From the Editor:
I am sure many of you saw the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves. It made Costner world-famous and beloved in Indian Country; there was even a small museum in Deadwood for the movie souvenirs. "Indians" were on film and the BIG SCREEN, and that seemed momentous back then.
What followed was 500 Nations in 1995.
Description:
His new project THE WEST, (8 part series) premiers tonight on The History Channel:
https://www.history.com/shows/kevin-costners-the-west
From Executive Producers Kevin Costner and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kevin Costner’s The West is an eight-part series that provides a fresh look at the epic history of the American West by delving into the desperate struggle for the land itself –and how it still shapes the America we know today. The West has fired the imaginations of Americans since the end of the Revolutionary War, when settlers first began their relentless push beyond the Appalachians. In their quest for new lands and better lives – or just hoping to strike it rich – many became legends: the explorers of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, migrant families in covered wagons beating the trail to Oregon, feared outlaws and the lawmen that hunted them down, abolitionists who fought slavery on this new frontier, cowboys and ranchers who sought to claim their piece of the American dream through hard work. But the pioneers who staked their claims to the West also sparked fierce conflicts with native nations, and The Miami, Blackfeet, Comanche and Lakota brought together powerful alliances to defend their ancestral lands. While the West offers a chance to explore, to build, to strike it rich or start anew, there is a powerful truth at the heart of all these dreams: this land has the unique power both to promise bounty…and bring bloodshed.
(👆PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT WHEN YOU WATCH THE SERIES)
Of course not everyone was happy with Costner's Dances With Wolves, a fictional movie and many people wanted to believe it was true. It was not.
The movie had many inaccuracies.
"...A different kind of deployment of Lakota history marked the 1990 motion picture Dances with Wolves, which portrayed the Lakotas in the twilight of their buffalo-centered plains existence, about to be mowed down by the U.S. Army. Capitalizing on the Lakotas’ outsized place in popular consciousness, the director-producer-star Kevin Costner and the screenwriter Michael Blake had little use for the actual Native American history. They simply replaced the Comanches, the protagonists of Blake’s 1988 novel on which the film was based, with the Lakotas without changing the key historical events. The result was a jarring mishmash whereby the formidable Lakotas were victimized by bloodthirsty Pawnees, who in reality had been at the receiving end in their long-lasting feuds and wars, and where a Lakota elder holds the helmet of a Spanish conquistador while reminiscing about his nation’s ancient clashes with Spanish colonists—which would have been fine had the protagonists been the Comanches in the southern Plains. In a 1991 interview, Blake explained the change through numbers: “the Comanche pool (of actors) would have been too small to utilize in terms of leading roles and extras. A bigger reason for the change is that the largest buffalo herd on earth is kept near South Dakota, where the film was ultimately shot, on territory the Sioux had formerly inhabited.” It is not hard to imagine a different kind of logic at play: the Lakotas, the vanquishers of Custer, could fill more seats."
READ: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2020/01/07/dances-with-wolves-and-the-many-abuses-of-lakota-history/
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