Chronology of American Indian History

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

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The film Dances with Wolves premieres.
Dances with Wolves, a three-hour epic starring and
directed by non-Indian actor Kevin Costner, opens
to wide acclaim from the public and critics. The
movie tells the story of a white army officer who
goes to live among the Lakota Sioux during the
Plains Indian Wars of the late 19th century. In ad-
dition to being one of the year’s biggest box-office
hits, the film will receive the 1990 Academy Award
for Best Picture.
The film is praised among Indians for its sympa-
thetic view of the plight of the 19th-century Lakota
and for its casting of Indian actors, such as Rodney
Grant, Tantoo Cardinal, and Graham Greene (who
will be nominated for an Oscar for Best Support-
ing Actor). Some Indians, however, fault the movie
for taking an overly romantic view of the Lakota
Sioux and for perpetuating the myth of Indians as

a “vanishing race,” inevitably doomed to extinction.
The film is also criticized for presenting Indian life
through the eyes of a white man rather than from
the perspective of the Indian characters. (See also
entry for FEBRUARY 1993.)

“Dances with Wolves is first and
foremost a movie, and should
be seen as one.... It wasn’t
made to manipulate your feel-
ings, to reinvent the past, or
to set the historical record
straight. It’s a romantic look at
a terrible time in our history,
when expansion in the name of
progress brought us very little
and, in fact, cost us deeply.”
—actor-director Kevin Costner
on his film Dances with Wolves

The North American Indian Prose Award
is established.
The University of Nebraska Press, in conjunction
with the Native American studies programs of the
University of California at Berkeley and the Univer-
sity of New Mexico, announces that it will sponsor
the North American Indian Prose Award. This lit-
erary prize is to be given annually to a nonfiction
manuscript by an Indian author. Part of the award is
publication of the manuscript by University of Ne-
braska Press. Future winners will include Claiming
Breath, by essayist Diane Glancy, and They Called It
Prairie Light, by historian K. Tsianina Lomawaima.

The Rosebud Reservation becomes a
landfill site.
The Lakota tribal council of South Dakota’s Rose-
bud Reservation approves a proposal by O&G
Industries to construct a landfill on 5,700 acres of
reservation land. Under the agreement, Rosebud

Oneida actor Graham Greene was nominated for an
Academy Award for his portrayal of Kicking Bird in
Dances with Wolves. (Courtesy of the Museum of Modern
Art Film Stills Archive)

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