Mogul Ted Turner’s involvement with the plight of America’s original inhabitants shows itself abundantly this month, with the six-hour docu “Native Americans” already running on WTBS, and CNN Reports’upcoming news series “The Invisible People” starting Oct. 31. In between comes “Lakota Woman,” a skillful, if low-key, filming of Mary Crow Dog’s moving autobiography (written with Richard Erdoes)
Bill Kerby’s script, like the book, details her accession to maturity during the American Indian Movement’s 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, enshrined site of the bloody massacre of Indians by American troops in 1890.
Filmed at the site, with an almost entirely Native American cast, “Lakota” looks real. Director Frank Pierson and d.p. Toyomichi Kurita aim their cameras directly through the dust of the South Dakota Badlands; the setting itself creates an aching sense of desolation.
The central story is less the account of Mary — her abused childhood at a school where Indian children become “Americanized” and her annealing in the fury at Wounded Knee — than of the siege itself.
The issues are tangled and painful: intra-tribal politics between those who fight to preserve a proud heritage and those who cut deals with the outside world; blood struggles between the besieging forces and trigger-happy U.S. troops.
In the weathered, sad faces of the mostly amateur cast, and especially in the eyes of the extraordinary Irene Bedard in the leading role, one of the many blots in the sorry annals of this nation’s treatment of its predecessors on the land is powerfully illuminated. Vidpic is from Fonda Films, its first project for TNT.
