Director: Yves Simoneau
Cast: Aiden Quinn, Adam Beach, August Schellenberg, Anna Paquin
Genre: Drama/History/Western 2007
Running time: 133 mins.
Rating:★★★★
It begins powerfully with the Sioux triumph over General Custer at Little Big Horn. The action centers on the struggle of three characters: Charles Eastman (Adam Beach), a young, Dartmouth-educated Sioux doctor, Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg), the proud Lakota chief who refuses to submit to U.S. government policies designed to strip his people of their identity, their dignity and their sacred land - The Black Hills of the Dakotas; and Senator Henry Dawes (Aiden Quinn), one of the men responsible for the government policy on Indian affairs. While Eastman and schoolteacher Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin) work to improve life for the Sioux on the reservation, Senator Dawes lobbies President Grant for kinder Indian treatment.
"It is easy to be brave from a distance. Easy, and often quite safe. Once there was no honor in killing, only necessity. Honor came with true courage. But that day is long gone." Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin) quoting an Indian saying, sets the stage of what is about to unravel. The horrors that mankind play on one another, when ego, greed, propaganda, and ignorance are embedded. Was "educating" in Christian and U.S. ways really the right method to have peace and improve life with/for the Native Americans or a way to have control over a group of people like savage dogs? What choices does one nation have when the enemy forces have what they do not? Honor and fighting for you beliefs in may not seem the immediate answer, but one that is the better route in the long run. Many questions on the events that already have known outcomes and organically retold in this film, still feel very unanswered. Suppose all one can do is to reflect on one's own actions as they choose to interact with others and the choices made.
Wonderful use of muted earthy undertones mixed in with sepia photographs that allows the audience to feel as if they are back in the nineteenth century and witnessing these events that are safely out of harms way due to moldy history books and time. The landscapes are very well-thought out and breathtaking that one can't help but wonder, how much happier and simpler life must have been before the U.S.& destroyed it. Perhaps, it is nativity and blindness on my end for saying all of this for it is beyond my comprehension what it was like before, during, and after.
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