Hailed as groundbreaking because of its sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, Dances with Wolves (1991) follows a pattern similar to that found in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), where a white American goes native, embracing and in the process co-opting American Indian culture and attitudes toward environmental adaptation. Sherman Alexie calls this “cultural appropriation” a threat to American Indian sovereignty. In the context of Dances with Wolves, such cultural appropriation serves as a threat to the Sioux Indians’ very survival. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) penetrates the Siouxs’ homes, families, and culture as a brother, but he represents the military that will soon force the tribe’s banishment to the West. Before the film’s end, however, the narrative of environmental adaptation follows an evolutionary pattern: rebellion against and rejection of U.S. culture and movement west, discovering American Indians on the plains, gaining sympathy for Sioux culture and internalizing their ideology, and clashing with the dominant culture they left behind.
For us, the narrative in Dances with Wolves harkens back to Run of the Arrow (1957) in which Pvt. O’Meara (Rod Steiger) leaves the defeated Confederacy, joins the Sioux as an ex-soldier and takes an American Indian wife. Both films reverse the narrative of environmental adaptation by inserting a sympathetic white soldier as protagonist. In both movies, however, this evolutionary narrative fails because white intruders either banish or exterminate the Sioux. In spite of the two soldiers’ initial sympathy for the American Indians that adopt them, intruding pioneers dominate the narrative. As Meeker argues: “No human has ever known what it means to live in a climax ecosystem [in which human and nonhuman nature thrive], at least not since the emergence of consciousness which has made us human. We have generally acted the role of the pioneer species, dedicating ourselves to survival through the destruction of all our competitors and to achieving effective dominance over other forms of life” (162). In Run of the Arrow and Dances with Wolves, on the other hand, the Sioux and the white men they adopt are constructed as thriving members of a climax ecosystem that dissolves only when the pioneers, the cavalry, intervene.
In Run of the Arrow, O’Meara refuses to return home after the Civil War and pledge his allegiance to the Union with whom he had been fighting as a Southerner. He rejects the Union and flees to the West, meeting a tribe of Sioux who adopt him. He marries Yellow Moccasin (Sara Montiel) and lives peacefully with the Sioux until the cavalry begins building a fort on their land. This invasion into the Sioux paradise disturbs the evolutionary narrative O’Meara had been following. In the end, the cavalry defeat the Sioux in battle. O’Meara rejoins the white military and helps defeat his adopted “family.”
John Dunbar of Dances with Wolves rejects the civilization of the eastern United States when he asks to be reassigned to a western fort. His major (Maury Chaykin) asks him, “You wish to see the frontier?” And Dunbar answers, “Yes, sir, before it’s gone,” a subtle critique of the destruction in the West and of its resources by white settlers. He then encounters Sioux near his abandoned fort and records his observations in a journal, all reported in his voiceover narration. With each meeting, Dunbar gains more sympathy for the tribe. In one early entry, Dunbar notes, “Nothing I have been told about these people is correct. They are not thieves or beggars. They are not the bogeyman they are made out to be. On the contrary, they are polite guests and I enjoy their humor.”
Before the end of Dunbar’s evolutionary narrative, he has adopted an American Indian worldview. As Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) asserts of Dunbar’s transformation, “I was just thinking of all the trails in this life, there are some that matter most. It is the trail of a true human being. I think you are on this trail, and it is a good one.” Ten Bears (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman) even tells Dunbar, when Dunbar expresses concern about the cavalry’s hunt for him, “The white man the soldiers are looking for no longer exists. Now there is only a Sioux named Dances with Wolves.”
Ultimately, however, the narrative breaks down because whites, like intruding pioneers, threaten to wipe out the Sioux and their land. The cavalry does find Dunbar and arrest him for desertion, but he escapes and, like the Sioux, vanishes into the wilderness, taking Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell) with him. Unlike the Sioux, however, Dunbar and Stands With a Fist are white and can integrate easily into white culture. The Sioux, however, must contend with white men whose numbers are, as Dunbar explains, “like the stars.”
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