Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007) ****

Adapted from the sprawling book by Dee Brown, the film wisely takes the route of one particular tribe to relate the general native American experience of the late 1800's. I've briefly skimmed through the chapters before and it culls together an incredible amount of history and accounts from numerous tribes and it simply wouldn't have been feasible to cover all that on a conventional level. Even then, it falls a little short for that very reason. But the work is exceptional despite this predicament and I encourage anyone to check this out.

Choosing to focus on the Sioux, it begins at the outset of the historic battle of Little Big Horn in which Custer and his men were killed. From there, it soon develops a fork in which the Sioux are destined to survive on a reservation and a young Sioux boy is taken to learn the ways of the civilized white man through boarding school. It's this story that particularly interests me due to the fact that light hasn't really been shed on the American Indian boarding school experience during that period. Ohiyesa (top left photo), or Charles Eastman as he came to be known, is the youth the film focuses on and he grows to be a model native for hopes of assimilation. In terms of the Sioux experience (more Lakota than anything else), they cover the Dawes Act of 1887, the capture and death of Sitting Bull, the Wounded Knee Massacre soon after, and the Ghost Dance religion that would spread by way of a shaman named Wovoka. Don't fret: there's more than what I've listed here and it goes to show the care that went into making this production.

If there's one thing I wish to address, it's the nature of the Ghost Dance. Wovoka never intended to propagate the prophecy that the white man will soon disappear but rather, that the natives should learn to live in peace with the whites. This was the genesis but as other tribes picked this up as it spread northward into the Plains, other tribes soon interpreted it as the way it's told in the film. So in this sense, it was a tad inaccurate but it was still great that they chose to emphasize it at all. However, the film glosses over why and how the Ghost Dance played a huge role leading up to Wounded Knee. I felt this could've made the present scene stronger than it is now without detracting from the overall arc of the narrative.