Trouble making Bury My Heart

Pergament:  HBO’s ‘Wounded Knee’ is deserving of kudosAfter a 36-year wait, HBO Films has adapted the late Dee Brown’s 1971 best-selling nonfiction book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” However, the cable network is airing it at 9 p.m. Sunday—during a low-viewing Memorial Day weekend when much of America may be out barbecuing or celebrating the unofficial start of summer.

The story of “Wounded Knee,” which depicts the government’s claim to sacred Native American land and its political attempts to assimilate the Native American, is hardly a cause for celebration.

The U.S. government is the bad guy in this drama, which may be one reason it took so long for the book to be made into a film. In an interview last January in Pasadena, Calif., producer Tom Thayer said he asked the book’s literary agent why it hadn’t been made into a film when he sought the rights.

“Well, my dear boy,” Thayer said he was told, “if you’ve read the book, it’s all told from their point of view, so who would you cast?”

The bigger question is whether an American audience will embrace a movie that makes its government look so heartless, greedy and unsympathetic as it broke treaties, promises and hearts to open the American West.