You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we

suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Malinsky, and this is part two of our mini-series on SideKicks.

In the fall of 2008, Disney announced that they were going to make a big budget, loan-ranger

movie.

And Johnny Depp was going to play Tonto.

Now, there was an immediate backlash to a white actor playing Tonto, although Johnny Depp

does claim to have some kind of Cherokee ancestry, and adding to the bad press the movie had

production problems that delayed it for five years.

And through it all, Disney kept insisting that they were going to put Tonto front and

center as an equal partner to the loan-ranger.

Dustin Tomacara is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois.

He was particularly intrigued because Johnny Depp's Tonto was supposed to be Comanche.

And he's also Comanche.

And he wanted to give Depp the benefit of the doubt.

Folks didn't give him a chance, and they didn't put it in the context of his relationship

with the American Indian movement and his support of that movement.

His own identification as native, that however fuzzy or questionable that may be, that he

does have stories to support.

And I think that's what a lot of this comes down to is the stories and the power who has

the jurisdiction to tell these stories and to distribute them.

Now Dustin's aunt, Ladonna Harris, is famous among Native Americans because she's a long

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