Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007) on Netflix

TV-1420072h 5mDrama History Western

After the Sioux defeat Custer at Little Big Horn, Charles Eastman, a Sioux doctor educated in the East, works to improve reservation life. Chief Sitting Bull refuses to give up Lakota land.

Netflix3.6/5
IMDb7.1/108,486 votes
Rotten Tomatoes78%

Trailer

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Plot summary

The years after Little Big Horn turn on land and assimilation. Charles Eastman, born Ohiyesa, is a Sioux doctor who trained in the East at Dartmouth and Boston University, presented as evidence that assimilation succeeds. Sitting Bull, the Lakota chief, will not accept policies that would take the Black Hills and his people's way of life. Senator Henry L. Dawes, an architect of Indian policy, proposes dividing the Great Sioux Reservation into individual household plots to push farming, and argues before President Ulysses S. Grant for gentler treatment, against General William Tecumseh Sherman's harder line. Elaine Goodale, a New England reformer who oversees Indian schools in the Dakotas, works alongside Eastman to better reservation life. Chief Red Cloud has already made peace with the government and moved to a reservation.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Henry L. Dawes pushed assimilation through his Dawes Act of 1887 and his later work heading the Dawes Commission; over the 47 years the Act was implemented Native Americans lost about 90 million acres of treaty land, two-thirds of their 1887 land base, and about 90,000 were made landless.
SPOILER
The prophet Wovoka raised Native American hopes with the Ghost Dance, a messianic movement promising an end to their suffering under the white man; those hopes ended with the assassination of Sitting Bull and the massacre by the 7th Cavalry of nearly 200 men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Television Movie, and was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among them Best Limited or Anthology Series or Television Film.
The title of both the film and the book it is based on is taken from a line in the Stephen Vincent Benét poem "American Names".