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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Do we really have any right to be surprised, in light of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, that we now strap electrodes to the genitals of detained Iraqis and suspected terrorists who have not been tried? Should we be horrified? Absolutely. Angered? Without question. But it certainly shouldn’t come as a shock that our government’s policies have allowed wiggle room for such depravity and dehumanization—we’ve been doing it since we first arrived on this continent to Native Americans, Africans, immigrants, minorities, and (fill in the blank yourself). Evil is engrained in our history, as Yves Simoneau’s profound Bury My Heart as Wounded Knee makes absolutely clear. We shake our heads sadly at our past as if its atrocities have remained buried and left behind, but we’re certainly only fooling ourselves if we think we’ve learned to rise above it. Forgive me if I sound pessimistic, but at the time of this writing, I just read a headline about how torturous water-torture really is according to Michael Mukasey. But I digress. This film, based on the famous book by Dee Brown (which I haven’t read, but now intend to), concerns the final days of the displaced Sioux nation in the United States, beginning with Little Big Horn in 1876 and concluding with the slaughter at Wounded Knee in 1890, in which the 7th Calvary massacred unarmed (and fleeing) Sioux men, women, and children after shots were fired at a Ghost Dance demonstration. The scenes in between aren’t much prettier, and they deal with the slow, assured genocide of an entire race of people by white senators and military officers who justified their dark policies with charismatic rhetoric and effective fear mongering (“those savages are enemies of our civilized liberties, and they must be assimilated” is essentially what they alleged—sound familiar?). Director Simoneau primarily works from the point of view of the Sioux nation as United States policies closes in greedily on them; if sometimes those policies are not clearly defined in the narrative, it is because Simoneau masterfully allows us to experience the Sioux’s fearful displacement from their own perspective, which is not always a thoroughly informed one. The shifty eyes of senators and generals reveal what their increasingly contradictory campaign promises cannot, so it is no shocker that sometimes the politics of events are undefined or even unspoken. Though three white actors—Aidan Quinn, Anna Paquin, and J.K. Simmons—get high billing in the ads, the narrative particularly focuses on four Sioux men, often in periodical intervals effectively sectioned off by replications of Old West photographs that help visualize the era in which these proceedings took place. These men are all manipulated or double-crossed by the American government in one way or another: Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg) is the last chief to surrender his gun to the American government and is dumped on a reservation without any consideration to his legacy; Charles Eastman A.K.A. Ohiyesa (played as a child by Chevez Ezaneh and as a young man by Adam Beach) is an “assimilated Indian” raised by whites and used by Senator Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn) as the perfect example of the potential in civilized Indians; Gall (Eric Schweig), Sitting Bull’s brother and Charles’ father, converts to Christianity at first before he is condemned to the monotony of disease-ridden farmland; and Chief Red Cloud (Gordon Tootoosis), aging and blind, is content with being a pawn for the government if it means that peace and at least a semblance of his culture is maintained among his people. The film follows their journeys to completion, and some are more successful than others in realizing their goals, or at least the residue of their goals. Gall in particular speaks the line in the film that best sums up the dilemma of all Indians: “The earth belongs to the white man. There is no future without him.” It is a reluctant admission, but a perceptive one—spoken to his son Ohiyesa (not yet given the Christian name Charles) after he takes him from his Sioux village and places him in a boarding school dedicating to turning Indian children white. Gall sends Ohiyesa off singing a Christian hymn, which softly and briefly transforms into a Sioux chant. Though Ohiyesa only hears the hymn, it is Gall’s chant that echoes throughout the rest of the film, informing the underlining theme that the future indeed belongs to the white man. Before the picture is over, not all of the above characters, brave men all, choose to take this news sitting down, but they do come to the realization that there are more ways to stand up than a call to bloody arms: It is certainly no coincidence that the picture begins with Sitting Bull’s defeat of Custer and ends with a slaughter in which not one Indian lifts a finger. But this is not a propaganda picture. What makes Bury My Heart at Wounded Me ultimately so effective is that it is not one of those black-and-white, politically correct films (though such pictures have their merit) in which every Native American is purely innocent and every white is absolutely evil. The film is too unblinking in its depiction of the human soul to be so naive. There is an extraordinary sequence in which Sitting Bull, who oversaw the massacre at Little Big Horn, sits with General Sherman (Colm Feore), and they have a serious discussion about the nature of the land and who has a right to live on it. Sitting Bull states that the American government should not rob the land from his people; Sherman makes a strong case that the Sioux took the land from others because they felt it was their God-given right, and now white Americans are merely carrying on the tradition by doing exactly the same thing to the Sioux. Sitting Bull responds that his God is the only true god, and thus the logical paradox begins. The scene, which is one of the film’s many great moments, sounds startlingly modern and does not place blame on any one thing or mentality, unless you count the entire human condition: It seems that just about every reason for killing these days has something to do with God being on the side of the ones who want to justify murder. We are creatures limited by our nature, after all. Both men in this scene know this, as Sitting Bull’s comeback to Sherman reveals: “I suggest you listen to our God. It’s time to fight.” Structurally, the film is a chronicle of these men’s lives and experiences, and it is a lovingly told document that neither overcomplicates nor oversimplifies. If viewed as a western-genre film, I believe that Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee works sort of as an antithesis to Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), a great entertainment that plays up the mythological Old West but reverses its effect so that the whites are all evil and the Indians are mostly pure-hearted. Yves Simoneau is working on a different level here, a quieter level that does not want to romanticize so much as tell this tale stripped of philosophy and metaphor, except obvious ideas that the Sioux is a lost people that literally watched their own extinction take place around them. One scene in particular is astonishing in this implication without being overtly cinematic: Sitting Bull freshly arrives at the Sioux reservation; he meets his son, who has become a very white-looking sheriff. “Look, father, we can hunt here!” he says excitedly, and he dashes into a muddy, fenced-in enclosure where a white farmer releases a small cow. Sitting Bull’s son taunts the cow on horse for a moment before shooting it, after which he raises his gun and shouts a proud war cry. Watch Sitting Bull’s face while this scene takes place: It reveals a combination of bewilderment, unease, and disgust. His son, once a proud warrior, has been reduced to a parody so indoctrinated that he can no longer see that that this “hunt” is just a farce. It is the greatest single visual I have ever seen for the plight of the Native American in the movies. But certainly not all of the whites are presented as bad. Clearly Anna Paquin as a white woman accepted by the Sioux’s reservation unquestionably realizes what is happening. Less obviously, we never doubt the sincerity of Aidan Quinn’s Henry Dawes, a good man who seems to truly care about what happens to the Indian Nations. His ultimate flaw is perhaps that he takes the idea of “assimilation” a little too seriously, and honestly thinks that such integration is doing the Sioux a favor. And keep an especially careful eye on Lt. Walsh (Patrick St. Esprit), the Canadian border officer who initially looks after Sitting Bull and his tribe after they flee north. Here is a man concerned for the death of a race and fighting with all his might to keep them intact, even though he must follow orders and understands little about Sioux customs or practices. The great sin of Anglo-Americans depicted here is that they individually cannot relate to a different custom, try to as they may, and so collectively they respond with great evil. The individual stories of the four principle Sioux are very moving, but particularly so are the accounts of Sitting Bull—who transforms from a warrior chief to a vagabond in Canada before returning to America with his last remaining warriors, first as a pragmatist who doesn’t mind exploiting his celebrity and finally as an social activist against the injustices he has seen—and Charles Eastman, a young man who is first willing to help the cause of assimilation before the weight of his heritage makes his shame nearly unbearable. August Schellenberg plays Sitting Bull as a man who has seen so much war that nothing startles him anymore; disasters and heartache are absorbed into his increasingly numb soul and suppressed for infrequent moments of emotional outbursts. It’s a careful, restrained performance. As Eastman, Adam Beach is as a complete revelation; his journey from Sioux to Christian to Sioux again is really the heart of the film, and he carries it with the emotional ferocity of a wounded animal who has been kept at bay long enough to feel a sort of comfort in his caged condition. The scene in which he explains how he got the name “Charles” is at once heartbreaking and humorous, and Beach pulls it off with rhythm and energy that is kind of miraculous. There are so many familiar, talented Native American characters actors around that when I see them in a new film, I feel like I’m watching old friends; Beach, on the other hand, so consistently reinvents himself that I hardly ever recognize him from film to film. Every role reveals a new dimension in his talent. Keep an eye on this guy; between this and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, I’m convinced that we’re looking at one of the most talented actors to emerge out of Hollywood in quite some time. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is unflinching in its approach to its subject matter, and unapologetic in its critique of American policy. That last sentence, and indeed this whole essay, might instantly make some readers who feel I have an anti-American bias stop reading, but let me assure you: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is not a politically motivated film, at least not as much as, say, Gavin Hood’s Rendition. It primarily allows itself to be an elegy for the lost dead, a sad remembrance of a displaced people living in perpetual flux as the American government kept shifting and retracting its promises. We wanted back the land that we pledged to the Native Americans, so we methodically took it through both political and forceful means. We therefore broke our own treaties and justified it by insisting that changing times in the American civilization couldn’t wait for Sioux to be assimilated into our society, as if this was a requirement to live on land that we invaded to begin with. These statements are not a political biases, but historical facts. But see, here I am saying “we” when referring to the white Americans of the late nineteenth century. I was not there and am ashamed by this historical time period, but the film moves with such urgency and despair, and with such precise historical care, that it seems as unsullied and as contemporary as today’s newspaper headlines. I say “we” in the same context that I use it when referring to our government’s secret interrogation policies across the world. My only consolation to those headlines is that someday a talented filmmaker might document this current, troubled era in our history with as much grace, detail, and sadness as this film achieves. Cast: HBO Films production. Directed by Yves Simoneau. Written by Daniel Giat, from the book by Dee Brown. No M.P.A.A. rating; contains scenes of violence and some language. Running time: 132 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: May 27, 2007 (premiered soon after on HBO). |
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