Americans - Smithsonian

Likenesses of American Indians have been used to sell everything from cigars to station wagons.
"Festooned with a colorful collection of movie posters, magazine spreads, supermarket products, college merchandise and more, the towering walls of the 3,000-square-foot gallery space at the heart of the National Museum of the American Indian’s new 'Americans' exhibition are initially downright overwhelming. Here, a sporty yellow Indian-make motorbike; there, a bullet box from the Savage Arms gun company. Here, an ad for Columbia Pictures’ The Great Sioux Massacre; there, scale models of the U.S. military’s Chinook, Kiowa and Apache Longbow helicopters. It’s a dizzying blizzard of pop cultural artifacts with nothing at all in common—save for their reliance on Native American imagery. ..."
Smithsonian: Probing the Paradoxes of Native Americans in Pop Culture (Video)
Americans - Smithsonian (Video)

Hollywood milked the cowboys-and-Indians genre for all it was worth.