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The Emmy-award winning HBO film "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," released this past summer, has received much praise for its portrayal of the effects of Western expansion on Native American peoples. Released this past May, the film is a fictionalized adaptation of the acclaimed book of same name by Dee Brown.
Brown's book, released in 1970, is a history of Native Americans in the late nineteenth century - a time during which throngs of white Americans were moving westward, and tensions between settlers and natives were high.
The book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" presents a chapter-by-chapter account of the effects of American expansion on native peoples - from the Apache and Diné of the Southwest to the Sioux in the Black Hills. It provides factual evidence, first-person narratives and written accounts and was given much praise for its reference-laden description of events that went long-undiscussed in American history.
Along with Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto" and Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony," "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" instantly became required reading for anyone interested in American Indian studies.
The film however, being a fictionalized adaptation, has raised more than a few eyebrows among natives and purveyors of Native American studies. While the book is an expansive history of the purported genocide of indigenous peoples, HBO's adaptation focuses primarily on the Sioux, introducing characters not mentioned in Brown's account and altering historical events to better fit the plot.
And although Hollywood adaptations of historical events are rarely left unskewed, what makes Bury My Heart's distortion all the more contentious is the opinion of an overwhelming majority of historians and native peoples that the history we're taught in school is equally inaccurate. So while Mel Gibson's romanticizing of William Wallace in the 1995 film "Braveheart" can be written off as 'movie-magic' because the actual account is relatively well-known, the same can't be said for this Emmy-award winning film.
Many Native Americans, however, didn't have high hopes for Hollywood to begin with, as it doesn't have the best track record in the portrayal of indigenous peoples.
"Expecting it to capture the intricacies of what is arguably one of the best books in its genre is probably wishful thinking at best," said Sandra Haley, a Native American graduate student of the University of Massachusetts history department.
HBO's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is a far cry from the manner in which Native Americans have been portrayed in popular culture - from the whooping savages of Clint Eastwood westerns to Italian-American actor Iron Eyes Cody shedding a single tear in environmentalist commercials. In many respects the film humanized a culture that has long been presented in two conflicting lights - either as backward and savage or naive and innocent. Shown as a beleaguered people - with virtues and vices - the film did its best to present Native Americans as people, very much like the white settlers who pushed them ever westward on the most fundamental levels.
Daniel Giat, who wrote the film's screenplay, said he had tried especially to humanize Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief and holy man, presenting him as somewhat vain and boastful, though wholeheartedly dedicated to his people. Critics say the film went too far, though, and several prominent native figures left an early screening of the film in protest.
"I walked out. Relatives of Sitting Bull won't be happy," said Joseph Brings Plenty, Lakota, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, in an interview with Indian Country Today. "They portrayed him as a cruel man; he was a holy man, he took care of the people."
But defenders of the film's use of artistic license maintain that presenting characters like Sitting Bull as flawed human beings, rather than elevating them to near sainthood, makes them all the more human, thereby making the story all the more realistic. Also, instances presented in the film such as Sitting Bull's exchange of money for photographs and autographs - as well as his participation in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show - are based in truth, and don't take away from the fact that he was a leader very much dedicated to his people and their cause.
The film also employs artistic license heavily with the introduction of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa in his native Sioux), a physician and reformer. Eastman was a prominent figure in the late-nineteenth century, but did not play an important role in the book version of Bury My Heart. The HBO adaptation, however, made Eastman the main protagonist, including a largely fictionalized internal struggle for the "assimilated" Eastman, whose film representation (played to much acclaim by Saulteaux actor Adam Beach) feared he had abandoned his people by receiving a western education.
Many have found the use of the character Eastman to be an attempt on the part of HBO to provide a sort of buffer between the Native American characters and a largely white audience. Critics, however, have deemed this unnecessary, even offensive, citing acclaimed mini-series "Roots" as rebuttal to the assumption that a white audience needs a "whiter" character to relate.
"The implied message is that white folks won't be able to relate to Native people as human beings if Hollywood doesn't take the time to construct a 'civilized savage' for them. It's offensive to everyone involved - both Natives and non-Natives," said Haley.
In some respects, the film adaptation also perpetuated some of the problems with the original text. Haley finds that the movie, much like the book, failed to give native women a voice.
"Some have critiqued the book as reflecting the tendency of historical narratives to be largely male, and the film carries this problem forward," she said.
Despite its historical inaccuracies, screenwriter Giat insists that Bury My Heart is not merely an account of a relatively unknown massacre in American history, but a testament to the perseverance of the Sioux.
"This shouldn't be the story of a massacre," he said in an interview with HBO. "This should not be the story of the end of a people. This should be the story of survival, because the Sioux did not cease to exist at Wounded Knee. Hundreds of people, innocent people, were killed there. But that society exists. And the poverty is terrible, certainly, on the reservation, but these people are struggling to survive, and they are succeeding in a very, very important way."
Giat's assertion reflects the overarching sentiment of Native American activists and indigenous peoples, which is rooted in the concept of "survivance." Survivance is a term generally employed by Native Americans to describe not only the individual survival of its people in the face of adversity, but also the perseverance of a people as a whole.
The film met much acclaim for addressing a dark stain on the history of the United States, and although it has fallen under heavy scrutiny in the wake of its five Emmys, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" succeeded in reopening the discourse. Perceptions of the film might vary, but all can agree that it brought attention back to the treatment of Native Americans by the United States government and western expansionists.
"It is probably best that it spur further reading and thinking than to be regarded as a fully factual account," said Haley.
S.P. Sullivan can be reached at spsulliv@student.umass.edu.
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