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May 9, 2007

Classic Book About America’s Indians Gains a Few Flourishes as a Film

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, May 8 — When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of
rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and
decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but
from that of the Indians.

But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages
and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to
convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience.
When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning
Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was
part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white
woman.

“Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a
part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience
through this project,” Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO
Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year.

The added character is based on a real person: Charles Eastman, part Sioux
and descended from a long line of Santee chiefs but who was sent away by
his father to boarding school and then held up as a model of the potential
assimilation of 19th-century Native Americans. But the film fictionalizes
significant portions of his life. In the HBO version he dodges bullets at
the Battle of Little Bighorn. In reality he was far away, in grade school
in Nebraska.

Fictionalizing history has long been standard in Hollywood. But rarely do
filmmakers directly hitch their historically inaccurate projects to revered
works of nonfiction. Dick Wolf, an executive producer of the film who is
best known for the “Law & Order” television franchise, defended the
fabrications.

“This was not an attempt to do the Ken Burns version of the Indian
experience,” Mr. Wolf said in an interview. “It is a dramatization, and we
needed a protagonist.”

(The chief executive of HBO, Chris Albrecht, announced yesterday that he
was taking a leave of absence after being charged with assaulting a
girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot early on Sunday.)

At the time it was published, Mr. Brown’s epic, subtitled “An Indian
History of the American West,” struck a chord in a country embroiled in a
divisive war in Vietnam and still shuddering from the American military’s
massacre in the village of My Lai. Segregation was dying hard in the South,
and the American Indian Movement was ascending.

The story is a relentless tragedy, tracing the history of American Indian
nations from 1860, shortly after the first new states extended into the
“permanent Indian frontier,” through 1890 and the massacre at Wounded Knee,
in what is now South Dakota. It became a blockbuster best seller and helped
shape the way the history of the American Indians has been interpreted ever
since.

For decades the book eluded attempts to turn it into a film, partly because
of Mr. Brown’s distrust of Hollywood. At least two attempts by potential
moviemakers to adapt the book failed. When the current producers optioned
the book five years ago, Mr. Brown was in the last years of his life and,
according to his grandson, did not believe anything would come of the
project. (Mr. Brown died in 2002 at 94.)

Tom Thayer, the executive producer who originated the project, said the HBO
team wrestled for months with how to boil down a book that spans 30 years
and dozens of tribes into a 130-minute film.

“The book is basically an editorialized textbook,” Mr. Thayer said. “It
doesn’t have a single narrative; it’s anthropological and episodic.”
Therefore, he added, “we felt that to tell a story of that size, the
Eastman character would be a great hand-holder for the audience.”

Many literary critics, and millions of readers, however, had little trouble
following Mr. Brown’s story. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in
March 1971, N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, emphasized
that the book was a story, “a whole narrative of singular integrity and
precise continuity; that is what makes the book so hard to put aside, even
when one has come to the end.”

The film largely restricts itself to the late 1880s, the time of the Ghost
Dance, a messianic movement that swept through the Plains Indian tribes.
Within that period it weaves together three strands: the story of Sitting
Bull, the legendary chief of the Sioux, who fought against Custer’s forces
at Little Bighorn in 1876; that of Henry L. Dawes, the Massachusetts
senator who pushed into law a plan to allocate portions of Indian land to
individual tribe members; and Eastman, who was taken from his tribe by his
father and attended Dartmouth and then Boston University School of
Medicine.

It is in the last two stories that the film begins to bend history.

“Eastman was the most well-known, well-educated Indian at the beginning of
the 20th century,” said Raymond Wilson, a professor of history at Fort Hays
State University in Hays, Kan., who wrote what is considered to be the
definitive biography of Eastman. “When I heard they were doing the film,”
he said, “I joked with a couple of people that I hoped they didn’t have
Charles Eastman shaking hands with Sitting Bull at Pine Ridge.”

Not quite, but almost. The film’s climactic scene has Eastman watching as
Sitting Bull addresses a group of Sioux in Pine Ridge at a meeting of which
Dawes is the chairman. Sitting Bull tells them not to accept the government
land allotments. In fact, the chief lived 200 miles away at the Standing
Rock agency, and the meeting never happened.

As for placing Eastman at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Mr. Giat, the
screenwriter, defends that choice by noting that some members of Eastman’s
tribe were there.

The film also shows Eastman courting Elaine Goodale, a Massachusetts poet
and teacher who oversaw schools for Indians in the Dakota territory, over a
period of years, beginning while he was in college. In fact, Eastman met
her when he arrived at Pine Ridge less than two months before the Wounded
Knee massacre. Nor was Goodale anywhere near the reservation in 1883 when
Sitting Bull arrived, as shown in the film; she was in Virginia.

HBO executives said they saw no problem with the inconsistencies. “When we
look at historical accuracy, we look at history as it plays in the service
of a narrative,” said Sam Martin, a vice president at HBO Films in charge
of production on the project. HBO has at times gone the opposite route;
last year it publicized the pains it took to ensure the factual accuracy of
its Emmy-winning miniseries “Elizabeth I.”

To its credit, HBO’s version of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” does not
glamorize Sitting Bull, but rather portrays him as he was: an egotistical,
often brutal leader whose pride endangered members of his tribe as they
suffered through famine, drought and disease.

Some people who have seen advance screenings of the HBO version have
praised it. “This is the first time I’ve seen a film so accurately portray
the impact of federal policy on our people,” said Jacqueline Johnson, the
executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which is
cooperating with HBO on educational projects featuring the film. “You see
the beginning of issues and policies whose effects we are still dealing
with today.”

But others are dismayed. Nicolas Proctor, Mr. Brown’s grandson and one of
three people who oversees his estate, as well as an associate professor of
history at Simpson College in Iowa, said that as a historian he was “always
kind of shocked that history is not moving enough, is not evocative enough
and rich enough to keep people from having to get in there and start
monkeying around with it.” He said that the estate had no control over the
film’s content.

Mr. Proctor said his grandfather wouldn’t necessarily be surprised by HBO’s
tinkering. “I don’t think he ever thought anything historically accurate
would come out of any film version,” he said. Still, before this, “nobody
had ever before gone and gutted it and turned it into a love story.”