"Dances With Wolves" Retrospective: The Unjust Penalty of Beating Scorsese

Dances with Wolves is a flawed epic, but it's far more than an excuse to look at Kevin Costner.

May 9, 2023

“An act to provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.”

These are the words of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a flowery artifice designed to project an image of good faith between a band of genocidal colonizers and their victims. It is not as though the Native Americans were without their faults: if we want to reduce the warring between indigenous tribes before European settlement to its most common terms, evoking the archaic “Savage Indian” stereotype, there is little evidence that the scalping of enemies is, under any circumstances, a sunny (or necessary) affair.

What of it? War has been waged since the dawn of civilization, whether with wooden clubs or nuclear bombs. Is it truly just skin color that makes one a “savage” to “relocate” for white advancement in the New World?

Of course not. It’s an excuse, the same one countless “Karens” use when they suffer a swift uppercut from equality: “How dare these dark people, who breathe the same air as I, breathe the same air as I?” It is the inherent folly of racism: cut open, we all bleed red, yet somehow those marred by prejudice are too blind to see it.

We were not entitled to land that was not ours, but does it matter? Would any of us give up what we have to undo the horrors of the past? It's a harsh truth, but the answer is undeniable: no, so we do little things to acknowledge the barbarity of that “exchange of lands” and the thousands of lives that built it. We force sports teams to change their names, lament the state of Native American reservations, or if you’re Kevin Costner, you make Dances with Wolves.‍

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After nearly losing his foot in the Civil War, Lieutenant John J. Dunbar survives a suicide attempt, inadvertently securing a Northern victory in battle. As a reward, he gets stationed on the frontier. After encountering the neighboring Sioux tribe, he slowly forms a bond with them that changes his life, illuminating his perspective on the Native Americans and leading him to true love.

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It’s limp in dissecting our treatment of the Native Americans. There is no outright disapproval of our conduct, an examination of its fallaciousness, or attempt to make us question the social biases that make us care so little to the point we pretend to care so much. There is only a safe idea of little emotional merit but tremendous cinematic value: white man bad, Native Americans good.

The sole attempt to establish credibility in portraying the Sioux is in a short scene where two tribesmen scalp Dunbar’s traveling companion. It’s their one moment of savagery, the same checklist storytelling that occasionally finds its way into award-winning dramas. Outside this fleeting moment of barbarity, the Sioux are a peaceful people violated by the neighboring Pawnee, who seek to establish control over their lands before winter.

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It is the miscalculation of Costner’s ambitious pseudo-Western: despite its syrupy adulation of the Sioux, it lends little sympathy or understanding to the other Native Americans. It's the same fallacy that inspires such vehement hatred between racial and ethnic groups today: some black people may be fine, but we can’t forget the inner-city hoodlums parading around with Glocks in hand and pants sagging past the ass.

While refusing to acknowledge their existence is disingenuous, pretending that an entire race is reducible to a stereotype is equally insincere. Why do the Pawnee not deserve the same treatment as the Sioux? Had Costner come by them, would they have been his allies and the Sioux his foes?

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Yet, for all its ethical miscues, there is something admirably earnest about Dances with Wolves: a willingness to defy trope in just as many ways as it exploits it. Dunbar is not the first white man to enter an outside world and become one with its people, ultimately sparing them from a horrible fate. But Dunbar is not a white savior: he helps and rescues but doesn’t liberate; he’s a collaborator. He gives to the people just as much as they give to him. His perspective gets enriched by them, not the other way around. None of this is revolutionary: what is different is how he grows to appreciate who and what they are.

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When the Sioux struggle to pronounce his given name, he doesn’t dismiss it and allow for a mispronunciation to become his identity: he works with them to perfect it, just as he works to learn their language. He commits to sharing his world just as the Sioux commit to ingratiating him into theirs. Though custom dictates he not get told of what happens with widows in the tribe, Stone Calf shares Stands with a Fists’ story with him. Dunbar doesn’t force a man to return his beloved hat but agrees to a fair trade that shows more respect for what the Sioux value than what he values.

They make concessions for one another, establishing reciprocity usually missing from our attempts at cultural competence. We snicker at “peculiar” names before giving up on getting them right at all. We force people to adopt Anglicized identities to resolve our unwillingness to pronounce their birth names correctly.

We scoff at other foods, customs, traditions, and ideas. We briefly contest cinematic whitewashing before flocking to the theater to see the film regardless. Decades before doing so became mainstream, Costner honors his subjects instead of exploiting them. The language is authentic. The actors are Native Americans, many of them Sioux. It doesn’t condescend to the culture it depicts by painting them as helpless children constantly needing rescue.

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It’s far from perfect, but Dunbar develops a genuine symbiosis to their relationship that makes him just as necessary for their survival as they are to his virtue as a man. Considering this, it's odd we haven’t reflected on Dances with Wolves more kindly. It isn’t the most compelling narrative of its kind. It isn’t the most striking aesthetic or most profound moral examination.

But it is what we so often demand films be: inclusive and respectful, cultured and sincere. It doesn’t settle for actors whose ethnicity can look the part or a story that upholds white narratives (though the unnecessary love story between the film’s two white characters undermines its credibility a tad). Sure, it doesn’t bite off quite as much as could be chewed, but it rips off more than many of us do in our day-to-day lives, regardless of how many Instagram posts we make to the contrary.

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Yes, it’s beautiful, the merit often conceded before admonishing it for beating Goodfellas. Yes, it’s grand and majestic and ambitious. Yes, John Barry’s music builds a story even in the smallest moments. Yes, Costner felt every frame of the movie, even if it’s not a perfect product.

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But its real value lies in standing for something we don't value enough and have made little progress with, despite our claims to the contrary.

Yes, things have improved for marginalized groups since 1990, but do we truly seek to collaborate with them, listen to them, and genuinely understand them? We primarily seek to tell people who they are and what they need so we can leech off their victimization and fancy ourselves as crusaders. It's not a perfect effort, and Costner's empathy has not resolved the plight of the modern Native American. But he tried more earnestly and effectively than many of us do over three decades later.

It doesn’t sweep us off our emotional feet and lacks conviction the longer it goes on. It suffers from cliché in many ways and never becomes all it promises. It seeks to honor the Native Americans but names itself after a white character (though that name is given by the Sioux, in fairness). But in the end, after 180 minutes of ping-ponging triumph and tragedy, Dances with Wolves leaves an impression. It makes you want to revisit it and appreciate things you forget it possesses because no one wants to admit it has them.

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It cannot undo that flowery artifice designed to project an image of good faith between a band of genocidal colonizers and their victims. But it does more than call the Redskins the Washington Football Team or force the Cleveland Indians to change their name and discard Chief Wahoo.

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It might be many more decades before we know exactly what that something is, but that’s okay. When we finally know, perhaps we’ll give Dances with Wolves the credit it deserves.