Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Tim Giago had an excellent editorial last week regarding the HBO mini-series docudrama "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee", which was nominated for something like 17 Emmy's. I found this latter fact depressing as I found it to be so completely misrepresentative of Dee Brown's original book. I was initially reticent to watch the movie when reading a newspaper interview with the producers who had decided to insert a love story and an individuals who was half Indian and half European in order to appeal to the broader "White" audience. This latter fact alone should have precluded anyone from watching the show or awarding it as it basically performs the paternalistic actions that the book was arguing against. It would appear that the message of the book flew right over the producers head.

I will admit I did watch (it was even worse than Into the West) and was depressed that so many of the important aspects of the book were glossed over including, the massacre at Sand Creek, Red Cloud's War, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the assassinations of both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and then finally the Ghost Dance and the massacre at Wounded Knee. They portrayed the Indians as unwitting and passive actors in the framework of historical events. This is just wrong, they were active participants in some of the most significant occurrences in U.S. history. One example includes the only war that the US has ever admitted to losing was the Fort Laramie Treaty signed in 1868 between the several Gret Plains tribes and the US Government. Granted its provisions were subsequently ignored and today the reservations of the Plains Indian tribes in Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and the Dakotas are some of the poorest places in the county. If the producers of this show wanted to do justice to the Native Americans of the country they should have stuck to the facts and not to the fanciful story telling they relied on. The reason the original book was a bestseller was because people all over the world were willing to listen to the original message of this American tragedy.

Oh yeah, I'm also kind of upset that Emmy's snubbed The Wire.