Weekend TV: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Schellenberg, foreground, as Sitting Bull. HBO/Annabel Reyes

In HBO's lamented Western Deadwood, we rarely saw or heard from Native Americans, except as severed heads and as a cynically-invoked threat that rationalized brutality and power grabs. HBO's movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, debuting Sunday, begins just before Deadwood did--with the massacre at Little Big Horn--but has a distinctly different perspective. The first thing we see are two Sioux boys being set upon by a line of U.S. soldiers, who kill one of the children; but the fighting then leads to the famous rout of Gen. George Custer and his troops.

The recriminations and reprisals that followed were background noise in Deadwood, but they--and the ensuing years of systematic humiliation and destruction of the Sioux--are the subject of this movie, adapted from Dee Brown's nonfiction book. (The movie itself reportedly takes some liberties with history and chronology.) The wide-ranging film chronicles the efforts to solve the "Indian problem" (part of the "problem" being that the Sioux have gold on their land) by the government, starting with the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. (Played by--who else?--perennial fictional prez and real-life possible candidate Fred Thompson, whose Law & Order boss, Dick Wolf, produced the film. If Thompson runs, HBO may have to cast Rudy Giuliani as Fiorello LaGuardia in the interest of equal time.)

The movie focuses on Sioux chief Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg); Sen. Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn), who drives Indian-affairs policy; and Dawes' conflicted young aide, the American-educated Sioux Charles Eastman (born Ohiyesa). [Update: He's played by Adam Beach.] Dawes' charge is to persuade, or threaten, the Sioux whom Sitting Bull leads to sell their land, a plan that, for all its racism and coercion, he genuinely believes is in the Indians' best interest. Sitting Bull resists, believing the payoff will cripple his tribe in the long run, but the standoff leaves the Sioux divided and destitute, leading finally to the desperate Ghost Dance movement (in which the Sioux embraced the mystical belief that they could summon their spirits of their ancestors and drive the white man away).

Given the film's historical scope, it feels compressed at two-hour length; it seems like it should have been a miniseries, and none of the characters get much room to breathe. But within those constraints, they're treated as ambiguously as you'd expect from HBO. Dawes is at once idealistic and arrogant, compassionate and condescending in his desire to force assimilation on the Sioux by any means necessary. Sitting Bull (played with monumental presence by Schellenberg) is at turns noble and vain, fighting with heart but often choosing the wrong battles, standing proud but often acting out of pique. And Eastman is well-meaning but conscious of what he's lost through assimilation; you wonder, as he does, how well he truly understands his fellow Sioux anymore. (As schoolteacher Elaine Goodale, Anna Paquin is the film's biggest name but mainly fades into the background.)

Wounded Knee's sympathies are clearly with the degraded Sioux; there's a depressing scene on the reservation in which a staged "hunt" consists of shooting cattle in a corral. But like Deadwood, the movie sees no blameless actors in this tragedy. There's striking scene in which Sitting Bull and U.S. Col. Nelson Miles (Shaun Johnston) argue the basis for their nation's claims on the gold-laden Black Hills. Miles is high-handed and ruthless, but he makes the point that, although the Sioux say they have a religious claim on the land, they themselves took the land brutally from other tribes, after being chased from Minnesota by the Chippewa. Sitting Bull counters that it's ironic for the Americans to be sanctimonious now, when they gave the Sioux the arms they used in that battle.

The exchange could just as well be about the Middle East or a dozen other areas of competing national and religious land claims. Regardless, it's not sophisticated arguments that win the battle, but rather the relentless pounding of Miles' massive artillery shells. If not a perfect work of HBO drama, Wounded Knee is still a stark and chilling illustration of how the West was won, and what happened to those who lost it.