Search - Biography - Sitting Bull: Chief of the Lakota Nation on DVD

A Lakota Leader

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 05/07/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This documentary taught me some important stuff. The Lakota called whites "longhairs": I would have thought they would think of them as "shorthairs" compared to their long braids. It turns out that Sitting Bull did not participate in Custer's Last Stand; he just foresaw it in a vision. The Lakota thought gold was useless; I thought gold's shininess appealed to all humans, thus its value, even in Ancient Egypt.

One big problem is that this documentary begins by focusing on Lakota culture and Red Elk and ends by describing a massacre that took place after Sitting Bull's assassination. Thus, little of this work focuses specifically on Sitting Bull.

The documentary says, "The Lakota were tolerant of alternative lifestyles" and then it describes acts of masochism (that one interviewee incorrectly calls sadism) during Sun Dances. However, in Walter L. Williams' "The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Cultures," an ancestor of Sitting Bull said she thinks he had a two-spirited, or transgendered, wife. Thus, Sitting Bull may have been what we would now call bisexual, yet the documentary never brings that up.

This A&E work must have been made at the same time as their work on Crazy Horse. Understandably, Crazy Horse avoided the Western practice of photography. However, since Sitting Bull didn't oppose it, we have all these varied, descriptive photos of him to this day. The same white interviewees in the Crazy Horse work were interviewed here, but the Native American interviewees were different people."