Search - Biography - Crazy Horse: The Last Warrior on DVD

Lakota Leader

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 05/03/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Crazy Horse never took a photograph or signed any documents. Thus, this Biography learns from him in a unique way: it replays recorded interviews in the 1930s about him from tribal members that knew him. The documentary shows photos of other Sioux nationals at the time. This work includes footage of cowboys riding and Indians riding, however, they never say from where this footage originated. It did not seem like the cheesy reinactments of many modern documentaries.

The interviewees here were male and female, Native American and white. However, unlike many works in the Biography series, they were mostly academics with few laypersons as interviewees.

While Europeans may have forced others to come to them or seduced them in, this documentary, and others show that some non-Europeans resisted the temptation. Crazy Horse belongs in the same category as Brazil's Quilombo, Haiti's L'Ouverture, Nat Turner in the American South, or Japan's Ieyasu and the Tokugawa samurai.

I had no idea that Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull had the same tribal affiliation and lived during the same time. This is like the dualism of Malcolm X and Dr. King or Da Vinci and Michaelangelo. I wish the work would have said more about the relationship between the two leaders."