ALL VIOLENT ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER: REASSESSING TWO REVISIONIST NATIVE AMERICAN WESTERNS

An American flag that flew from a lodge pole near the teepee of the peace-seeking Cheyenne leader Black Kettle failed to offer his people any protection from the soldiers' 12-pound mountain howitzers, carbines, and sabers. The fiftieth anniversary of these landmark films prompts reassessments of both, though not more so than the perpetuation of colonialist and imperialist outrages against Native Americans inherent in the ongoing Dakota Access Pipeline crisis for the Dakota and Lakota (Sioux) of the Standing Rock Reservation and in the disproportionate rate of COVID-19 infection among American Indians and Native Alaskans compared with infection among non-Hispanic whites. Filmed against the backdrop of the counterculture and the Vietnam War, and following the passage of the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, Little Big Man and the more incendiary Soldier Blue were radical in their depictions of the genocidai subjugation of North American native people but scarcely the first Hollywood movies to show them in a sympathetic light. Produced by and starring William F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill"), along with Indian fighter General Nelson A. Miles, Theodore Wharton's The Indian Wars (1914), a series of Wild West re-enactments, was cofinanced by the U.S. Government as propaganda for Indian assimilation and American military heroism on the eve of World War I. It presented the 1890 Army massacre of about three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a tragedy Cody exploited in his touring Wild West show, as heroic and justifiable.