Chronology of American Indian History

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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)