Celebrities (Male)   Male film actors   Aidan Quinn  

Movie digs up tragedy of the massacre of the Sioux - 02 Jun 2007 - NZ Herald: World / International News

Movie digs up tragedy of the massacre of the Sioux - 02 Jun 2007 - NZ Herald: World / International News
Howard Hughes  |  by www.nzherald.co.nz. All rights reserved. 17.07 | 19:16

Anna Paquin and Adam Beach in the movie that some say has been Hollywood-ised for a largely white American audience.

It was a book that transformed the way people thought about the Wild West and rewrote the history of the Native Americans who were dispossessed of their lands by white settlers.
Now Dee Brown's bestseller, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, has been shown on American television as a feature-length movie and is reigniting a debate over some of the most tragic and bloody episodes in American history.


The release of the film comes at a time when Native Americans are undergoing a period of turmoil and change - some tribes are growing rich on the proceeds of legalised gambling while others remain in desperate poverty.
"It is a very divided community. Gambling money has been both good and bad as some tribes have become very rich," said Professor Dawn Riggs, an expert in Native American history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.


Back in 1970, when Brown's book was published, Native Americans were all but forgotten and powerless on their reservations, reduced in popular culture to stock images of whooping warriors in cowboy films or friendly farmers in Thanksgiving Day ceremonies.
Brown's book changed all that. Chapter by chapter, it chronicled the experience of individual tribes at the hands of white men.

And though the characters and locations changed, the story was always the same: white treachery, the loss of Native American lands and the extermination of a culture. It has sold more than 5 million copies.
"It had an enormous impact.

It changed everything," said Riggs.
Now cable channel HBO has turned the book into a two-hour epic starring Aidan Quinn, Adam Beach and Anna Paquin. The film has already been screened to Native American audiences and had its premiere in Rapid City in South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation where the battle of Wounded Knee took place.


The movie scraps much of the original book and focuses on the final chapters and the efforts of the Sioux to resist white settlers on the Great Plains. It begins with the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where General George Custer was killed, and ends with Wounded Knee, which was mainly a massacre of Sioux civilians by the US Army.
August Schellenberg as Sitting Bull is also seen as brutal and flawed.


One of its main characters is Charles Eastman, a Sioux doctor who was used by the US Government as an example of how Native Americans should be assimilated into the white man's world. Eastman - who does not appear in Dee's book - marries a white woman, played by Paquin.
That has led to some scepticism as to whether the book has been "Hollywood-ised" for a largely white American audience.


RSS allows you to subscribe and receive news directly to your computer.

Read more on by www.nzherald.co.nz. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Native Americans, Native American, Wounded Knee, Adam Beach, Anna Paquin
Related news
Post comments
Name
Place
2 + 1 =
Comments