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...
... middle of paper ...
...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
This is such a good conflict, which made the movie more interesting to watch and you always waited to see what the Indians were going to do next.
We can see that in both Machimanito and Dances with Wolves, there is a conflict between the white society and the Indian society. The white trespassing society intervenes with the traditions and customs of the Indians which causes a threat to their culture. Since the white man views the Indian community as being native and tries to educate it by colonizing and implementing their own ways. Both these literary pieces show this conflict and the effects of the colonization on the Indians. While Dunbar comes to the conclusion “Nothing I’ve been told about these people is correct. They are not beggar and thieves. They are not the bogie men they’ve been made out to be.”
Dunbar welcomed the Sioux to the fort but was worried of what they planned to do with him. The language barrier was met head on, as neither could understand each other. Using gestures and objects, limited communication was accomplished on the first visit. The Sioux continued to visit Dunbar and each day progress was made. Dunbar taught the Indians some of the white culture and Kicking Bird was anxious to discover why he was in their territory and how many more white men would come. Both sides were forced to overcome the language barrier and their mutual fear and distrus...
When the Dunbar is first assigns himself to Fort Sedgwick, and sees that it is abandoned, he is still intent on staying, despite the guffaws of Timmons, a peasant who delivers him there. He starts cleaning up the camp and filling in the caves made by past residents. This shows that he places himself as a U.S. Army Soldier, and his loyalties lie with them. As the plot develops the tribe thinks that they can use Dunbar to tell them when and if more “White People” will be coming. Dunbar finds out that the Sioux people have little furnishing of buffalo left, and need more food to survive. Although Dunbar is withholding information about how many white people will be coming he still feels compelled to notify the Lakota Sioux where he saw a herd of buffalo stampeding by. He is feeling a transition in himself from soldier to Sioux, and this is even more prominent when Dunbar is given his own lodge among the tribe and is narrated to feel comfortable there. When Dunbar begins to learn Sioux and feels a sense of pride when the Sioux win against the Pawnee his evol...
Native Americans have always been interpreted as “savage beast”. We are told the stories of the Europeans coming to America and their encounter with the Native by teachers, movies, and history books. When looking at the art of people “interpreting” the Native American the idea is still quite similar. Horatio Greenough work, Rescue, shows the common idea seen by most.
As a result, both films represent Natives Americans under the point of view of non-Native directors. Despite the fact that they made use of the fabricated stereotypes in their illustrations of the indigenous people, their portrayal was revolutionary in its own times. Each of the films add in their own way a new approach to the representation of indigenous people, their stories unfold partly unlike. These differences make one look at the indigenous not only as one dimensional beings but as multifaceted beings, as Dunbar say, “they are just like us.” This is finally a sense of fairness and respect by the non-native populations to the Native Indians.
The Civil War was a hard fought battle between the North and the South. The Civil War was caused by four main things: sectionalism, lifestyle differences, secession, and slavery (Wise). Slavery was the ultimate cause of the Civil War. The different leaders from the North and South had a large impact on what happened during the Civil War and how the battles were fought. The battles of the Civil War brought turning points and tragic moments in American History. In the end the North won and took control of the country and tried to bring it back together as quickly as possible. The Reconstruction Era after the war lasted for 12 years as the Presidents tried to reunite the split country (Reconstruction). The Civil War was a long hard fought war that ultimately changed the U.S. forever.
The Civil War was an important war over the freedom of slaves in the U.S.. The Civil War is well known for being caused by the issue of slavery, but it is really a combination of different events and actions that caused tensions to rise throughout the country. The economic and political issues in the U.S., along with certain actions caused the Civil war, which is one of the United States’s worst wars. All in all, the Civil War was one of the most devastating wars for our country as a whole, and the process of rebuilding would take years and is no easy job.
Following the American Civil War, the whole nation was forever changed and was the result of many good and bad things. Although it was a very costly war and was So, the Civil War did define us and made us the good and the bad things we are and led to an extremely significant change because slavery was abolished once and for all and African American rights followed many years later, the Federal Government imposed more power over the states, our country was divided for a while, and it left the nation in debt due to the fact that we fought each other.
Dances with Wolves is an epic film made in the year nineteen ninety shot in
"Dances with Wolves" tells us the story of a white man who gets acquainted with the Sioux, who learns to love and respect them as valuable people with a culture and who discovers how wrong white people's preconceived ideas about Native Americans are.
In the beginning of this film, the "White Man" viewed these Native Americans as vicious humans that had no remorse for individuals out of their race. They did not make it any better on their part either, because they continued with their in-human killings of the "white man", and tortures. One of their famous strategies, was known as "the scalping". When Dunbar and Timmons were traveling to the fort, they viewed a decayed body with an arrow sticking out of it. Then on his way back, Timmons was shot repeatedly with arrows, scalped, and left to die. When Dunbar first came into contact with an Indian, his first reaction was fear, but somehow he built up the courage, and walked bravely and naked to confront the Indian. He then realized that as the Indian ran cowardly away from him, the Indian was just as afraid of him as he was afraid of the Indian.
The film, Dances With Wolves, was very cleverly written in my opinion. For most of the introduction, before John Dunbar begins to get friendly with the Sioux Indians, you are given an emotional expression of hatred and dislike towards the Native American Indians as they are slowly introduced into the script. There were a few scenes of brutality and savagery that triggered these emotions. For example, there was a...
The problem of water scarcity has increasingly spread throughout the world as of yet, The UN reports that within the next half- century up to 7 billion people in 60 countries which is more than the whole present population will face water scarcity (Sawin “Water Scarcity could Overwhelm the Next Generation”). As well the demand for freshwater has tripled over the past 50 years, and is continuing to rise as a result of population growth and economic development. 70% of this demand derives from agriculture which shows the influence of water on food supply globally as well not just drinking water (Sawin “Water Scarcity could overwhelm the Next Generation”). But increasing water use is not just a matter of the greater number of people needing it to drink and eat; it also comes from pollution and misuse of water supplies, by either dumping or runoff of bacteria or chemicals into water. This also “causes other pollutions as well such as soil and air pollution, accelerating wetland damage and human caused global warming” (Smith and Thomassey 25). According to UN report, recent estimates suggest that climate change will account for about 20 percent of the increase in global water scarcity in coming decades.
Freshwater is quite scarce, but it is even scarcer than one might think: about seventy percent of all freshwater is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland and is unavailable to humans. Most of the remainder is present as soil moisture or lies in deep underground aquifers as groundwater. It is not economically feasible to extract this waster for use as drinking water. This leaves less than one percent of the world’s fresh water that is available to humans. It includes the water found in lakes, reservoirs, groundwater that is shallow enough to be tapped at an affordable cost. These freshwater sources are the only sources that are frequently replenished by rain and snowfall, and therefore are renewable. At the current rates of consumption, however, this supply of fresh water will not last. Pollution and contamination of freshwater sources exacerbate the problem, further reducing the amount of freshwater available for human consumption. Something must be done if humans want to even survive in the near future: the lack of clean drinking water is already the number one cause of disease in the world today. The first step is worldwide awareness of the water crisis: governments and the citizens they govern worldwide need to know about this problem and be actively involved in solving this problem.