American Civil War and the Sioux Indians

American Civil War/Sioux Indians

Cowboys and Indians in Hollywood:

The Treatment of Quotidian Life of the Sioux People

in Dances With Wolves

The old Hollywood Westerns that depicted the heroic cowboy and the evil Indian have past; they no longer sell out the movie theaters and are inundated with critique instead of cinematic favor. In the last thirty years, new Hollywood has attempted to correct this revisionist history, as embodied by Kevin Costner's "Dances with Wolves" (1990), a film sensitive to cultural differences and committed to reflecting the accurate lifestyle of the Sioux it portrays. While the technological prowess of the last century has given way to the planet-busting, Armageddon struggles between good and evil, Earth and Stars, many successful films of the recent past are carefully situation in precise time. Unforgiven (1992) chronicled the1881 assassination of President Garfield, The Patriot (2001) depicted the strife of revolutionary America in gory detail.

However, the films that deal with the disasters wrought by progress are far more infrequent. They demand a coherent and developmental approach to historical change that not only appeals to the average viewer, assumed to be not as historically well versed as he ought, and yet strive for an accuracy that might assuage the sins of historical revisionism and the concept of the Evil Indian pervasive in American popular thought since birth. The mythos of Dances with Wolves, however, is its ability to deal with important historical discussion posited inside an action-romance film that might serve to enlighten the greater populace with the detailed facts that Divine, Breen, Frederickson, and Williams attempt in America Past and Present to 1877. In its treatment of violence in daily life, language, cultural props, societal construction, and quotidian activity, Dances with Wolves ultimately achieved an appropriate representation of an historical accuracy all too frequently ignored.

"The Only Indian is a Sioux Indian" and Curtailing Culture

Historian-Critic Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz praised Dances with Wolves for its ability to "negate that old Hollywood Western theme of 'the only Indian is a dead Indian."

However, she says, it commits as near-fatal a flaw, promoting a new variation on the old theme: "The only Indian is a Sioux Indian (and the rest are still better dead)."

The film presents the Pawnee with bloodthirsty, macabre charm, brutal and mindless in their devotion to violence, ravaging not only the lands of their tribal neighbors, but thoughtlessly butchering the settler families with little mind to their innocents, children, or lives. While the film's portrayal of the Pawnee is assuredly lacking in its faithful dedication to history, its attention to the Sioux is far more detailed.

The attention to details committed by the historical accurate ideal fostered by the Hollywood executives leading Costner's team must be examined within the role of the movie; Dances with Wolves was never intended to be a documentary or even a historical cinematic debut, but a blockbuster. As such, in order to be able to even discuss the details of Sioux life the creators wanted to share with the American people, shedding the popular belief of the good cowboy and the evil Indian, they were forced to posit the discussion within a realm easily acceptable to an American audience. Dunbar criticques the movie's lack of white violence, but perhaps this was not so much an oversight but a deliberate olive branch. "But the Pawnee end up dead," she wrote, "killed by the Sioux, of course, in self-defense. We see Indians killing Indians and Indians (those bad Pawnee) massacring whites. We even see whites killing whites, but not whites killing Indians. Which actually is what happened."

Actually is an interesting term for historians to treat retrospectively; actually, all of those things happened. What can be depicted in three hours time needs to fit well within the concept of a generally-held standard of actually in order to actually achieve any broadening perspective for the average viewer.

Among the historical mistakes made in Dances with Wolves, its biggest flaw existed in its unexplained attribution of new tools to the Sioux tribe. Most important of this was the presence of animals in the film not native to the community. "By some remarkable and unexplained fate, the Sioux community in his film has managed to acquire horses, herds of them, but the people have never laid eyes on a gun."

During the temporal setting of the film, the native tribes were well aware of the strength of gunpower; generations of struggle with the Sherman-led Washington indoctrinated the Sioux community into this knowledgebase. The first treaty signed between the Sioux and the U.S. Government was established in 1805, and five treaties were to follow it as settlers and natives flared with violence during the coming years. "How this one Sioux community managed to stay out of the fray is never clear, and a viewer would not be likely to ask the question if the historical facts were unkown."

A second major faux pas committed by the storytellers was the role Dunbar played in locating a Buffalo herd in proximity to the Sioux village. When Dunbar is awoken, startled, by the sound of the herd, he immediately rides to the Sioux to warn them. While some critique this event as historical neglect, since the Sioux, who have devoted their entire lives and cultures to dependence on and synergy with buffalo, would clearly know that this herd was present before Dunbar, one must set aside the cultural mistake for the lesson beneath it: generosity and amicable reliance are important features in the movie, and being overwhelmed by an obvious curtail undermines the intelligence of the viewer and the effort on behalf of the producers to portray an accurate analysis of daily life for the Sioux. Even a high-school student understood the filmmaker's obvious plight. In his academic survey of Native American treatment in Hollywood, one Tenth grader commented to Peter Seixas that perhaps "the film seemed to be trying to elicit a pro-indigenous response from an audience which might translate into political action."

The film did more than revive old stereotypes about Sioux in new forms for the casual viewer, and despite its attempt to provide a factual historical account, it frequently fell short. One problem Costner's team faced was the recreation of the dictum of the spoken Lakota dialect used by the Sioux tribes in the 1860s. As divulged by the credits, the film producers hired Doris Leader Charge, a 60-year-old teacher at South Dakota's Sinte Gleska College and one of only a few thousand Sioux still fluent in Lakota. Leader Charge translated the script and served as a dialogue coach during production, also playing the role of Pretty Shield. Unfortunately, the men in the film generally speak Lakota in the feminine form, a result of having the script translated by a someone who either did not make allowances for the differences or was, in the years long after the use of Lakota as a pedantic dialect, unaware of any variations thereof.

Sioux historian and tribal leader David Seals states that a number of Indian leaders were angry about this error and found it infuriating in a film that purported its own authenticity. He relates the faux pas to another Costner film, railing, "Imagine if Costner and his baseball buddies in Bill Durham had spoken as if they'd stepped out of Little Women."

Cultural Truths: The Sioux in the Un-Settled West

Many of these failings, however, Seals accurately attributes to inter-tribal government relations when the United States of American in its most nascent form and the great Sioux Nation in its height converged. The relations between tribes governed all aspects of life, from the food available to be hunted (as limned by the areas accessible by treaty or force), to the roles of marriages between villages, to the greater family relations that were noted in Dances with Wolves. At the historical moment in which the film was set, the Sioux nations were struggling with Sherman under the leadership of Red Cloud, who led the tribes' armies to great victory throughout Wyoming. The Americans were suing for unconditional peace on the Bozeman and Oregon trails, seeking their own safety, for once, for transportation purposes inside the vein in which the Sioux had established with other First Nations.

"In a mood of great conciliation," Seals writes, "and general patriot pride, the Sioux and the Arapaho agreed to a cease-fire if the Americans would abandon their forts and go away forever; in turn, the victors would allow them to have their roads to the golden Elysian fields in California and Oregon and Montana."

The state of relations between the Sioux tribes and the American battalions were critical in setting the stage for the film, and through this more congenial relationship, the structures of daily life could be more carefully explored and represented without the revisionist attitude all too frequently embedded in Hollywood's depiction of the great American West and its first homemaker, the Native American.

Yet, at the same time in history, the greater leaders like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were astutely aware of the underpinnings that might catch the tribes in a schism between the United States' government and treaty. They, wisely, feared the worst. Yet, despite their refusal to sign the treaty, Red Cloud went to Washington "wearing a big top hat" and shook hands with Grant, ratifying the treaty into law.

As this was happening, and important ties between tribes were being circumvented for relationship and power transfers with the insurgent governance from Washington, Michael Blake ignored the growing tension in his screenplay, whose struggle to present an accurate picture in three hours meant a necessary temporal departure from correctness.

"There were some very poetic and nature-loving Indians all over the place," Seals postured, "and the beautiful white babe who had been captured as a pioneer child, her whole family butchered by them sneaky Pawnees, but nowhere were there ay of the complex intertribal feuds going on or whiskey traders and railroad men and land speculators who were everywhere out here."

Divine et alius can relate to this; in their portrayal of the details of diversity pervasive in American history, they ignored many of the inter-tribal discontinuities that were fostered not from Washington but instead from the hinterland.

Seals does note, however, that the film managed authenticity in other ways, such as the way the ruling elders' council was handled. Many of the films successes were in the depictions of daily life so important to painting a normative picture of accurate life. Seals praises the correct use of the scared pipe, the Canupa of White Buffalo Calf Maiden, who founded the buffalo culture nineteen generations ago. The Pipe Keeper and others asked that the film not depict the smoking of the pipe, but it does so just the same. Seals praises the use of these reflective props, but qualifies it inside a conversation of "New Custerism," or the velvet-glove approach Divine and Costner embody. Seals criticizes this action as a reflection of the current society of its ills in days gone by, citing the modern players as "torn between their cultural guilt and self-interest."

First Nations Peoples' historian Louis Owens criticizes the film's portrayal of quotidian activity of the Sioux, citing it as part of the greater movement for historical revisionism that inoculates the American Indian into the Euro-American ideology and lifestyle paradigm.

Within the Hollywood golden conception, he says, the Indian is supposed to be the Vanishing American, "a colorful residue of the past." Kostner's Dances With Wolves in particular, he says, subsumes Indianness into the Euroamerican self, erasing Indians as actual, living people of this continent.

Owens purports an idea that the ideological genocide is deliberate, and that even the effort made on Kostner's part for historical correctness results in the culturally supported revisionism, melding the concepts of sex, love, food, and war as not distinct anthropologies between cultures but as, instead, unifying facts blending together both cultures into one socially acceptable to Hollywood. Confronted with the correctness of the film, and its reputation of proper housing recreations, battle gear, daily activity, food, clothing, and wares, Owens reports that the "mixed messages" present the viewer with a subversive bias; instead of being forced to reckon with blatant revisionism, the historical accuracy allows for the audience's slip into assumptions of shared lifestyles.

Daily Life and Common Threads: Sewing History into Hollywood

Nevertheless, the trends for which Owens critiques the film remain conspicuous to the historian. Love, sex, food, family, war, and loss, the main themes plaguing the people of Costner's romantic western are shared across cultures, and instead of being viewed as a moment of revolutionary conception of 'planned genocide,' are more accurately reflected as moments of cross-cultural extensions, allowing for a careful synergy between what Owens calls the "Euramerican self" and the lifestyle details of the historical Sioux life.

Divine, Breen, Fredrickson, and Williams stress throughout the text the same hesitance Owens sees in generic historical analysis. While they stress with great intent to clarify the frequently glossed-over diversities inherent to American history, they do so with a too-great injection of historical excitement.

Their approach to Native American history is nearly as fragmented but admirable as that presented in Dances with Wolves. Detailed Native American history reveals that the term Sioux is not truly indigenous, but instead a fragmented corruption of French and Ojibwa "nadouessioux."

The Sioux themselves applied the distinctions of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, as portrayed in the film; contemporary Sioux favor these names.

The film strived to give an appropriate background shot for the action and romance that would make the movie a success, and this treatment serves as the basis for their defense of a "historically accurate" film that defies the revisionism of its predecessors. The Lakota people of Dances with Wolves were only a small division of the greater Oceti Sakowin, which separated itself into seven distinct bands.

The Lakotas were known as the "people of the prairie" or the "buffalo people" (pre oyate), and their homes were in the Great Plains. Their economy centered on buffalo and gathering the wild fruits and vegetables plentiful in the region.

Their society was tightly knit, and an invader like Dunbar would not be warmly welcomed historically, something the filmmakers treated with accuracy. However, once included, an outsider would notice the particular importance of the Black Hills in the daily lives of the Lakota, where they would return annually for religious and social gathering. Throughout the rest of the year, the Lakota resided in their separate, defined regions, living in small tispaye, like that in which Costner confronted a new world of sexual mores in the small community. In each tiospaye, family members, extended family, and those associated with them would live together; those outside the family, or those who chose to not live in the tiospaye or for spatial reasons were unable, would remain close, supporting the tight-knit village community Costner encountered in the film.

With the only accessibility most young people have to accurate native Ameircan portrayal being that provided by a frequently incorrect Hollywood, America Past and Present seeks to explain the diverse cultures so commonly overlooked. Divine et alius attempt to circumvent the normal underpinnings of American history as recounted to youth and young scholars by presenting a focused history on the aspects usually uncovered; such was their direction in the necessary excise of facts regarding African and Native American tribes, cultures, pasts, and futures.

However, negating racist reconstruction of history needs to occur separate of greater social commentary. Instead of just presenting facts, they repeatedly inject their texts with social commentary and loosely laced historical attribution.

Treating History in Cultural Media

While any scholar understands that, like statistics to a surveyor, facts can be manipulated to fit any hypothesis under academic guise, America Past and Present to 1877 ignores the imperative of historical truths in its effort to present historical breadth. Although admirable in intent, the foundations of the American society as we know it -- a European-settled, greedy, violent disengagement of the American society already present -- were replete with a wide variety of heroes on either side. Not all white settlers were bad, and not all Indians were good; this is a truth that Divine seems to carefully ignore and, at the same time, undermines Costner's cinematic exegesis of the strife, tribulation, and goodness on both sides.