It is one of the rare films about American Indians that is not at all concerned by their extermination by Custer and company. But it is in fact a lot deeper than that. It shows from inside the functioning, the culture, the rites and rituals of Sioux Indians when a white English Lord is captured and turned into a slave for some time. It shows how he manages to become a warrior by killing two Shoshone assailants. Then he marries the sister of the chief and eventually becomes the chief after a war with the Shoshones who attack the village that he defends successfully. And then they move. It shows how hard they are with old women when their sons have disappeared. It shows how hard they are with their warriors who have to go through very cruel rites. Pain is the deliverer of the soul. It shows the basic motivation of wars between tribes: to loot the others, in other words to survive by doing nothing productive but appropriating what is not theirs but the others'. It could be considered as light anthropologically but when it came out in 1970 it was a real revolution in the sympathy and empathy it conveyed about the Indians, but also about the fact that cruelty and pain were never looked for per se but always to prove the courage and the strength of the person. In other words it is the proof that Sioux Indians had a high level of morality based on proved physical endurance and courage. It also proved that love was a real dimension among them governing the relations among fellow human beings in the tribe and between men and women, though their love was not necessarily expressed the way we would romantically adorn it.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines