`Dances With Wolves' Confronts Myths About Settlement Of The West

The film ``Dances with Wolves'' hits Americans with a troubling question.

``What kind of people are we?'' the camera seems to ask as it pans across buffalo that have been stripped of their hides and tongues and left to rot in the shimmering, golden grass of South Dakota.

Much has been written about the film's portrayal of Native Americans. But what is truly unprecedented is the film's treatment of nature.

``Dances with Wolves'' is America's first ``environmental Western,'' says Richard White, a historian at the University of Washington who writes about Indians, the West and environmental history.

The film also challenges the frontier myth that has been central to American identity, and this, historians say, is a sign of deep cultural rumblings. The emergence of such questioning in popular culture suggests that our ideas about our relationship to nature and the meaning of our past are in the midst of profound change.

``Dances with Wolves'' centers on a Civil War veteran, Lt. John Dunbar, who is posted by mistake to an abandoned fort on the frontier and comes to love the land, the animals and the Sioux too much to conquer them. For this, the army brands him a traitor.

``Nature always serves as a setting in the Western, but this one makes nature a character,'' White says. The animals in the film - the horse Cisco, the wolf Two Socks and the buffalo - are not just props or a part of the scenery, he notes, they are real characters. And in the end, it isn't the Indians who get killed by the advancing whites, but the animals.

Cultural historian Richard Slotnik agrees that ``Dances with Wolves'' introduces something ``original and highly significant'' to the Western, a genre that figures prominently in America's mythological landscape.

``This film makes our interconnectedness with nature a major theme,'' Slotkin said, noting that Dunbar treats his horse and the young wolf that befriends him ``as fellow citizens in a small society, not as objects to be used and destroyed.''

But Dunbar doesn't simply retreat to nature, he is drawn through the Indians into a new form of human society, one with a very different relationship with nature. The Indians stand as an alternative to the white society, which comes to do battle and ``win'' the West. ``When you retell a myth,'' Slotkin says, ``you are imagining a possible way of living.''

The director of the American Studies Program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Slotkin specializes in the role of the frontier in American thought, including the role the Western genre has played in our culture since Colonial times.

The frontier is America's central myth and its oldest, he explains, noting that this story of ``progress through conquest'' still informs our national politics. And the Western, first in print and later on film, has long served as a vehicle for speaking symbolically about current concerns as well as thinking about our past.

We have turned to Westerns, he says, when we are in a crisis and want to find out how we got there. The last major flowering of the genre came during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The early '50s - a time when we were wrestling with the Cold War, the McCarthy era and the early civil rights movement - marked another. Through stories about ``cowboys and Indians,'' these movies have talked about racial problems, class structure, the distribution of power in society, violence and the proper justification for war.

When such basic myths as the frontier are being handled critically, ``not just by professors'' but in a popular medium, ``you are in the midst of real cultural change,'' he says. But it is too soon to know where it will take us.

``Dances with Wolves'' recasts the frontier myth as a story of destruction and loss rather than one of progress and opportunity. The white society is portrayed as violent, intolerant and out of touch with the natural world. ``They are only able to relate to the natural world through murderous violence,'' Slotkin points out. The Sioux society Dunbar embraces offers different values and a different way to live as a human.

Some Western historians welcome such a re-examination, saying Americans have never come to grips with their real frontier past.

``We've never had good self-understanding,'' says Donald Worster, a historian at the University of Kansas. Our national myth is an ``imperialistic one'' that celebrates conquest of the land and of other people, he says. ``Our history has been driven by a powerful urge to acquire wealth and power, and that has had very destructive consequences at times.'' Confronting and acknowledging the imperialistic strand in our culture ``should help us mature as a people.''

Patricia Nelson Limerick of the University of Colorado, another historian who has looked at the dark side of the Western experience, applauds ``Dances with Wolves'' for having made conquest so central in its portrait of the frontier and for showing it with such ``clarity.''

``It's been a traditional white American habit to act as if Latin America and South Africa had `conquest,' while we've had `an expanding zone of opportunity.' ''

For White, the film is an indictment of industrial society, reflecting the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

He can't find anything redeeming in the white society portrayed in the film. In their sordidness, greed, gluttony and self-destructiveness, White says, the conquering whites become ``a metaphor for the fouling of the planet.''

The questions posed by the film, Limerick adds, aren't really new ones. We've been wrestling with them since the time of the frontier. And, she says, we still haven't figured out whether this land is more to us than resources for exploitation.

This confusion, she says, is evident in our environmental battles, where those opposing development frequently muster economic arguments. More than a century later, she says, it is telling that ``we're still stuck in a commercial frame of reference.''

Recalling the movie's scenes of buffalo slaughtered for profit, she adds, in a symbolic sense ``we haven't yet decided if we're killing buffalo or preserving them.''