The Indian Wars

A government-sanctioned phantasmagoria, The Indian Wars unfurls like a blood-stained lithograph commissioned to sanctify imperial erasure: 300 Lakota bodies strewn across the Dakota snow become mere brushstrokes in a tableau that recasts butchery as Manifest gallantry. Wilson’s treasury bankrolls this celluloid auto-da-fé, where cavalry sabers glint like cathedral spires and Hotchkiss shells become baptismal fonts of ‘civilization.’ Black Elk, Dewey Beard, and other survivors are dragooned into reenacting their own trauma, their faces—caught between stoic resignation and spectral accusation—hovering like displaced icons in a traveling freak-show of history. Charles King’s scenario choreographs massacre into pageant: wagons wheel like altars, carbines pop like celebratory liturgy, and the frozen creek at Wounded Knee becomes a proscenium where infants’ cries are overdubbed with trumpet flourishes. The camera, complicit archivist, lingers on Miles’s epaulettes, on the pantomimed ‘surrender’ of ghost-dance shirts, on the slow-motion toppling of grandmothers framed as tactical necessity. Each splice is a suture over the national wound of guilt, each intertitle a catechism of denial: ‘Savage fanaticism subdued.’ Meanwhile, the perforated bodies of the Lakota—already exhumed by grave-robbers for museum trophies—are now exhumed again by emulsion and light, their agony re-inscribed as pedagogical fable for Sunday-school patriotism. The reel ends not with elegy but with a tableau vivant of the Stars and Stripelifting above the corpse-mound, a semaphore of conquest fluttering in artificial wind supplied by off-screen cranks.