Last night, I went to the L.A. premiere of HBO’s upcoming Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, based on Dee Brown’s historical text by the same name, which will start showing Memorial Day weekend. There has been some hubbub, chronicled in a recent New York Times article about its historical accuracy - most glaringly, Adam Beach’s character Charles Eastman, who was a real man (half Sioux, half white, a doctor who married a white woman) inserted into the narrative in an unreal way, in order to pull in white viewers. From the NYT article:
“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.
From the same article; Tom Thayer is an executive producer on the project.
“The book is basically an editorialized textbook,” Mr. Thayer said. “It doesn’t have a single narrative; it’s anthropological and episodic.” Therefore, he added, “we felt that to tell a story of that size, the Eastman character would be a great hand-holder for the audience.”
Overall, I thought it was a good film. As a Native person, it was emotional - it always is - to see depictions of the slaughter of your people. There were a few clunky moments when put against some of the best television in history - also by HBO, The Wire, Band of Brothers - but I do hope people tune in. I think it’s an important project; the fact of the matter is people still don’t know much about Native history. Jacqueline Johnson, exec director for the National Congress of the American Indians, notes in the NYT article what is perhaps most valuable about the film - namely, its portrayal of the impact of federal policy on Native people. At the same time, it is disheartening that our story, which is compelling and brutal and elemental to the fabric this nation was built upon, is not enough (or perceived as not enough by the execs making the decisions) to bring in a white audience.
Not that the idea is far-fetched. My husband always points to Amistad; a Steven Spielberg production that no one went to see. The plight of Jews during World War II? Yes! The plight of Black people during slavery? Not so much.
My other frustration is that we still don’t get to see Natives in the present day. We’re still stuck in sepia tone. There’s a modern Native movie called Four Sheets to the Wind that’s received accolades at Sundance and hasn’t gotten distribution. A recent LA Weekly article discusses the film and the state of Native cinema. It sounds promising if it ever sees the light of day, or, rather, the dim of theaters.
Adam Beach as Charles Eastman and Aidan Quinn as Henry Dawes.
August Schellenberg as Sitting Bull.
Anna Paquin as Elaine Goodale Eastman and Beach.
Before.
After.
1 response so far ↓
1 Larry McNeil in Larryland // May 12, 2007 at 2:26 am
As an Indigenous scholar and artist, I am used to writing critiques about colonialist interactions between the mainstream culture and our own. It seems that the most intellectual kind of response I can muster is that HBO is full of shit on this one. Come on, are they even aware of how racist their comments are? I don’t know which is worse, making racist statements that one is cognizant of, or racist comments that they are oblivious to. Their writer, Daniel Giat actually came out and said that, “Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project.”
Would they say the same thing about African American stories? Would they need a part-white man to play the role of Dr. Huxtable on the Cosby Show in order to get a white audience? Hey all you morons at HBO, if you want an Indigenous story to be told, hire Indigenous writers. What do you think Mr. Cosby? Was your role miscast and there should have been a part-white man to play your role? If this writer said the above about African Americans, there would have been a firestorm in the media. Instead, there was a collective non-story, because it is all right to make openly racist comments in the media about Native Americans.
If it were indeed a good film, what would have happened if it were written by Indigenous writers and we got an excellent film instead? Thank you for posting this review, I appreciate it my niece. What was kind of cool about your piece is that I have been working on a new lithograph (with the Tamarind Art Institute) that uses one of the stupid Edward Curtis prints, which by the way is sepia toned.
One of my own recent essays talks about colonialist photographers like Edward Curtis whose magnum opus “Vanishing Race” body of sepia photographs is in reality about glamorizing the idea of the genocidal practices against Native Americans. The Vanishing Race didn’t poetically ride into the sunset and vanish all by themselves, they were murdered on a scale not seen before or since. Anyway, this is part of what informs the politically loaded sepia photographs of Native Americans made by white guys. Think about that the next time you buy an expensive photograph by the old white guys, especially Curtis; that there are issues of racism that come along as stinky baggage. Hmmm. All this from sepia tone? Wait, I’m not even started yet…
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