Same here. I genuinely enjoyed the film. And I get that it was deliberately revisionist, coming on the heels of decades of jingoistic films that supported the idea of westward expansion and manifest destiny. But the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction, and actually promoted a totally ahistorical "noble savage" myth.
Seriously, read "Empire of the Summer Moon." I know it's about the Comanches, not the Sioux or Cheyenne, but they were also a plains tribe, and had a lot in common, including a warlike culture of raiding their enemies -- other tribes, as well as white interlopers to their ancestral lands. Dear God some of the passages are spine-chilling to read. Routine in plains tribal warfare was killing all the adult enemy males who didn't escape -- those not slain in battle were almost invariably tortured to death -- gang rape and either murder or enslavement of adult females, murder of infants and small toddlers (they were apparently considered more trouble than they were worth caring for), and sometimes adoption of pre-adolescents into the tribe, because they were at an age where they could be and often were easy to assimilate completely, and the hard life on the plains meant tribes always had some difficulty maintaining their numbers, so there was a strong incentive to add these children to the tribe.
This movie makes the massacre of the Cheyenne village by the U.S. army look like an outrageous and inexcusable crime -- which it was, of course -- but it totally omits that an attack on that same village by an enemy Indian tribe, or an attack on an enemy Indian tribe by the Cheyenne themselves would have been every bit as cruel and barbaric.
reply
share