When describing her travels to Jordan, Indigenous author LeAnn Howe reflects on the connection between Arabs and Indigenous Americans when she states, “The fact that Arabs identify with Indians and not John Wayne isn’t surprising” (LOC 2289). Howe mentions several times that, during her year in Jordan, she was not only physically mistaken for an Arab but that actually she identifies, as a Choctaw author, with them. She senses an affinity in the relationships between herself as an Indigenous person and Arabs in relation to America, an affinity which stems from both groups having been “enemies of the United States.” Images of “Arabs in keffiyehs fighting the US military” have “replaced images of Plains Indians fighting the US Cavalry” (LOC 2289). Both groups are as fashioned as an enemy other but, in that depiction, they find a kinship. Jordanian author Tayseer Sboul mirrors Howe’s sentiment in his short story “The Red Indian,” which follows a Jordanian boy’s relationship with American Western films, his desire to identify with the white American cowboys, and his ultimate change of heart so as to conclude that he is “a Red Indian” (Sboul 58). The boy in the story fights his father, who longs to be ‘white,’ and comes to realize the impossibility of identifying with those who demean as violent and animalistic both the Indigenous peoples in their movies. In both texts, the performance of Indigenous and Bedouin identities does and does not conform to conventional expectations. Both are relational, both are “others” defined through and by a dominant community, and yet this relationality forms the basis for possible resistance. Goffman’s theories of identity performance, combined with Cresswell and de Certeau’s works on tactics and mobility, reveal a situated performance of the self though the image of the other. An analysis of Jordanian Tayseer Sboul’s short story “The Red Indian,” shows that oppressive relationality can be replaced by unexpected global alliances, like the parallel Sboul draws between Bedouin and Jordanian performances and the imaginary of the American frontier. “The Red Indian” explicitly connects Indigenous identity and the medium of film, tracing the ways in which Native Americans specifically are represented in film and how that representation defines expectations and possible identifications with characters in films for Jordanian viewers.