Early film Westerns were often criticized for not being authentic. About twenty percent of the movies in the 1910's were cowboy and Indian-related pictures. Pathe Studios, a French film company that had opened a small production branch in Ft. Lee, N.J., wanted to correct that perception. Pathe hired actor and part-time film hand, James Young Deer, who claimed he had ancestors from the Nanticoke people of Delaware, to write and direct its Westerns. One of his first works, his earliest that exists, was "White Fawn's Devotion." This June 1910-released film is the first existing movie directed by a Native American.
Many Westerns filmed Indians as hostile warriors, attacking wagon trains and solitary farmsteads. There were many other movies at that time, however, that looked upon Native Americans in a more positive light, reflecting their stoicism and integrity, where they were constantly harassed by land grabbing whites. D.W. Griffith's early films on this subject dealt humanely with his native portrayal.
In "White Fawn's Devotion," Deer develops a story in which an Indian wife is fearful that her white husband, inheriting riches back East, will take her and their daughter into the white's civilization and leave the life she loves. After seemingly committing suicide, the wife appears to have been killed by her husband after the spat, and their daughter tells the neighboring tribe of the killing, eliciting a knuckle gripping chase scene.
There is only a handful of existing Deer-directed films available for today's viewers; the remainder are considered lost. As a Spanish-American War veteran, he is buried in the Long Island National Cemetary under the name James Young Johnson.