"Going Indian" Through Dances With Wolves

Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199391 Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) with Sioux Tribal Leaders in Dances with Wolves. Photo courtesy of Orion Pictures Corporation, All Rights Reserved. 92 Baird / Dances with Wolves "Going Indian" Through Dances With Wolves ? Robert Baird While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper name introduced . . .It was a purely wild and primitive American sound, as much as the barking of a chickaree, and I could not understand a syllable of it... I felt that I stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of America, that night, as any of its discoverers ever did. Henry David Thoreau (The Maine Woods 184-185) As soon as possible after my arrival, I design to build myself a wigwham, after the same manner and size with the rest .. .and will endeavour that my wife, my children, and myself may be adopted soon after our arrival . Thus becoming truly inhabitants of their village, we shall immediately occupy that rank within the pale of their society, which will afford us all the amends we can possibly expect for the loss we have met with by the convulsions of our own. According to their customs we shall likewise receive names from them, by which we shall always be known. My youngest children shall learn to swim, and to shoot with the bow, that they may acquire such talents as will necessarily raise them into some degree of esteem among the Indian lads of their own age; the rest of us must hunt with the hunters. J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur (Letters From an American Farmer 225) With thanks to the Blackfoot tribe who adopted me. Leslie A. Fiedler (The Return of the Vanishing American, opening epigraph) Taken together, the three quotations above are good examples of a very old, and ongoing process of the American imagination: the White discovery of, and the renaming and adoption into, the tribal society of the American Indian. "Going Indian" describes an imaginative mythopoeic process, recurring often enough in American history to merit more attention, especially after the apparent resurrection and further development of this gesture in Kevin Costner 's tremendously popular Dances With Wolves, released too long since any other great, epic western to be anything but a boondoggle- -or so we thought until "Costner' s folly" was seen by millions and had won seven Academy Awards. A traditional goal in American studies has been the search for Americanness.Crevecoeur' s third letter asked, "What is an American, " and his famous melting-pot response testified to the seriousness Crevecoeur brought to the question. Tautologically, Robert Baird is an Oklahoman with Native American ancestry. He is the Film Editor for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of General Culture (Garland, 1997) and has published in the Michigan Academician. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199393 the defining American characteristic has been the continual redefinition of the American character. It is the question itself and its rhetorical immortality which marks this nation as unique. One answer to the question of national identity proposes that the original inhabitants of North America represent "True Americans," whose character deserves emulation. Dances With Wolves accepted this not new proposal and sought to convince modern motion-picture audiences that only by going backward into history, back into tribalism, could the American hero hope to go forward. D.H. Lawrence argued that Europeans "came to America for two reasons: 1. To slough the old European consciousness completely. 2.To grow a new skin underneath, a new form. This second is a hidden process" (53). Leslie Fiedler praised Lawrence's insight, suggesting that he knew something. . .which we are born not knowing we know, being born on this soil... that the essential myth of the West and, therefore, of ourselves. ..[ is] the myth of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. Here is, for us— for better or for worse, and apparently forever—the heart of the matter: the confrontation in the wilderness of the White European refugee from civilization and the "stern, imperturbable warrior" (167) . This meeting, Fiedler noted, occasioned two possible outcomes: "a metamorphosis of...