THE LAST STAND:

“BURY My Heart at Wounded Knee,” which premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. Sunday, traces the decline of the Sioux resistance from the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876 through the climactic Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. The two-part film is a major departure from previous dramas about 19th century American Indians -- not least because it grounds their experience in harsh reality rather than myth.

Depicting the travails of an essentially beaten people, mostly on their miserable reservations, it’s a wintry, melancholy film that doesn’t have time to dwell on the spiritual, Earth-friendly image of Native Americans. Nor does it offer a politically correct perspective. We’re told, for example, that during their own periods of conquest, the Sioux had been as rapacious as their white conquerors. The passel of Lakota and other Indian consultants hired for the project obviously didn’t object too strenuously.

Early in the film, which Daniel Giat adapted primarily from the last two chapters of Dee Brown’s 1971 bestseller, Col. Nelson A. Miles (Shaun Johnston), commanding the U.S. Fifth Infantry, agrees to a parley with Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg) and ridicules his belief in the Sioux’s divine right to call the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory their own. “You came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man,” Miles sneers. “You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee without mercy, and yet you claim the Black Hills as a private preserve bequeathed to you by the Great Spirit.”

Sitting Bull has no answer to this. Although he will eventually use his powers of oratory to deliver a moral defeat to Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn), the senator who promoted the assimilation of Indians while forcing them to sell their land, he knows that violence has its place on the frontier. During his band’s sojourn in Canada, he shoots the infant of a warrior who tried to leave with his family. Later, he is derided for having stayed in his tipi during the Custer fight and for selling his autographs and posing for photographs on the reservation.

“My primary objective was to fully dimensionalize these people,” Giat says. “Sitting Bull was vain. He was desperate to hold onto the esteem of his people and win the esteem of the whites. But I think in depicting his desperation and the measures he took in acting on it, it makes it all the more sad and tragic, and I think we identify with him all the more for it.”

“People have an iconic view of Sitting Bull,” says Yves Simoneau, the film’s director, “but that image is restrictive. The way August played him, noble but far from perfect, made him the character the test audiences identified with the most -- by a long way.” Schellenberg played Sitting Bull in TNT’s “Crazy Horse” (1995), but he is much more forceful here.

Inner conflicts

THE KEY theme in the film that underscores the conflictedness of the Sioux at this cataclysmic moment in their history is that of self-betrayal. Two of Sitting Bull’s warriors became tribal policemen at the Standing Rock Agency. One of them unintentionally tramples on his people’s pride by killing a buffalo in a corral. The other, who shoots Sitting Bull, was the bitter father of the slain baby.

This revenge motive is a touch of dramatic license. There are others. The Dakota youth Ohiyesa (Chevez Ezaneh) wasn’t present at Custer’s Last Stand as the movie shows in its opening sequence. He grows to become Dr. Charles Eastman (Adam Beach), the film’s conscience, whose romance with the white schoolteacher Elaine Goodale is, perhaps inevitably, molded to the story.

Educated at Dartmouth College and Boston University, Eastman came to the Pine Ridge Reservation as an agency doctor in 1889. In the film, he realizes that his assimilation, though a realistic choice, was a tragic one too.

“He was disillusioned by what he saw at Pine Ridge, and the Wounded Knee massacre destroyed his faith in white civilization,” Giat says. “He came almost to completely disavow his experience among the whites and devoted the rest of his life to writing about the Sioux and their stories and legends.” He also became an active reformer and Indian lobbyist.

“It was a hard realization for Dr. Eastman to hear Sen. Dawes say to him, ‘You are no more Sioux than I am,’ ” Beach says. “It means, ‘Don’t fool yourself. You’re a white man. You learned all our ways, and we taught you to forget everything about your heritage.’ He felt at a loss because there was no negotiation of understanding between the two peoples. The Sioux were told they had to sign away their rights to their lands or perish. When he learned that, it shattered his whole idea of sharing his existence with the white world.

“But I don’t think he ever carried himself in a negative way. He thought he’d come to a level of what the whites felt was civilized, but that he’d also brought some of his history with him. That made him feel he had something to offer. You don’t forget everything, you know? In the end, he tries to balance everything. That’s a tough thing to do, and our people are still at a crossroads. Some say assimilation worked enough that now our people are fighting each other to say who is more Indian than the others.”

The more “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” paints its Indians as flawed or compromised individuals, the more it humanizes them. This has been a gradual evolution in films -- from “Broken Arrow,” “Devil’s Doorway” (both 1950) and John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964) through “Little Big Man” (1970) and Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning “Dances With Wolves”(1990). The latter movie made Hollywood’s traditionally racist attitudes toward Indians finally untenable -- even if it spawned films that have offended Indians.

For example, the aforementioned “Crazy Horse” was denounced by Chief Oliver Red Cloud, fourth-generation descendant of the Oglala chief Red Cloud: “Upon reading the script,” he wrote, “we, the descendants of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, discovered that the truth of our history has been altered to present these great leaders of our Nation in a very bad light, and in some cases, they have presented pure lies.” In “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Red Cloud is played by Gordon Tootoosis as a weakened sage who rallies to support Sitting Bull as the Sioux make their last stand -- not on the plains but in a makeshift conference room.

All this is a far cry from the way Indians have traditionally been shown on film.

“Indians in westerns were often used as little more than howling adversaries to the cowboys they chased -- deadly, faceless and brutal,” says Henry Cabot Beck, movie editor of True West magazine. “They were primarily targets to be picked off. So many Westerns of the 1930s and ‘40s and on TV in the ‘50s were geared toward adolescent audiences, so it’s no surprise there was little effort made to add any complexity.

“But the adult westerns that dealt with Native Americans in any detail were obliged to give the Indians a greater gravity, to make of them worthy opponents or companions. The Comanche chief Scar in ‘The Searchers’ [1956] had to be a mirror of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards.” Scar’s depredations on the whites are also explained by their earlier killing of his family; the same plight was suffered by Magua, the ferocious Huron in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992).

“It might be argued that the first movie Indians to demonstrate a sense of humor appeared in ‘Little Big Man,’ but that’s a rare quality, even today,” Beck says, noting that the most significant quality common to the newer portrayals is mystical awareness, as shown by “Thunderheart” (1992), “Silent Tongue” (1994), “The Missing” (2003), “Miracle at Sage Creek” (2005), and “Seraphim Falls” (2006).

But metaphysics are hard to pull off. TNT’s “Crazy Horse” erred in trying to depict the great Oglala war leader’s dreams and visions, a near impossible task for any filmmaker. There’s no such hocus pocus in “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” The book and the film’s single most haunting image is that of Chief Big Foot, frozen in death on the Wounded Knee battlefield. He and nearly 300 of his band were mowed down by the Army’s Hotchkiss guns for practicing the Ghost Dance, the Sioux’s unarmed ritual of resistance. Big Foot’s corpse was found face down, but Simoneau shows how it was turned over for the benefit of the photographer -- a potent metaphor for the manipulation of American Indians, on film as in life.

“When you look at the photos of the post-massacre site, you see something irreplaceable -- which is the souls of these people,” Simoneau says. “It’s shocking to learn that Big Foot’s body is twisted at that strange angle because he had been moved -- it tells you a lot about what photographers, reporters or filmmakers will do.”