Dances With Wolves

Reviving the Western

The first western to win Best Picture since Cimarron in 1931, Dances With Wolves revived the genre by using its conventions innovatively. To evoke the frontier's lost grandeur, thousands of buffalo on South Dakota's vast plains preface a spectacular (unprecedented in film) buffalo hunt. Using a domestic herd and foam and fiberglass buffalo, Indians from 10 tribes learned to shoot bows and (rubber-tipped) arrows, while galloping bareback among fast-moving buffalo, to capture the likes of a buffalo hunt not seen since the 19th century.

Adhering to Eurocentric assumptions that whites would reject an Indian protagonist and all audiences could identity with a white male, the film also reemploys the white male protagonist convention to update the western with late-20th-century ideas. The army sends Dunbar to the 1863 Dakota frontier under the mistaken assumption that he wants to be an Indian fighter. Instead, he wants to see the wilderness before it is gone, and he rejects the policy that Indians need to be eliminated. Rather than represent the attitudes of a Civil War officer, Dunbar is an environmentalist, he respects animals (interacting with and naming a wolf Two Socks as the Lakota rename him Dances With Wolves), and he considers the Lakota a nature-loving, oppressed minority.

The white hero out-Indians the Indians. Dunbar rescues the Lakota-adopted white woman, discovers buffalo to hunt, is successful in his first hunt, rescues a youth from a charging buffalo, and saves the Lakota by supplying rifles against a Pawnee attack. Seeming to embody the idea of white male superiority, far from being superior, Dunbar is often the butt of humor. After encountering the Lakota medicine man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), Dunbar faints. Trying to stop the Lakota from stealing his horse, Dunbar instead knocks himself out by running into his doorjamb. As he pantomimes a buffalo and grinds coffee, the Lakota see him as ridiculous. And Dunbar himself decides—while witnessing fields of buffalo carcasses left to rot by white hunters who only wanted tongues and hides— against the supposed superiority of the white man.

The film reuses the Hostile Savage Indian stereotype (of merciless, motiveless killers of innocent white settlers). Pawnee first kill Timmons (who brings Dunbar to the frontier). In flashback, Pawnee kill Euro-American settlers, including the parents of Christine/Stands With a Fist (Mary McDonnell). To problematize the stereotype, the film gives the Pawnee motives, showing them reluctantly following a leader (Wes Studi) who kills Timmons as yet another white man blatantly intruding on Indian land. At film's end, Pawnee scouts help soldiers track Dunbar, reduced to serving Manifest Destiny to survive.

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