Understanding Native Americans in the Film, Dances with Wolves

Understanding Native Americans in the Film, Dances with Wolves

To dance with someone is to become one with him. When you dance, you lay selves aside and you try to move as one person. Every step flows cautiously into the next. You never want to step on the toes of the other person and with your hands you guide each other in various directions, but always together. The dance is a journey; one that brings two often very different people together. For that brief time that the two are dancing they act as one person, laying all differences aside.

The film, Dances with wolves, accomplishes this feat. For one hundred and eighty-one minutes it allows us to get caught up in the dance of the white man and the Indians. Dances with wolves, disregards cultural barriers and only focuses on people for who they are as individuals.

At the beginning of any dance, people are cautious. They must first "feel-out" the other person. They must get a sense of who the other person is, and what is meaningful to them. In the film, Dances with Wolves," John Dunbar approaches the Indians with this same apprehension. He is a white America who is alone on the frontier. He may be scared of the supposed "savages," but he never lets on.

The stereotypical Indian is a brutal savage-like beast who kills for the sake of killing and ravages the countryside. In the first scene of the movie, this is the image that I received. It seemed hard to imagine any sense of brotherhood that could be found in the hearts of the Indians as we watched them scalp an innocent American named Timmons.

My initial reactions, however, were disregarded as I continued to watch. I observed the first confrontation between Dunbar and the Indians. It was an encounter much like th...

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...ried to a terrorist with a scientifically gifted sneaky child. What I want to say, and I ask you to take this back: We must look at racism as a disease. It is a cancer. It is very good and noble that the President has started this initiative. But you cannot put a band-aid on to treat cancer."

Throughout the film and through the powerful testimonies mentioned above we realize the need for us to put stereotypes aside and truly desire to understand the Native American culture. It is only after we have "danced with them" that we can truly know them.

Works Cited

Dances with Wolves. Dir.Kevin Costner. Perf. Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, and Rodney A. Grant. 1990. videocassette.

American Indian Studies. www.jupiter.lang.osaka~v.ac.jp/~krkvls/FinalMovie

PBS News Forum. March 1998. www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/race_relations/jan- june98/denver