by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Only three westerns have ever taken top prize at the Academy Awards. The first was Cimarron in 1931, and the second was the subject of this month’s column: Dances With Wolves. The third, Unforgiven, followed 24 months later, and none have won since. While John Ford is the only director to win Best Director four times, the only movie he directed to win Best Picture was How Green Was My Valley, which is not a western. While these facts are fun trivia, they’re worth starting with for Dances With Wolves because that’s the film’s most enduring legacy at this point. 

On a story level, Dances With Wolves is a revisionist western that covers some of the same ground as The Outlaw Josey Wales. We follow Lt. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner), a Civil War veteran in the U.S. Army, as he requests to be transferred to the most remote posting available. He is sent to Fort Hayes, in Kansas, where he repeats his request to his new commanding officer, who sends him to Fort Sedgwick, in the Colorado Territory, near the Nebraska Territory border. Dunbar arrives to find the fort basically abandoned, but decides to stay and await reinforcements. He doesn’t realize that his orders were the last act of a commanding officer who killed himself before filing them, and that there is no record of his posting. Much of the film’s focus is Dunbar’s ingratiating himself with members of the Lakota tribe. A peaceful rapport is established, in an act of historical revision.

From a representation perspective, Dances With Wolves is a mixed bag at best. On the positive side, Lakota characters like Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), and Chief Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) are presented as dimensional characters. These three, and a few more who get significant screen time, all have distinct personalities and character arcs. It’s good to hear a western where much of the language spoken is in an Indigenous tongue, as well. I do believe that Dances With Wolves is an attempt at making amends, and Costner and author/screenwriter Michael Blake were well-intentioned at showing respect towards the people being depicted.

However, there are some major problems. I am not going to try and focus on the particular details of the depiction of the Lakota or Pawnee in the film, as I am not an expert on their cultures or history. Instead, it’s much more within my knowledge to consider the choices made here and what they suggest about the story being told. This revision of history was eloquently summarized by Roger Ebert:

In real life, such contacts hardly ever took place. The dominant American culture was nearsighted, incurious and racist, and saw the Indians as a race of ignorant, thieving savages, fit to be shot on sight. Such attitudes survived until so recently in our society - just look at the B Westerns of the 1940s - that we can only imagine how much worse they were 100 years ago. In a sense, Dances With Wolves is a sentimental fantasy, a "what if" movie that imagines a world in which whites were genuinely interested in learning about a Native American culture that lived more closely in harmony with the natural world than any other before or since. But our knowledge of how things turned out - of how the Indians were driven from their lands by genocide and theft - casts a sad shadow over everything.

There may have been individuals who tried to build bridges to the Indigenous tribes of the Plains, but even within Dances With Wolves, Dunbar is worried when the Lakota ask him how many more white men are coming. He eventually says their number will be “like the stars.” 

This choice, the central tenet of the movie, perpetuates the myth that America’s treatment of our Indigenous peoples is something that happened in the past, and that the genocide perpetuated was complete and is over. However, there are still millions of Americans who are Native American or belong to Native American ethnic groups. Indigenous Americans live in every state in the country, and like Black Americans, continue to face disadvantages due to discrimination, othering, and structural inequalities built into our systems. As I write this, the Supreme Court was hearing arguments in Haaland v. Brackeen, a consolidated series of cases centering on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA was designed to stop Native children from being removed from their families and tribes and given to white families. At stake in this case is the law but potentially also the concept of sovereign tribal law itself. Not being a lawyer, that link explains it better than I could, so read the CNN article linked in this paragraph. The relevant part to this example is that in 2022, America is still stumbling over how to treat the tribes whose land we stole. For many alive today, these tribes are invisible, or at best, known for casinos. 

Dances With Wolves, while lauded at the time for its representation, still centers a white person’s story and experience. It is not an Indigenous story, but a white story. It speaks to our guilt and our fantasy of connecting with a “pristine” version of this country, and of being more enlightened than those that actively stole land, but doesn’t require us to do anything about it. Dunbar is a sensitive and interesting character, but he is a fictional conscience that we can claim no right over. Because he is in the past, he can’t be aspirational. Similar to Outlaw Josey Wales using Native Americans as a way to justify the Lost Cause, Dunbar allows modern whites to point and say, “if we had been there, we would have been like him.” On some level, that may be true, as Dunbar accomplishes nothing. The white men on the Plains are as numerous as the stars. We killed the buffalo, put the Native tribes onto reservations, and put up fences. White people saw a land they described as “free” and did everything we could to control and extract from it.