Cowboys and Indians - Lone Ranger and Tonto

While I was reading Michael Yellow Birds beautifully written piece Cowboys and Indians I had an old memory as a kid, actually two childhood memories.
The first as a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley in LA, the area where I lived employed many people in the entertainment industry what was seen on screen was also seen in my real world, and the difference between the two was confusing, and filled with inconsistencies both in my community, as well as within my own family.

My first impressions of Native Americans were of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on television. I watched this TV show every Saturday afternoon with my sister and our friends. But this first impression was dissolved when my family visited my aunt and uncle and cousins in Reseda, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley in California.

Tonto lived next door to my aunt and uncle, not in a Tepee! His name was Jay Silverheels and when I met him in person I was shocked, I expected him to look and live as he did on TV, I can remember looking in his backyard for a Tepee. You see, my sister and I had romanticized Native Americans via the media.

My second memory was about a talk with my Dad, I asked him what kemo sabe meant, this is the word Tonto use to address the Lone Ranger. Now my Dad had a very dry sense of humor and he has passed on so I cannot talk to him about this, but he told me that kemo sabe meant chicken shit! Now, in light of what I know now of all the atrocities done to Native Americans, it makes perfect sense that Tonto would call the Long Ranger chicken shit, so I am laughing now for a joke my Dad made by pure accident, thanks Dad.

I am posting a little blurb on Jay Silverheels, it looks as if he too in real life probably had the same sentiment towards towards Lone Ranger as well.

A mixed-blood Mohawk Indian, Jay Silverheels was the son of a Canadian tribal chief. Silverheels excelled in sports during his youth and it was this prowess that brought him to Hollywood in 1938 as a stunt man. Though most of Silverheels' earliest film appearances went uncredited, it was difficult to ignore him in such roles as the Osceola boy in Key Largo (1948) and Geronimo in Broken Arrow (1950). In 1949, Silverheels was cast as Tonto on the pilot episode of TV's The Lone Ranger. Until the series shut down production in 1956, Silverheels essayed the role of the masked man's "faithful Indian companion," while Clayton Moore (and, briefly, John Hart) was seen as the Ranger. Silverheels also co-starred in two spin-off Lone Ranger theatrical films and reprised the Tonto role in a memorable Jeno's Pizza Rolls advertisement of the 1960s ("Have-um pizza roll, kemo sabe?"). Silverheels' other film credits include a cameo in the all-star fiasco The Phynx (1970) and a pivotal role in 1973's The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. In the 1970s, Silverheels established himself as a prize-winning horse breeder and harness racing driver. During the period, he was asked if any of his new horses were faster than Tonto's Scout, whereupon Silverheels replied, "Heck, I can beat Scout." One of Jay Silverheels' last public appearance was on a comedy sketch on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, wherein Silverheels summed up his relationship with the Lone Ranger as "30 lousy years." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide