![]() ![]() Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is accurate enough about events leading up to the massacre of hundreds of Lakota Sioux in South Dakota in 1890, and ferocious enough about the shameful massacre itself, to remind us of My Lai and Birmingham and frighten us with our worst behaviors. Accustomed as we are to perfect verisimilitude in our television docudramas, we presumably rattle our remote controls at our plasma screens in righteous indignation and switch to Fox News. Charles Eastman, into the middle of a real historical event, Little Bighorn, where young Eastman hadn’t really been, after which he starts a romance with another real person, the schoolteacher and poet Elaine Goodale, whom he wouldn’t really meet until much later, and who is also plunked down where, historically, she really wasn’t. These liberties consist of sticking a real person, the Dartmouth-educated mixed-race Sioux Dr. Perhaps you were as shocked as I was to learn from the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that the new cable-television production of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee had taken some liberties with the text of Dee Brown’s 1970 best seller. ![]() ![]() Illustration by Henry Jansen Photo: Annabel Reyes/Courtesy of HBO ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |