‘Frontline’ Touches Spirit of Sioux

It was a generic Western, one of those old ones you see on TV.

The good guys (white skins) were about to be ambushed by the sneaky bad guys (red skins).

The bad guys watched from the rocks as the good guys rode by. But instead of attacking at that moment--and achieving a pretty easy massacre--they waited until the good guys passed, then chased them, whooping it up and enabling the good guys to shoot over their shoulders and pick them off one by one.

The bad guys were not only bad, but also dumb.

They were obviously from the same tribe of bad guys whose strategy for attacking white settlers in other movies has been to ride in a circle around the wagon train and, yes, let the good guys pick them off.

Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” is a major step forward. Thanks to all those old Westerns shown on TV, however, we may never stop dancing with deeply ingrained stereotypes of American Indians.

Just how deeply ingrained?

Have a look at the Black Hills of South Dakota, where up to 20,000 tourists a day visit Mt. Rushmore during the summer months. On the screen, a tourist gives money to a man in traditional American Indian dress, then tells his small son how to greet this costumed stranger.

“Say, ‘How.’ ”

Meanwhile, a saleswoman describes the kind of Indians who turn on tourists:

“They like ‘em when they’re in suede and the leather. They like ‘em with all the beads on. They like ‘em with the braids. They like to buy the traditional look of what they’ve always thought the Indian was.”

These scenes come from “The Spirit of Crazy Horse,” a “Frontline” documentary from PBS (Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, at 10 p.m. on Channel 50) that is airing almost a century after the famous massacre of Chief Big Foot and hundreds of unarmed Sioux by U.S. cavalry at Wounded Knee.

“It was the last massacre of the Indian wars,” says Milo Yellow Hair, the principal correspondent for “The Spirit of Crazy Horse” and a resident of the Pine Ridge Reservation that is home to the Oglala Sioux.

This simple, straightforward “Frontline” program chronicles the history of the Sioux. It includes the virtual theft of their Black Hills by the treaty-breaking U.S. government in 1877, when gold was discovered there. It also includes the violent confrontations of the 1970s and the ongoing internal conflicts of the Sioux.

The spirit of the great warrior Crazy Horse may indeed be alive in the hearts of Sioux. But what this means in pragmatic terms remains to be seen, for as Milo Yellow Hair laments: “In this America, the Indian is just a relic.”

So, in a sense, the “Indian wars” have continued. For example, there is the schism among American Indians themselves, pitting “traditionalists” who want to retain the “old ways” against those who side with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. There was also the Wounded Knee siege of 1973, when U.S. marshals clashed with American Indian Movement (AIM) members who had captured the town to publicize their grievances against the U.S. government.

The program’s footage of the incident comes mostly from co-producer Kevin McKiernan, who covered it as a journalist, then buried his film for fear that it would be confiscated by government authorities. He retrieved it three weeks later.

There is also sympathetic coverage of Leonard Peltier, the AIM activist who remains in jail for the 1975 slayings of two FBI agents in the hamlet of Oglala. His appeals have been denied.

McKiernan, who believes Peltier deserves a new trial because the evidence against him “is tainted,” first proposed a documentary on the Sioux to “Frontline” in 1984. “I wanted to make an investigative piece on the shoot-out at Oglala, but they turned it down,” he said from his office in Santa Barbara.

The treatment that “Frontline” did accept from McKiernan and co-producer Michel Dubois earlier this year is much broader, centering mostly on Sioux internal conflicts.

“I think with the 100th anniversary (of the Wounded Knee massacre) coming up, there was renewed interest,” McKiernan said. “And now, of course, because of what Costner has done, these things (American Indian projects) are very fashionable.”

Although not inspired by “Dances With Wolves,” also in the works are a documentary backed by Robert Redford on the Peltier case and, scheduled for Feb. 3-4, a two-part ABC movie, “Son of the Morning Star,” about Gen. George Armstrong Custer, based on the novel with the same name.

While the Indian militancy of the 1970s is central to Tuesday’s program, even more compelling are eloquent Sioux descriptions of the Black Hills as the sacred center of their culture. Equating land with spirituality is something few of us in this development-mad society can comprehend. Given their feelings, however, it’s no wonder that the Sioux have rejected the government’s offer of $122 million in compensation for the Black Hills, demanding the land instead.

Charlotte Black Elk says: “We’re created and spread out from the Black Hills. . . . This is the most special place on Earth.”

But a white resident of the Black Hills takes a hard line against Sioux demands that the land be returned: “When you lose the battle or the war, then you have to suffer the consequences. They’re a conquered people. If you conquer the people, then it’s got to stand.”

As Milo Yellow Hair walks among buffalo in the tall grass on what was once Lakota hunting grounds, man and nature seem in harmony. Despite this pastoral scene, however, you have the impression that the battle over the Black Hills is yet another the Sioux will lose to their conquerors, and that the most special place on Earth will remain in white hands.