Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE looks at the conflicts that occurred with the Native Americans when the U.S. began to expand west in the 1860s and 1870s. The Little Big Horn massacre of General Custer (shown from a distance, in a striking, overhead shot) happens under Native American warriors led by Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg). The victory is a last hurrah for the Native Americans trying to hold onto sacred Black Hills lands, in the wake of a series of peace treaties largely broken/rewritten by the Whites greedy for railroad and mining territory. A U.S. Senator, Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn) favors a peaceful policy of relocating the Indians to "Reservations," government-sustained but barren lands, to be Christianized, farm-trained, and cajoled to legally sell the Black Hills. Even Sitting Bull, weary of battles and casualties, turns in his rifle and becomes a Reservation celebrity, signing autographs and posing for photos. Dawes' biggest "success story," Charles Eastman (Adam Beach), a college-educated Native American doctor who was a boyhood fighter at Little Big Horn, comes to work at the Reservation, but he's appalled by the poverty, indolence, deadly fever epidemics, and restlessness that finally lead to an outburst of bloody violence at a place called Wounded Knee.