Historical Accuracy of Dances With Wolves

A detailed Summary of Historical Accuracy of Dances With Wolves

Stories of the frontier and Indian history have become popular topics of art, literature, music, and motion pictures. Most of these movies involving Indians portray them as a race of ignorant, thieving savages, who initiate the fighting, and deserve to be killed. Dances With Wolves manages to avoid this stereotype by humanizing Native Americans by the way they portrayed the tribe as real people with true emotions.

Dances With Wolves is about how a Union soldier in the Civil War, Lt. John J. Dunbar, performs a bizarre, near-suicidal act, which earns him an award for heroism, a horse, and his choice of a new post. He selects a remote Western fort because he feels it is his last chance to see the frontier before it disappears. When he arrives, the fort is abandoned, but he decides to fulfill his soldierly duties until reinforcements arrive. He soon comes in contact with a local Sioux tribe and, through patience and effort on both sides, is befriended by and gradually integrated into the tribe. Over the course of time he is drawn more and more into their community. Eventually he is forced to take the side of the Indians over that of his fellow soldiers; a situation which leads to his arrest. Also, a major factor in the fi

The movie indicated that the Sioux had no knowledge about firearms. The tribe was shocked when they saw John Dunbar's gun, and he was the one who introduced them to the gun. The truth is that Indians had been trading for and using weapons like the flintlock and musket for a hundred years. The Indians were quick to adapt to new forms of weapons and became very proficient with them. It also seemed a bit strange that the lieutenant introduced them to coffee and sugar. The Native Americans, including the Sioux, had been trading for coffee for hundreds of years. Sugar in many forms wasn't new to people who had access to the Maple forests and traded with other Native peoples from all over the continent. The whole idea that the Sioux were not knowledgeable about the white man by this time is wrong.

The lieutenant, John Dunbar, seemed to know little of the Indian culture. He was amazed when he saw his first Indian, because he did not know what to expect. He was supposedly educated at West Point, and therefor would have been more than aware of the culture of the Indian. He would have studied warfare tactics that had been learned from the Indian. He would probably also be aware of the type of Indian government, which the American form of democracy was founded upon.

The first inaccuracy that

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Approximate Word count = 878
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies

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