Abstract
Hollywood has treated the Pawnee Indians of Nebraska badly. In both Little Big Man (1970) and Dances with Wolves (1990), films that generally present Indians in a favorable light, the Pawnees are portrayed as villains. The Pawnees in Dances with Wolves are one-dimensional stereotypes, playing violent villains to Kevin Costner’s Lakota heroes; ironically, the Pawnees are playing roles identical to those the Lakotas used to play when the heroes were all white. In reality, the Pawnees were a sophisticated people who sought to order their universe and renew their world through complex rituals.
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Notes
Gene Weltfish, The Lost Universe: The Way of Life of the Pawnee (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 97–98, 200, 207, 243;
Douglas R. Parks, ed., Ceremonies of the Pawnee by James R. Murie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 39–42;
Douglas R. Parks and Waldo R. Wedel, “Pawnee Geography: Historical and Sacred,” Great Plains Quarterly 5 (1985), 143–76;
Richard White, “The Cultural Landscape of the Pawnees,” Great Plains Quarterly 2 (1982), 31–40; and The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among the Choctaw, Pawnee and Navajo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 171–73.
Martha Royce Blaine, Pawnee Passage: 1870–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 66, 84–86, 94; Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners for the Year 1874 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1875), 102; Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners for 1877 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1878), 56.
On the Quaker missionaries’ “record of failure and frustration” among the Pawnees and their neighbors, see Clyde A. Milner, II, With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees, Otos, and Omahas in the 1870s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
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© 1996 BEDFORD BOOKS of St. Martin’s Press
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Calloway, C.G. (1996). A Pawnee Vision of the Future. In: Calloway, C.G. (eds) Our Hearts Fell to the Ground. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07646-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07646-5_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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