Native Americans Are People Too
The overarching contextual theme of Broken Arrow is nothing less than an attempt—which actually proved somewhat successful—to reset the template for the entire western genre. No movie produced by Hollywood since the arrival of sound had painted Native Americans as anything much more than a homogenous axis of evil. Attempts to lend humanity to the “Indians” in movies about cowboys and Indians were limited to very few minor scenes. Broken Arrow right from the opening line is dedicated to creating a revolution in the genre by treating its Apache characters as multi-layered, multi-dimension human beings.
An Allegory of the Communist Witch Hunt
By contrast, the subtext of the film presents an overarching theme in which the event are symbolic commentaries upon the communist witch hunt dominating American society—and especially Hollywood—at the time. Though not credited to him, the film was actually written one of the infamous Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. This subtextual reading implicates the attempt by Jeffords to advocate peaceful co-existence with the “reds” as the act of a traitor who must be lynched (or, failing that, outright killed) by good patriotic lovers of the American way (irony fully intended).
“It is good to understand the ways of others.”
Jeffords himself voices the theme that unites the context and the subtext of the film. Without an attempt to understand a foreign culture, any attempt at reconciliation or peaceful co-existence is doomed. The choice to align as enemies without even making the attempt to learn the ways of others is situated here as no policy at all, but simply a smokescreen for a bloodthirsty strategy of autocratic genocide. Dehumanization begins with resisting the attempt to understand another’s language; not by coincidence, the opening lines of the film spoken in voice-over narration by Jeffords direct address this issue: “what I have to tell happened exactly as you'll see it - the only change will be that when the Apaches speak, they will speak in our language.”
