DANCES WITH WOLVES. Starring
Kevin Costner, Graham Greene, Tantoo
Cardinal, Mary McDonnell. Directed by
Kevin Costner. At Cineplex Odeon
theatres.

“I was born a Lakota and I shall die a
Lakota. Before the white man came to our
country, the Lakotas were a free people.
They made their own laws and governed
themselves as it seemed good to them.
When the Lakotas believed these things
they lived happy and they died satisfied.
What more than this can the white man
offer us?”

Red Cloud’s farewell address to his
people, 1903.

“One does not sell the land on which

the people walk.”

Crazy Horse, 1875
"hese were among the few
‘recorded words of Red

Cloud and Crazy Horse,
the Lakota (Sioux)
leaders who inflicted two
of the three greatest

ss defeats ever suffered by
the U.S. Army in its wars against the

Amerindian nations during the conquest
of the west. One of those Lakota
victories, the battle at Greasy Grass
Creek, would live on in legend, and in
book and movie screen, to become
known as the Battle of the Little Big
Horn or Custer’s Last Stand.

On that day, June 25, 1876, Lakota and
Cheyenne warriors caught the U.S. Army
while it was divided in two columns. A
third of the Amerindian force pinned
down the column of Maj. Marcus Reno
while the other two thirds of the warriors
fell upon the Seventh Cavalry of Gen.
George Armstrong Custer, who had
impetuously ordered his command to
attack.

Custer, who desired one final, decisive
victory over the powerful Lakota nation in
order to secure his nomination as the
Democratic Party’s candidate in the
upcoming presidential elections, saw his
political aspirations, along with the more
than 200 men in his command, annihilated
in a maelstrom that descended from all
sides.

USS. retribution for this defeat was
quick and severe and within a few years,
as the last buffalo herds were eliminated,
and with the aid of disease and starvation,
the spirit of the great equestrian nations of
the plains was broken.

Dances With Wolves is set in the
decade preceding these tumultuous events.
It is a glimpse of a society just before an
all-engulfing avalanche of westward
expansion descends upon it. A film of
great visual beauty, Dances With Wolves
succeeds in that most difficult of tasks —
recreating a world that has been forever
lost in a manner that imparts a sense of the
way things must have been.

It is the most faithful portrait of
pre-colonized Amerindian life put on
screen by a major American studio and it
should serve as a standard with which
films in the future will be measured.

Kevin Costner, of Field of Dreams and
No Way Out fame, has produced, directed
and acted in this film adaption of a novel
by Michael Blake which succeeds in
being entertaining and remarkably
uncompromising. This is no small feat.
Westems are not exactly the stuff of which
big box office successes are made —
particularly when they run over three
hours and feature, for much of that time,
Amerindian actors speak in Lakota with
subtitles.

Dances With Wolves centres on the
relationship between a U.S. Army Officer
and a particular Lakota band. (The word
“Sioux” is actually a French distortion of
an Ojibway word meaning “cutthroat”
but, like the words “Indian” or “Eskimo”
it has, as a part of colonialism, become a
word of popular usage. The “Sioux” are
actually three primary groups — the
Santees, Yanktons and the Tetons whose

26 « Pacific Tribune, December 17, 1990

‘ists = tee

territory covered much of what is now
North and South Dakota, Minnesota,
Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana.
Depending on the dialect they spoke, the
people were either Lakota or Dakota.)

Costner is John Dunbar, a U.S. Army
officer who through a courageous, if
suicidal act, becomes a decorated hero and
wins release from the bloody inferno of
the Civil War. He is drawn not to the
sanctity of some eastern city but to the
unknown frontier where he seeks and wins
a posting at a fort beyond the edge of
“civilization.”

On Dunbar’s way there we see two of
the secondary characters who make only
brief appearances. But in their moments
on the screen they give a foretaste of the
humour and tragedy that makes Dances
With Wolves a success. There is the mule
skinner who takes Dunbar to the fort. Full
of dirt, flatulence and humour he is an
earthy version of the faithful servant fron:
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, transported to
the west. And there is the insane Army
officer at the frontier town who writes
Dunbar an illegible order of safe conduct
while ruminating about the King and
drinking wine shortly before blowing his
brains out.

Dunbar’s fort turns out to be nothing
more than two abandoned shacks in the
great vastness of the western plain. There

is no sign of what happened to the original

garrison — only dug out caves ona
nearby hill — while deer carcasses in the
pond hint that visitors are less than
welcome. Whatever the fate of the
fictional garrison it is likely not
ahistorical. In 1835, five white prospectors
ventured into the sacred Black Hills of the
Lakota territory. All that was ever found of
them was a scrawled note on which was
written “All kilt but me.”

For weeks Dunbar has no sign of the
two things he has been searching for —
Indians and buffalo. Instead he spends
weeks in isolation, a speck on the prairie,
his only companions his horse and a
prairie wolf that hangs around the fort and
will eventually be the reason Dunbar gets
his Lakota name.

When contact with the Lakota finally
comes it is like a slow but inevitable path

. oe < eee coca :
Kevin Costner as John Dunbar in a scene from Dances with Wolves.

‘Dances a rare film
with honesty, power

towards assimilation. But this time the
tables are reversed — Dunbar is a
minority of one and his curiosity is a
catalyst that leads, not merely to his
friendship to the Lakota people, but also
his gradual absorbtion into the Amerindian
way of life.

Once this contact has been made,
Dances With Wolves flows with the
majesty of Indian ponies on a prairie
horizon. Costner’s insistence that the
Lakota language be used in the film pays
off. These are not Amerindians speaking
in broken English; there are no cliched
expressions like “heap big trouble.”
Rather, there are Amerindian actors
speaking an Amerindian language. It is an
important commitment on Costner’s part.
It gives this film authenticity and power.

Unlike the stereotypical Indians of
Hollywood fame, being shot off their
horses as they ride, whooping, around the
wagons, the Lakota characters in the film
are given both depth and diversity. Wind
In His Hair (Rodney Grant) is an imposing
warrior, wary of this strange white man.
He, in the end, comes to trust and to take
into his heart this army officer who
becomes Dances With Wolves.

Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) is the
powerful medicine man, gifted with wit
and great intelligence. He has the
foresight, or perhaps sense of foreboding,
to continually press Dunbar on how many
more white men were coming. In her
portrayal of Kicking Bird’s wife, Tantoo
Cardinal breaks the cliche of the
submissive Indian woman. In her day to
day dealings she shows she knows how to
deal with her occasionally obstinate
partner.

Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell)
is the white woman adopted into the band.
Brought up since childhood as a Lakota,
the English language, like her other
culture, is a distant and well-buried
memory. Her developing relationship with
Dunbar forces her into the painful process
of stripping away some of the layers
guarding the past. In a welcome twist, it is
Dunbar who immerses himself into her
reality as they fall in love.

The centrality of the buffalo herds to
the Lakota culture, as to all the other

plains nations, is captured in both sacred
dances and a magnificent hunt scene.
Having access to the world’s largest bison
herd, Costner is able to impart some sense
of what it must have been like to have
viewed the huge herds that travelled F
across the great plains, stretching from
horizon to horizon.

The Lakota’s hunt, in which the buffalo
is sacred and provides everything from
food to shelter to clothing, is contrasted
with the waste of the encroaching white
hunters for whom the buffalo has only
commercial value. The Lakotas can only
gaze in bewilderment and horror at the full
carcasses the white hunters leave strewn
across the prairie, taking only the hide and
the tongue. The senseless slaughter is a
warning of what lies ahead.

The Pawnee nation, the Lakota’s
traditional enemy, is painted as the “bad
Indians” in this film. We see them
slaughter settlers and carry out punitive
raids on the Lakota in what amounts to a
one-sided characterization. Yes, the
Pawnee did align with the U.S. Army
against the Sioux but given the fact the
Sioux had rifles and had inflicted a big
defeat on the Pawnee, such an alliance is
not surprising. Nor is the Pawnee’s
collaboration with a colonial power
unique.

Indeed, in 1823 Dakota and Lakota
warriors joined the Sixth U.S. Infantry in a
raid on two Minnetaree villages, showing
that even the powerful Lakota nation was
not immune to such unsavoury, if rare,
alliances. It is a small, if annoying,
weakness of the film that it comes
perilously close to making one group of
Indians good by making another group
bad. History is seldom that simple and it is
the one point where Dances With Wolves
fall short.

But in the main this is a magnificent
film. One that needs to be seen on a large
screen. Its lament for a lost way of life is
honest and hopefully audiences will leave
with the knowledge that, while a lot has
been forever destroyed, for the Lakota
nation, like all aboriginal nations, there is
still a lot to be gained.

:
}

— Paul Ogresko —