Earth Angels

Robert De Niro has joined the ranks of other screen stars using their clout and political consciousness to develop film projects revolving around American Indian culture.

Kevin Costner has “Dances With Wolves” due out this summer for Orion. Robert Redford previously announced that he’s developing “Dark Wind,” based on a Tony Hillerman novel featuring a Navajo police officer, and “Peltier,” the real life story of Leonard Peltier, the Indian activist accused of killing two FBI agents in a reservation shoot-out in 1975.

Now, screenwriter John Fusco (“Young Guns”) tells us, he’s co-producing “Thunderheart” with De Niro and his Tribeca Films partner, Jane Rosenthal, for Tri-Star. A script’s finished and negotiations are underway with a potential director and stars.

The contemporary “Thunderheart” reportedly has a half-Indian detective investigating a series of murders on a reservation, discovering his ancestral roots in the process. Fusco declines to give plot details, but says the script “deals with the ongoing oppression and attempted genocide of the Indian culture, as well as the exploitation of the earth.”

Fusco, an avid student of American Indian culture, was “adopted” three years ago into the Oglala-Sioux family. He and De Niro spent several days on South Dakota’s remote Pine Ridge reservation of the Lakota Sioux nation last fall. A number of Indians are acting as unofficial advisers on the script, Fusco says, “from American Indian law-enforcement people to medicine men.”

Fusco feels the current batch of Indian-themed projects may benefit from fortunate timing: “If these films are made with substance and truth, I think it is because of this new level of (Earth) awareness. You can’t separate Earth awareness from the American Indian.

“To traditional Indians, every day is Earth Day.”