Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Just after the battle at Little Bighorn. The Sioux have won but it is not an end; the army returns and the question of land does not close. The narrative follows three people. Charles Eastman is a doctor born Sioux; raised in white schools, he stands between two worlds. Sitting Bull goes on resisting and crosses into Canada. Senator Henry Dawes is preparing a law in Washington; to him the answer is dividing the lands into individual ownership. The narrative follows these three strands across thirty years and ends at Wounded Knee. Yves Simoneau directs. Aidan Quinn, August Schellenberg, Adam Beach and Anna Paquin are in the cast. It was made for HBO. The source is Dee Brown's book of the same name, published in 1970 and counted among the works that changed how the history of Native Americans is seen. The adaptation takes not the whole book but its final chapters and rebuilds them through three characters. It won awards in many categories at the Emmys. The matter it treats is the harm of good intentions; the Dawes character is not ill meaning and his law produces destroying results. Charles Eastman was a real person; he practised medicine and treated the wounded after Wounded Knee. Its limit is structure; thirty years are compressed into two hours and some events are skipped. Who it is for: anyone curious about historical drama and Native American history. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the ending bitter, and the narrative compressed.