Review: 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' lives on

Friday, May 25, 2007  

The National Museum of the American Indian was a fitting place to screen "Bury My Wounded Knee," HBO's adaptation of the best-selling book by Dee Brown. The museum and the film both seek to educate the public about Indian people, as NMAI Director Rick West noted.

The movie, which debuts Sunday, largely succeeds in its mission. For a little over two hours, viewers get a crash course in some significant events in recent Indian history: the Battle of Little Big Horn, the theft of the Black Hills, the passage of the Dawes Act and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

But don't be surprised if everything seems a bit too familiar. If you watched "Into The West," the 2005 TNT mega-series that tackled Indian-White relations in the late 1800s, you'll see many of the same actors and some rather similar scenes, all the way down to the hair-cutting and Christian name-choosing at the boarding school.

Where "Wounded Knee" promises to be different takes viewers back to the NMAI and its location in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. The movie reminds us of the long-lasting -- and mainly negative -- effects that actions in Washington, D.C., have on Indian people.

An early scene with President Ulysses S. Grant (Fred Thompson, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate) and future Massachusetts Sen. Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn), the force behind the law that broke up the tribal land base, sets the stage. We eventually learn that Dawes is a "friend" to Indian Country who goes so far as to hire Charles Eastman (Adam Beach), a mixed-race Lakota "success" story who was educated in White schools, to carry out his assimilation plan.

Back in the Dakotas, Chief Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg in a particularly masterful performance), struggles to maintain his treaty, hunting and land rights in the face of encroachment by non-Indians. He's eventually forced to move to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where he's pained by the treatment of his family, his people and his Big Horn allies, including Chief Red Cloud (Gordon Tootoosis).

The Washington and Indian paths cross when Eastman is sent to the reservation to start a health clinic. He struggles to secure funding for basic supplies and equipment and repeatedly begs Dawes, whom he considers a mentor, for help. Nothing ever happens.

Dawes eventually comes to the reservation but it's not to solve problems -- it's to whittle down the land promised to the Sioux Nation by parceling out individual allotments. He warns Sitting Bull and others that his offer represents "one good shot" (to borrow a phrase from a sitting Senator) and if they don't accept, well, he's going to move on.

More than 100 years later, it turns out, the "Indian problem" still isn't resolved.

So where next? Only at the end do viewers learn of the real-life impacts of the events depicted in the movie: how tribes lost 90 million acres between 1887 and 1934, how the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun called the theft of the Black Hills one of the most "dishonest" actions in history and how the Sioux Nation refuses to accept a trust fund for loss of the land.

But the rolling credits might be little too late for "Wounded Knee" to make a real dent in the minds of the public. HBO's next project should take up the Indian trust fund debacle, a real-life massacre taking place today.

Relevant Links:
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, HBO - http://www.hbo.com/films/burymyheart
Adam Beach, official message board - http://www.adam-beach.com/beach_talk