Hi Al,
I know the same reaction from Native American friends. My wife was at the Rosebud Reservation visiting Lakota friends, when two episodes were shown on TV and she watched them with our Lakota friends.
I agree that the movie only shows the pick of an ice-hill what was done on cruelties from the white fighters, scalp hunters and soldiers against the Indians. I do now 30 years on research on this history. 'When I have a look on the history I had the impression that the whites were the barbarians and not the Indians.
I observed, that it is difficult to speake in America abaout this side of the Indian wars. I did a critic on the racist Osprey book "The Plains Wars" and put it in German and English language on our German website. I got full support by German, French, Italian and Greec figurinists, But I was heavy attact by a some American figurinists to be insult the American people and to be "Anti-American". Whis was finally the reason not to go to the World Expo with my Indian figurines.
I'm very pleased about the reaction towards my Indian figurines and my articles at the Planet Figure. I have a lot of American friends ad I'm not Anti American!
The book review "Comanche"s, I published at Planet Figurine, I first wrote to be published in an American Magazine, but it was not published, because there were thougst that suche review would be not liked by some reader.
Under this situation, the movie "Into the West" had the courage to show Sand Creck Massacre, Washita Massacre and Wounded Knee Massacre.
At the same time a book is published by an American historian Jerome Green, official historian of the "US Park Service", who describes Washita as a great victory of brave white men and a justified action against the savages, because the soldiers finde some items in the village of Black Kettle which were stolen from a stage coache. Which means because there are some criminals in a village it is justified to kill the whole village. Well know US historian Robert Utley denie in his book "Last Days of the Sioux Nation" that Wounded Knee was a masscre at all. He stated that according to the white reports the "savages" as he called them, had fired 60 rounds to the soldiers and they aswerd in a kind of self devesce, but he don't explain how they could do this after they had lied down their weapons.
I totally agree that all suche szenes at "Into the West" are softened. At Sand Creck the Indians were not only scalpted. The white soldiers commit every sadistic barbarity inclooding rape, mutilation and tortouring. They even cut of the belly of pregnant women and killed the unborn and observed the mother to die in her blood. They than parade in Denver with cut the of "privat" human parts of men and women and exposed them at the theather.
But even for this soft version Steven Spielberg was heavy attact by whit people who don't want to hear this side of the story.
For this reason I love "Into the West" and I regard this movie as a step foreward.
I also love this movie for the correct way they showed the Indian life and portraied them as human beings with all emotions, often missed at "Western Movies"
Best regards
Bruno
~Gary
