By Linda Winsh-Bolard
News of Custer’s defeat in 1876 enraged white Americans, who felt entitled to the lands that belonged to Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. The film shows the consequent events. President Grant was determined to “civilize the Indian”, by taking their lands (gold was discovered in Black Hills), forcing them onto reservations and into Christianity. Henry Dawes, playing the good white man, wants to ease the situation- and get the land. Doctor Charles Eastman, a Lakota, married teacher Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin) and both work at the Pine Ridge reservation. They mean well, but get discouraged and leave. The lands are lost while reservations are established.
Adam Beach stars as the Lakota boy who was send to a white Christian school, and eventually to Dartmouth, to become a doctor. Charles Eastman did not exists, but Adam Beach portrays the prototype of a person forced to live away from his own roots whose life experience, education and understanding divide him from his people as if he was living behind a glass wall.
Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg) is the surviving leader of the Lakota, who returns from Canada to his land only to find that his land is getting smaller by a day, and his freedom is gone. His own people, serving as Indian police, kill him on the reservation.
Much more controversial Red Cloud (Gordon Tootoosis) is portrayed as the man who wanted peace but was deceived by white politicians into giving up.
The film suffers, like all films about American Indians do, from a complete lack of Indian life in them. Perceived as ferocious fighters, proud savages, or simply men bend on fighting for their land, American Indians on celluloid are devoid of social, familial, internal or interconnected life. The complexities of their society, their beliefs and the interactions among tribes are as forgotten as their way of life and self-government that preceded the nearly 300 years of wars with white invaders.
When General Miles accuses Sitting Bull of atrocities his people committed on other tribes, Sitting Bulls replies that it was the whites who provided the means to such slaughter. The real Sitting Bull would have pointed out that the whites were pushing the Indians onto constantly smaller territories, destroying old hunting grounds, game and borders, and forcing the Indians to fight each other in order to survive.
The bloodbath of Wounded Knee followed fifteen years after Little Big Horn (it took a long time to round up the Indians) That event is as unreal in the film as the Wowoka preaching; it seems that even the usually excellent Wes Studi was overcome by ennui. The exclamations by Col. James Forsyth (Marty Antonini) that “we were not the ones who fired first” (hence the Lakota are responsible for the killing), don’t ring true. Wowoka’s movement was a pretext, anything would have served. The Indians were slated for genocide, how and when it was done, was a matter of opportunity. It is time to face this.
Christian schools were set up to destroy the infrastructure of Native Indian lives, it is the only purpose these schools fulfilled well.
Bury My Heart at the Wounded Knee is about white Americans reaction to Indians who were an obstacle on the way to land and mineral resources. Despite claiming otherwise, Dee Brown’s book describes only the atrocities committed against various, and not all, Indian tribes. It does not deal with their individual, and very different, lifestyles. It is shortened history of inflicted wars. Americans, who knew nothing about Indians before the book came out, knew nothing about them after they read it. The book does nothing to revive the obliterated memory of former societies. But the convention stuck.
This latest version of the story is shallow, lacks tension and despite the attempts of August Schellenberg, and an occasional break through the dense script and wooden dialog by Adam Beach, remains lifeless, distant and full of clichés.
The mixing of sepia pictures of the main characters and Lakota chants annoyed me. It is cheap, trite way to justify playing with history. It doesn’t cover up the inaccuracies. The entire story line of Eastman and his father is a fiction, whether it might have played like portrayed is uncertain. But the turmoil brought by loss of independence is very real. Also Dawes’s patronizing seems accurate, as does Eastman’s bewilderment at being treated as a lesser person.
American perception of the Indians remains largely unchanged. It is less than a month since LA Times published an article where American Indians were described as “reduced to selling trinkets’. I expect that the author never met a scientist, doctor, filmmaker or a professor who was a Native American. If he did, he expected them to be assimilated along the lines set by Grant more than century ago, and would be horrified to find out that they might abhor such assimilation. “People think we are extinct”, said one of my friends when opening a Spring Dance, “but we are still here”. Alive and evolving.
Written by Daniel Giat, based on the book by Dee Alexander Brown; directed by Yves Simoneau; executive producers, Dick Wolf and Tom Thayer; Mr. Simoneau, co-executive producer; Clara George, producer. Produced by Wolf Films/Traveler’s Rest Films.
WITH: Aidan Quinn (Henry Dawes), Adam Beach (Charles Eastman), August Schellenberg (Sitting Bull), J. K. Simmons (McLaughlin), Eric Schweig (Gall), Wes Studi (Wovoka), Colm Feore (General Sherman), Gordon Tootoosis (Red Cloud), Fred Thompson (President Ulysses S. Grant), Anna Paquin (Elaine Goodale) and Shaun Johnston (Col. Nelson Miles).
