I think these are points with real validity, and deserve to be taken seriously.
That said, these problems are hardly unique to DWW; in fact, I’d say these sorts of issues are almost unavoidable in films made by white people for white audiences.
BwanaBob says:
It’s not that you can’t make a movie with both peoples, but that any representation as interpreted through the eyes of a conquering culture is going to be problematic in some way.
I think DWW does as good a job as any period movie I can think of so far to deal with some of the issues that plague Hollywood as far as Native American representation. I love the film, and think it’s maybe Costner’s best role. But, yes, DWW both does a relative good job managing its content while also perpetuating some trite White person storytelling shortcuts around Native Americans.
Contemporaries? Not really, from what little I’ve seen. It was the perfectly reasonable outcome of pre-existing rivalries and was pretty much regarded as such. The Pawnee at that time were constantly under pressure by groups like the Lakota and it only make sense for them to ally with others in retaliation. It was the same with all the Plains tribes - constantly shifting alliances and perpetual tribal warfare was the stuff of life. But movies always over-simplify everything.
In the book of Little Big Man it is the same Cheyenne who take the title character in who also wipe out his family while drunk, not the Pawnee. The most prominently mentioned scouts are not Pawnee, but Arikara( “ree” ), who are the ones the title character mentions not particularly caring for, because everyone had a different “taste” for different Indians. But having the Cheyenne massacre the family fucks with the good guy/bad guy dividing line in the movie, so it got tossed. And the scene with the Arikara( a group not many are casually aware of )was cut, so it just convenient for the director and screenwriters to conflate both groups with the Pawnee, a better known tribe than the Arikara and one who usually allied with the U.S. but had very occasionally killed white settlers as well.
These alliances were makeshift and often not particularly consistent. The Arikara for instance once got into a fight with white trappers which led to an alliance of the trappers and various Sioux tribes including the akota assaulting an Arikara village. The Crow were famously U.S. allies, but they too got into occasional fights with trading posts and the like. The Cheyenne and Lakota are usually linked as allies because they were during the final period of the Plans wars they were - but they were also enemies in earlier periods. The battle lines only became more firmly drawn after the mid-19th century when white pressure became irresistible, but before then just who was an ally of whom was constantly changing.
Yes, it’s a tedious, outdated stereotype that “Injuns” build long, neat rows of totem poles in completely the wrong area of the continent in coincidentally the exact same place as Ma Bell. Just like it would be a tedious stereotype to make a crack about Druids evidently building a lot of very tall, thin, pale wicker man with wavy arms if the DP of their movie got sloppy about framing a few shots.
