How Bury My Heart shaped America

How did 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' shape America?Brenda Child, associate professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of American Studies, will join The Daily Circuit Tuesday.

"You have to remember that the subtitle is 'An Indian History' and the narrative at that time didn't include American Indians and their interpretations of that history," she said. "In anything the general public read Indians were portrayed as being backward, uncivilized. There hadn't been a critical look at how this population was treated and what this book did was examine a number of different tribal histories and tell some of those stories from the documents of the tribes themselves. It was truly a voice of native people."

Child said the book's problem is its portrayal of native people as tragic figures.

"What we now know is that tragic things happened, but they weren't tragic figures," she said. "Native people made their own history and were agents of change as much as anyone else in this country even though they were disadvantaged."Comment:  For more on the subject, see "Books that Shaped America" and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:  The Movie.

"Books that Shaped America"

Debbie Reese writes about a book exhibit in her American Indians in Children's Literature blog (7/24/12):

"Books that Shaped America" at the Library of CongressRecently, I began to see links to a new exhibit at the Library of Congress. Titled "Books That Shaped America," it consists of 91 books.

When I learned of the list, I wondered who selected them and if those individuals had an inclusive view of the peoples of America. I've since learned that the list was developed by "curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress."

There are some great items on that list, but, there isn't a single title on the "Books that Shaped America" by an American Indian, which makes me wonder about the curators and experts who selected the books. Is there not an American Indian amongst them? Or, perhaps, an expert in American Indian writings?

That list of books should include Vine Deloria Jr.'s bestseller, Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. It led a great many people to think critically about the U.S. government and American Indians. Deloria's ideas shaped a lot of thinkers who were and influential in government policies that shaped and continue to shape America. Custer Died For Your Sins was (and is) very influential in other places, too. It shaped the ways that many American Indian Studies programs at universities are structured, and, it changed the shape of the ways that anthropology departments study American Indians. Deloria's work is so influential that symposiums are named after him.Comment:  The list does include Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is the first "Native" book I thought of. I presume that's supposed to fill the "Native" slot even though a non-Native wrote it.

The list includes several works of fiction that I doubt did much to "shape America." There's arguably room for another Native book, and Deloria's book is probably the best choice.

For more on a related subject, see Alexie and Erdrich Deserve Nobel Prizes.

No Bury My Heart for Eyre

Eyre Talks of New Movie, Hollywood StereotypesAs a filmmaker, he said, he has avoided creating movies that depict Native people as victims of manifest destiny, a theme too often explored by Hollywood.

"It's a literally romantic notion to see Native people dying," he said.Some people didn't like his Skins:"People were really upset about the portrayal of Native Americans in that movie," he said.

The difference between his portrayal of Rudy, the alcoholic brother, and other mainstream Hollywood portrayals of alcoholic Indians was that he showed Rudy as a human being, not just an alcoholic, he said.The movie he'd like to do: For his next film project, Eyre wants to tackle a comedy.

"I'd like to do a re-make of 'Little Big Man,'" he said. "That was the best movie."Comment:  I had no problem with the negative portrayals in Skins. Why is that? Because the characters were three-dimensional human beings...unlike, say, the characters in SCALPED.

Little Big Man wouldn't be my first, second, or third choice for a Native-themed movie to remake. It doesn't particularly need remaking. A remake of The Searchers, Cheyenne Autumn, or Buffalo Bill and the Indians would be better. Even Billy Jack (with a Native actor) would be better.

SVU, Bury My Heart, and torture

Last week's Law & Order: SVU was about torture. A couple of guides sum up the episode, titled "Harm":A volunteer at a rehab center is killed and detectives think it may be linked to her counseling of Iraqis tortured by an American-based company.Later:A New York psychiatrist goes on trial after her torture methods are cited in the death of a former Iraqi prisoner.Since the SVU team couldn't charge the Blackwater-style torturers because they were in Iraq, they charged the doctor. The episode then focused on the conflicting claims about torture.

One poster on IMDB.com wrote, "Every episode of SVU that involves the military is like watching a Cuban/Michael Moore propaganda film." But he's sadly mistaken. What was notable about this episode is how pro-torture it was. Doctor Sutton and her lawyer Braden gave impassioned defenses of torture that went unanswered. Even Dr. Huang, the psychologist who normally has the most compassionate point of view, spoke up for Sutton's integrity.

What were the pro-torture arguments? Sutton's argument was along the lines of, "We're at war. You can't play by the rules when someone is trying to kill you." Braden's was along the lines of, "What would you do if you knew there was a ticking bomb? I hurt a suspect once and saved somebody's life."

Although the SVU characters argued against torture, I'd say the pro-terrorist side won the debate. Here's what the "liberal" show could've said but didn't:

1) Experts say torture simply doesn't work. People will lie and do anything to get out of being hurt. 2) The "ticking bomb" scenario never happens in real life. It's a phony straw-man argument. 3) Our torture policy has inflamed Muslims around the world. It has created many more terrorists than it's stopped.

How is "Harm" relevant to this blog? Dick Wolf produced both SVU and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The latter was supposedly pro-Indian and anti-American but was really the reverse. Now we have evidence that Wolf's position is consistent. His shows bluster against US policy but end up supporting it.

Wolf is supposedly a Democrat, but if so, I bet he's a hawkish, Joe Lieberman type of Democrat. I bet he thought we should've invaded Iraq and still thinks we can win there. Similarly, I bet he thinks the US brought "civilization" to the Indians and ultimately did them more good than harm.

Wolf has done things for Indians by producing Bury My Heart and putting Adam Beach on SVU. But he hasn't helped them as much as he could. This is yet another case of two steps forward, one step back.

Bury My Heart's major mistakes

HBO's 'Wounded Knee' ignites controversy:  Stories altered to fit plotlinesDaniel Giat, who wrote the film's screenplay, said he had tried especially to humanize Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief and holy man, presenting him as somewhat vain and boastful, though wholeheartedly dedicated to his people. Critics say the film went too far, though, and several prominent native figures left an early screening of the film in protest.

"I walked out. Relatives of Sitting Bull won't be happy," said Joseph Brings Plenty, Lakota, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, in an interview with Indian Country Today. "They portrayed him as a cruel man; he was a holy man, he took care of the people."And:The film also employs artistic license heavily with the introduction of Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa in his native Sioux), a physician and reformer. Eastman was a prominent figure in the late-nineteenth century, but did not play an important role in the book version of Bury My Heart. The HBO adaptation, however, made Eastman the main protagonist, including a largely fictionalized internal struggle for the "assimilated" Eastman, whose film representation (played to much acclaim by Saulteaux actor Adam Beach) feared he had abandoned his people by receiving a western education.

Many have found the use of the character Eastman to be an attempt on the part of HBO to provide a sort of buffer between the Native American characters and a largely white audience. Critics, however, have deemed this unnecessary, even offensive, citing acclaimed mini-series "Roots" as rebuttal to the assumption that a white audience needs a "whiter" character to relate.

Why Bury My Heart won

Hollywood Loves Indians.  They Really, Really, Really Love IndiansI know this to be true, because they proved it by bestowing the OUTSTANDING MADE FOR TELEVISION MOVIE honors to HBO’s adaptation of Dee Brown’s book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It has everything Hollywood relishes. White guilt and brown people as victims. Even a victim who overcomes by joining the heroes in their quest to help his fellow victims—what could be better!

So what if HBO tinkered with the facts a bit ... mmmm ... a lot, like taking the life the Santee activist Charles Eastman and planting him at battles he never fought in, situations he was never involved in, and assuming that’s it’s boffo because, well, it “served a higher purpose.”

And what is that, pray tell? Oh, let’s see; how about feeding the entertainment beast’s insatiable hunger to prove just how progressive, impressive, provocative and evocative they are. Nothing quite as satisfying than a couple of hours of the pillaging powerful, preferably in government and the military (Wait! Do I whiff a present-day metaphor?) to warm the heart of those on George Soros’s speed dial.Comment:  Carole argues that HBO made Bury My Heart so liberals could feel good about seeing the US government as the "pillaging powerful." Maybe, but as a card-carrying liberal, I didn't feel good about the movie's portrayal.

Perhaps the superficial motive was to please liberals--especially those who haven't read Dee Brown's book and don't know their Native history. But I'd say the deeper motive was to please the conservatives who support our government's imperialist policies. Bury My Heart gave these people succor by justifying the US onslaught against Indians.

As I wrote in my review:Bury My Heart takes a clear case of wrongdoing and muddles it. In this version of history, there are no good or bad guys. Flawed Americans, flawed Indians ... they're all the same.That's basically the same position we've taken in Iraq. Sure, we've killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed the country's infrastructure. But we're fighting "evildoers" who supposedly want to kill tens of thousands of our civilians and destroy our country's infrastructure. In short, their evil justifies our evil--just as in Bury My Heart.

So the movie has something for everyone: a sinful US government for liberals and sinful Indians for conservatives. No wonder it won the Emmy for best picture.

An Emmy for Bury My Heart

The winner:Television Movie

“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBO

“Inside the Twin Towers,” Discovery Channel
“Longford,” HBO
“The Ron Clark Story,” TNT
“Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy,” LifetimeThe losers:Supporting Actor, Mini-Series or Movie

Thomas Haden Church, “Broken Trail,” AMC

August Schellenberg, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBO
Aidan Quinn, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBO

Supporting Actress, Mini-Series or Movie

Judy Davis, “The Starter Wife,” USA

Anna Paquin, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBO

Director, Mini-Series, Movie or Dramatic Special

Philip Martin, “Prime Suspect: The Final Act,” PBS

Yves Simoneau, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBO

Writing, Mini-Series, Movie or Dramatic Special

Frank Deasy, “Prime Suspect: The Final Act,” PBS

Daniel Giat, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” HBOComment:  Bury My Heart probably won for best television movie because it had good performances and it looked good. It also may have won because it was an HBO prestige project from a known player (Dick Wolf). Awards voters often don't see every nominee; they go with the director, producer, or studio with the proven track record.

They especially like films with serious subjects--e.g., Gandhi, The English Patient, Crash--whether they're truly the best or not. What someone wrote about the Oscars also applies to the Emmys and to Bury My Heart:There are obvious biases in the selection of Best Picture winners by the Academy. ... Serious dramas or social-problem films with weighty themes, bio-pictures (inspired by real-life individuals or events), or films with literary pretensions are much more likely to be nominated (and win) than "popcorn" movies. Action-adventures, suspense-thrillers, Westerns, and comedies are mostly overlooked (although there are exceptions), as are independent productions and children's films. The glossy, large-scale epic productions with big budgets (of various genres) often win the Best Picture prize.For that matter, Bury My Heart may have won because it was the best of a mediocre bunch in a weak field. I never even heard of the other nominees.

Bury My Heart didn't win for best writing because it wasn't that well-written. Most critics said it was more of a dutiful lesson than a stirring drama. About the only scene they praised was Sitting Bull's exchange with Colonel Miles--and that was totally bogus.

What the critics said (or would've said) if they knew their history is that the screenplay was riddled with mistakes and stereotypes. As I pointed out in Bury My Heart's Bias Against Indians. The critics and Emmy voters may have sensed the mistakes and stereotypes intuitively even if they didn't understand them intellectually.

I haven't seen the seventh Prime Suspect yet, but I have seen the first six. If the last show was anything like the previous ones, it undoubtedly deserved the "best writing" award. As any good critic could tell you, the Prime Suspect series is in a class above Bury My Heart. It isn't even close.

Bury My Heart looks good, but...

'Wounded Knee':  A Powerful Tale Lost on ImpactThe program that earned the most overall Emmy nominations this year was not "The Sopranos" or "Grey's Anatomy." It was "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," an HBO film based on Dee Brown's well-known book about the displacement of the American Indian in the late 1800s. The movie tallied an impressive 17 nods, which raises expectations when one sits down to watch the DVD ($26.98), released today to undoubtedly ride the wave of publicity leading up to Sunday's Emmy Awards. Unfortunately, those expectations are only halfway met.

"Wounded Knee" is beautifully filmed and was clearly made with a great deal of reverence for the time period and for Native Americans. But that sense of respect overwhelms the production, making it a commendable effort rather than a deeply moving one. While watching it, you're more likely to feel like sitting up straight than shedding a tear.Comment:  These are my sentiments also.

Bury My Heart wins Creative Emmys

Alberta-made TV series wins big at Creative Emmys

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee won 5 trophies, including outstanding cinematographyA miniseries filmed in Alberta emerged the biggest winner at the Creative Arts Emmys, capturing five trophies, while a fake music video featuring a male part became the story of the evening.

The gala, held to honour technical, makeup and costume work in television, was held in Los Angeles Saturday night and had a few surprises.

[One] big story of the evening was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which went in with 17 nominations. The series won for outstanding makeup, outstanding single-camera picture editing, outstanding sound mixing, outstanding sound editing and outstanding cinematography for a miniseries or special.

Bury My Heart bungled it

Tim Giago:  Hollywood dashes hopes of 'Wounded Knee'The nominations the television special received that are usually considered strategic are for Directing, Yves Simoneau, Supporting Actor, August Schellenburg for his portrayal of Sitting Bull, and Supporting Actress, Anna Paquin, the non-Indian woman who played the role of Elaine Goodale Eastman, the wife of Dr. Charles Eastman. Neither Dr. Eastman nor Ms. Goodale was in the Dee Brown book, but they were added later to bring a love affair to the movie.

And therein lies the tragedy that is known as Hollywood. It is pre-determined that in order for a movie to be successful it must have a love affair no matter how contrived. In the case of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” the love affair was a waste of valuable time and a distraction from the tragedy that prompted Dee Brown to write the book in the first place. By creating the affair out of whole cloth for this movie, the producers severely damaged its relevance in the eyes of so many Native Americans.

Giat: Sioux betrayed themselves

HBO feels 'Wounded'

The final chapter of the American Indians' doomed struggle to cling to their homeland gets a starkly realistic treatment in HBO's 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.'"My primary objective was to fully dimensionalize these people," Giat says. "Sitting Bull was vain. He was desperate to hold onto the esteem of his people and win the esteem of the whites. But I think in depicting his desperation and the measures he took in acting on it, it makes it all the more sad and tragic, and I think we identify with him all the more for it."

"People have an iconic view of Sitting Bull," says Yves Simoneau, the film's director, "but that image is restrictive. The way August played him, noble but far from perfect, made him the character the test audiences identified with the most—by a long way." Schellenberg played Sitting Bull in TNT's "Crazy Horse" (1995), but he is much more forceful here.

The key theme in the film that underscores the conflictedness of the Sioux at this cataclysmic moment in their history is that of self-betrayal. Two of Sitting Bull's warriors became tribal policemen at the Standing Rock Agency. One of them unintentionally tramples on his people's pride by killing a buffalo in a corral. The other, who shoots Sitting Bull, was the bitter father of the slain baby.Comment:  See Hanay Geiogamah's response to this article. Also see my response to the same issues.

Geiogamah slams Bury My Heart

The End of the Hollywood TrailWith breathtaking arrogance, Bury My Heart's narrative forcibly inducts American Indians into the brotherhood of savagery as a way of universalizing them and making them like all other people.

Genocide is dramatized as just as much the result of the mean-spirited and physically cruel behavior of American Indians, who were fighting for their very survival, as it was of the inhumanity of the American armies. The last shreds of Indian nobility are eliminated once and for all.

A feature article on the making of Bury My Heart titled "The Last Stand" in the May 27 Los Angeles Times gives a brief, perplexing account of how Hollywood came to the view that American Indians can now be justly and fairly seen as co-agents of their own destruction. As a two-hour condensation of the book, "The film didn't have time to dwell on the spiritual, Earth-friendly image of Native Americans," says the article's author, Graham Fuller. "Nor does it offer a politically correct perspective," he adds. The Sioux, we're told, were "as rapacious as their white conquerers."

This view is scaldingly laid out with the portrayal of Sitting Bull as a baby killer, as a coward who hid in his tipi at the height of the Battle of Little Bighorn, and as a greedy buffoon who lusts for the white man's money and approval.Comment:  Geiogamah provides a poetic overview of the movie's flaws. My article provides the details.

Bury My Heart's bias against Indians

The most notable thing in HBO's version of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee isn't the writing, acting, or directing. All these things are passable in this flawed but watchable movie. What stands out is the anti-Indian bias.

How is that possible in a production based on one of the most pro-Indian books ever? Read on for the evidence against the movie.

Bury My Heart's Bias Against Indians

My take on Bury My Heart

I’d say Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was better than the negative critics said but not as good as the positive critics said. Which is another way of saying the average critic got it right. Score another one for the perspicacity of critics.

In short, it was flawed but worth watching. I question a lot of the details, but at least it showed the reality of the era: the camps, the skirmishes, the primitive reservation. The movie gave you a flavor of the time and place you couldn’t get from a book.

Rob's rating:  7.5 of 10.

Earnest, dutiful Bury My Heart

'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'

HBO's 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' is more dutiful than inspired, but there's always the book.To say that you should not mistake HBO's dramatic adaptation of Dee Brown's great book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" for actual history is to say only what must be said about nearly every film that dresses actors as real people and gives them a script to read. In all but the deftest hands, such movies are basically just pageants, episodic stagings of great moments from the past, sometimes strung together on what is usually a not very convincing through-line—a "personal journey."

But even a bad historical film on a good subject may make you want to learn more, if only by getting you to ask yourself, "Could it possibly have happened that way?" If HBO's version of "Wounded Knee"—which is not really a bad film, just an average one of its kind, earnest, dutiful, oversimplified, underdeveloped, weighted down in exposition and by turns intriguing, melodramatic and dull—does nothing more than send a few more people to Brown's book, that may be all the credit in heaven it needs.Wounded Knee:  America's Killing Fields

HBO movie depicts the slow, brutal death of a once-proud raceThe inclusion of Goodale’s point of view and the love story between her and Eastman, who, although an important historical figure, is not a part of Brown’s book, is vaguely problematic in that it reflects a disturbing tradition of mass-entertainment films about nonwhite races being partly driven by white—or, in the case of Eastman, assimilated-and-acting-on-behalf-of-white—characters. (Think Dances With Wolves, Dangerous Minds, Mississippi Burning or any movie Hollywood’s made about Africa.)

Considering what made Brown’s book such a revisionist revelation upon its release—the overdue novelty of steadfastly hewing to the poetic words and bitter remembrances of sympathetic Native Americans, after years of popular history depicting them as savages—this is a sticky element for anybody attempting to faithfully evoke the book’s we-were-screwed importance. Of the three prongs in the crisscrossing narrative—Sitting Bull, Dawes and Eastman—only Sitting Bull’s scenes feel like they capture the ugly dehumanization Brown was after. Whenever the focus is Eastman, who goes from well-intentioned policy collaborator with Dawes to reservation doctor, and watches firsthand how America’s ramshackle recruitment of Indians toward a “civilized” way of life is actually killing them, the movie develops a curious remove, despite Beach’s best efforts to communicate anguish. (You just don’t worry as much for the degreed doctor as you do for a Sioux uprooted from everything he knows.)Buried in HistoryVirginia Woolf once wrote that after reading some novels, she felt she was expected to reach for her checkbook. HBO's new film, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which airs Sunday, makes you feel that way, except that you don't know where to send the check.

Despite its good intentions, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" tries to jam too much history and significance into too small a space. For instance, the entire prickly issue of whether the Sioux were a predatory people who took their sacred Black Hills territory from the Crow—and, trust me, I've heard that question debated by members of both tribes, and as a white person you wouldn't want to touch it with a 10-foot lance—is compressed into a few lines of dialogue between Sitting Bull and Colonel Miles (played by a grim-visage Shaun Johnston). Insults, humiliations, and atrocities to the American Indians become so common that the conflagration at Wounded Knee seems almost anticlimactic. (Mr. Simoneau's restraint in the Wounded Knee scenes is in sharp contrast to Joe Johnston's horrific imagery of the slaughter in 2004's "Hidalgo.")Exclusive Interview:  Adam Beach, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

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.

Key exchange in Bury My Heart

There’s an Allegory in Those Hills“How very convenient to cloak your claims in spiritualism. And what would you say to the Mormons and others who believe that their God has given to them Indian lands in the West?

“No matter what your legends say, you didn’t sprout from the plains like the spring grasses and you didn’t coalesce out of the ether. You came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee without mercy. And yet you claim the Black Hills as a private preserve bequeathed to you by the Great Spirit.”

Sitting Bull shoots back: “And who gave us the guns and powder to kill our enemies? And who traded guns to the Chippewa and others who drove us from our home?”

Colonel Miles replies: “Chief Sitting Bull, the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all! You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands. Just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.”Comment:  I've already given some responses to a version of this speech. I'd love to hear how a Lakota or any Indian would respond.

Bury My Heart = movie of the week

There’s an Allegory in Those HillsThis project was doomed to overreach and to sermonize. To begin with, it’s about American Indians, who ever since Sacheen Littlefeather declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar in 1973 have scared the chutzpah out of Hollywood, forcing the showoffs who invented westerns into defensive crouches and sorry offerings that look more like cut-and-paste Sunday school atonement projects than filmmaking.

Second, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is a television movie. The red carpet premiere and credible stars (Aidan Quinn, Anna Paquin) that HBO supplied can’t conceal that this is a movie of the week—a form as eternal, indigenous and sacrosanct as the Black Hills of South Dakota. Simple-minded, blocky, smug, uplifting, always in a major key. Easy to sing along with.Comment:  Let's note the connections. Screenwriter Daniel Giat fabricated Eastman's role in the story. He rearranged details to make it accessible. He added expository speeches and anachronisms.

As a result, Bury My Heart sounds like a creative failure. From now on, when people think of Dee Brown's book, they'll remember this production. They'll assume the book is equally unpalatable and skip it.

This is exactly why you need creators dedicated to honesty and authenticy. If the screenplay is messy, uncomfortable, even difficult, that's reality. Manipulating it doesn't necessarily make it better and often makes it worse.

Of course, when I see Bury My Heart, I may decide it's good. But the point is valid regardless. If a contrived Bury My Heart is good, an uncontrived Bury My Heart could have been great.

Bury My Heart worth watching

McCollum:  'Bury My Heart' is not perfect, but it's very good[T]he Eastman character is so well-written by Giat and acted with such passion and nuance by Adam Beach ("Flags Of Our Fathers") that you almost can overlook the historical inaccuracies. Beach's work is so good that it alone makes "Bury My Heart" worth watching.

In addition, Giat has crafted multidimensional portraits of Sitting Bull (a deft performance by Canadian actor August Schellenberg, who is part-Mohawk) and of Dawes (a skillful turn by Aidan Quinn of "Empire Falls"). The great chief and the well-meaning but patronizing politician could have been shown simplistically as hero and villain, but Giat and the actors give both shades of gray that make them far more interesting and, probably, truer-to-life.

And in the end, the filmmakers achieve what they set out to: They've made a moving and enlightening movie about a horrific chapter in American history. "Bury My Heart" may not encompass everything that was in Brown's book, but it does manage to capture its tone and its pain. I can live with inconsistency of detail if the big picture is fundamentally truthful and true to the subject. Which means I can recommend "Bury My Heart," even with its flaws.

Variety pans Bury My Heart

Bury My Heart at Wounded KneeThe horrors inflicted upon Native Americans have traditionally made for wrenching drama, but this loose adaptation of Dee Alexander Brown's seminal 1971 book is a powerful story limply told, steeped in tired Western cliches and an overbearing score. A few emotional moments emerge almost by default, but a splintered focus and uneven storytelling largely negate them as well as the efforts of the large cast. HBO is using the movie to give "The Sopranos" and "Entourage" a Memorial Day weekend vacation, which, in cable scheduling terms, perhaps represents its own kind of burial.To be more specific:As with any tale of this period, the movie is punctuated by broken promises, horrible conditions, willful ignorance toward Native American traditions and bursts of grisly violence against innocents, including women and children. There are also modern echoes of the cultural rift between the west and radical Islam in the dialogue, with two cultures that speak at cross-purposes.

Dramatically, though--even tinkering with history to weave the Eastman character into the narrative--"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" proves curiously flat, retracing revisionist looks at this era from "Little Big Man" to TNT's recent miniseries "Into the West," another stilted disappointment despite a herd of Emmy nominations. Within that framework, the cast is hamstrung by the archetypal characters, which possess only slightly more dimension than the black-and-white photographs that partition the scenes.

Schellenberg is the one exception, with his deep-set eyes and low rumble of a voice, but other Native-American performers (among them Wes Studi and Eric Schweig) are underutilized. Even the climactic bloodbath proves unaffecting, captured in a distancing flashback without eliciting the horror it should evoke--despite what's otherwise a meticulously mounted production, lensed in the wilds of Canada.