Compelling Journey of ‘Lakota Woman’ : TV Review: The TNT drama shows cultural pride and spiritual awareness through the eyes of a woman transformed by political action.

“I found my life, my center, my people,” says Mary Crow Dog, a Lakota Sioux whose triumphant journey to rebirth and rediscovery during the historic occupation of Wounded Knee frames TNT’s compelling movie “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee.”

Part of Ted Turner’s series on Native Americans, “Lakota Woman,” shot in South Dakota with virtually an all-Native American cast, is not merely another Native American movie created by a white person. It goes deeper than that, mirroring squalor, humiliation and ultimate cultural pride and spiritual awareness through the eyes of the entitled woman whose published autobiography inspired the movie.

The heroine, Mary Crow Dog, who literally rises from the trash heap, is impressively captured by the luminous Irene Bedard, making her movie debut.

Director Frank Pierson (who wrote “Dog Day Afternoon” and helmed HBO’s estimable “Citizen Cohn”) catches both the comical and tragic side of the classic 71-day siege in 1973.

Before Watergate distracts the media, caravans of reporters flock to the sight; even a few hippies join the parade to the little church that became the Native Americans’ battleground.

But long before we get to Wounded Knee, in some of adapter Bill Kerby’s most trenchant scenes, we experience Mary Crow Dog’s adolescence in a society rapidly changing in the 1960s and early ‘70s.

Mary, after a childhood spent in a Catholic mission school determined to assimilate her into the white world, becomes a Native American without a soul. She wanders the streets, partying, boozing, hurtled into a life of jails and dead-ends--the plight of most young Native Americans, the movie infers.

Her transformation and salvation is the American Indian Movement, where she finds political idealism, her native roots and friends whose eyes aren’t glazed over by alcohol. Sobering up and joining 2,000 other angry Native Americans in a battle for dignity at Wounded Knee, Mary gives birth under the fire of the FBI, local yahoos and U.S. marshals who act as if they’re storming the citadel.

“I was there, I saw it,” she says simply at fade-out. This is her affecting story, often shot with almost painterly strokes by cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita, reawakening what we are told the White House wanted so badly to erase from memory.

* “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee” airs at 5, 8 and 11 p.m. Sunday on TNT. It repeats Wednesday at 5 p.m. and Friday at 7 p.m.