods, and those of generations before them, when they created the character. What fragments of literature, history and popular culture came together, in such uneven ways, to make this film series such a massive global phenomenon? Excavating the origins of a genre text like Indiana Jones is dangerous work: Once you’ve torn through all those old libraries, dusty tomes, misleading maps and forgotten, trap-filled labyrinths, are the contents of those cultural tombs worth anything at all?

The most direct antecedents of Indiana Jones are the Flash Gordon and Zorro serials from the 1930s and ’40s, which famously thrilled Lucas as a boy. Organized around cycles of thrilling cliffhangers and daring escapes, they featured a style of storytelling that was already old-fashioned when Lucas was devouring it in matinees growing up in California in the 1950s.

It’s a bit hard to accept that almost as many years separate Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) from Zorro Rides Again (1937) as separate Raiders from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is fresh in theatres. That Zorro film can be watched in full on YouTube these days, and, while undoubtedly dated, it contains inspired stunts and surprising, Marvel-style moments of action comedy, such as the scene where Zorro cracks his whip to keep a bar full of ruffians at bay (as the lead thug holds his bruised fingers and moans).

Swashbuckling hero

Adventure novels from around the turn of the 20th century, a genre coded as “boys’ entertainment,” are another important antecedent for Indiana Jones. Most notable among them may be the H. Rider Haggard cycle of Allan Quatermain novels (1885-1927) that began with King Solomon’s Mines (1885). These books saw their swashbuckling hero, a master hunter, seeking lost treasures across Africa, Asia and South America, eventually uncovering over the course of the series a hidden world of mystery, magic and danger far exceeding the rationalist, scientistic expectations of mainland Europe.

Quatermain’s first-person narration is funny and gripping, especially coupled with the footnotes from an “Editor” issuing their own corrections and commentary — but it is very hard to ignore the story’s racism, beginning with an extended commentary on racial slurs in the novel’s first chapter. Ngugi wa Thiong’o singles out Haggard for special scorn in Decolonising the Mind as one of the “geniuses of racism,” and the award is not undeserved.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like Temple of Doom, leave the Nazis out.

As the adventure genre developed, it grew to incorporate what we now call science fiction — and Indiana Jones’s escapades have plenty of overlap with that genre, too.

Indy frequently encounters improbably intricate traps built by pre-industrial cultures that apparently require no maintenance over millennia — and, of course, he once saw a UFO. That also speaks to some of the material in the franchise’s DNA: Similar stories can be found in such novels as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels (1912-1966) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, The Power of the Coming Race (1871). The last of those contributed to a feverish and largely apocryphal fascination with Nazi occultism that lingers to this day, thanks in no small part to the way the Indiana Jones franchise picked up on it.

If these influential texts are haunted today by their unavoidable racism, it’s not as if Indy’s creators — who grew up loving these stories — were wholly unaware of the problems with them.

The lonely skeptic

“You and I are very much alike,” taunts his first major doppelgänger, Belloq (Paul Freeman), in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in a speech that has been plagiarized by movie villains ever since. Even the original ’80s films know, on some level, that Jones is a villain in his story. The climax of every Indiana Jones movie, after all, comes only when Indy finally decides to relinquish whatever it was he was trying to get, rather than follow his obsession over a cliff (or down a chasm, or into space); the happy ending is when he gives up and just goes home.

Here, we find the traces of another weird antecedent of the Indiana Jones franchise, distinct from all the others: the religious conversion narrative. A self-obsessed and lonely skeptic, a man of science who has let his career crowd out all other aspects of his life and induced him to make morally questionable decisions in pursuit of fortune and glory, is granted a momentary gift of grace, a glimpse of the divine (or, once, aliens), which changes his life forever (at least until the next movie is greenlit and the whole cycle starts anew). In this way, every Indiana Jones film is really just a genre-swapped version of A Christmas Carol.

Indiana Jones has many children, and the franchise’s influence is so sweeping that even the biggest video game in the world at the moment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, bears its mark. But, five movies and 42 years in, we might start to wonder if Indiana Jones does belong in a museum.

The two movies produced in the 2000s, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Dial of Destiny, have each been preoccupied by the concept of Jones growing old. In Dial of Destiny, especially, we find Indy exhausted and bitter as he finally retires from his tenured professorship at Marshall College, with the advertising for the film loudly promising/bemoaning that this time it really is his last adventure (really).

Today, the figure of the Great White Hero feels almost completely used up. In 2023, Marshall College undoubtedly begins its events with a land acknowledgment and has probably scraped Jones’s name off whatever building it was on. It makes perfect sense that the plot of Dial of Destiny sees the character fighting with Nazis (again) over an ancient doohickey that can do time travel. Even those of us who love the character can do so now only by winding back the years.


Gerry Canavan is a professor in the English department at Marquette University and the author of  a biography of SF author; Octavia E. Butler.