>>11795857
The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act gave tribes the ability to operate casinos on sovereign land, turning their formerly completely worthless lands into hotspots for people to go to, and people suddenly started getting a lot more familiar with Native Americans and interacting with them knowingly on a daily basis. Plus, I'm sure the huge influx of wealthy natives from successful casinos started giving rise to young up-and-comers who leveraged their parent's wealth to appear in more movies, and so you had a previously most invisible part of the population outside of Westerns, become very noticeable. By the end of the 90's, this started re-scaling itself towards normalization and it gradually faded away.