General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202612 min read

Dances with Wolves

Dances with Wolves is a 1990 American Western film directed by Kevin Costner, written by Michael Blake, and based on Blake's 1988 novel of the same name. It follows Union Army Lieutenant John Dunbar, who is posted to the abandoned Fort Sedgwick in 1863 during the Civil War, befriends a neighboring Lakota Sioux community, and is gradually accepted into it under the name Dances With Wolves.²² Released by Orion Pictures at 181 minutes, the film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premieres in Washington, D.C. (19 October 1990) and Los Angeles (4 November 1990); Los Angeles and New York openings 9 November 1990; wide release 21 November 1990¹
Format	181 minutes, PG-13, filmed in Panavision, Dolby Stereo SR in selected theaters; produced by TIG Productions and Majestic Films International¹
Box office	$184,208,842 domestic and $424,208,805 worldwide against a reported $19,000,000 production budget³
Academy Awards	12 nominations, 7 wins: Best Picture, Best Director (Costner), Best Adapted Screenplay (Blake), Cinematography (Dean Semler), Film Editing (Neil Travis), Original Score (John Barry), and Sound²^•⁴
Language	About one third of the dialogue is in Lakota, much of it subtitled; two studios turned the project down over this insistence⁵
Principal cast	Kevin Costner (Lt. John Dunbar), Mary McDonnell (Stands With a Fist), Graham Greene (Kicking Bird), Rodney A. Grant (Wind in His Hair), Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman (Ten Bears)⁶
Preservation	Added to the National Film Registry in 2007⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Tennessee, 1863. The Civil War has chewed up Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner), and the field hospital is about to chew up his leg. Rather than let the surgeons take it, he rides back to the stalled front lines, and his suicide run so bewilders and inspires the Union troops that they charge and win behind him. He keeps the leg, gains a medal, and requests the frontier. The major who grants it, an eccentric who talks to his boots, sends him to Fort Sedgwick, then shoots himself days later, which means nobody in the Army knows Dunbar exists.

The fort is deserted. Dunbar repairs the place, keeps a journal, buries the remains of a suicide nearby, and slowly befriends a wild wolf he names Two Socks, tossing it scraps of bacon while it keeps a careful distance. The prairie around him is nearly empty, and the film is nearly wordless for long stretches, which makes the arrival of people feel like weather changing.

The people are Lakota. A warrior named Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) tries to steal his horse in broad daylight; Dunbar, wanting contact more than he wants the horse, walks into their camp carrying the American flag, an act so strange that it starts a wary conversation conducted mostly in charades. The tribe's holy man, Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), takes the long view of the stranger. The bridge is Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman taken in by the Lakota as a child after her family was killed by Pawnee, whose English is rusty and whose grief is not. She translates badly at first, then better, then not at all, because the translation stops being needed.

Dunbar earns his place in stages. He shares his coffee and tobacco. He tells Kicking Bird that the white men are coming like a river of people, endless, and the news lands like a diagnosis. Then the buffalo, the tribe's whole livelihood, fail to appear, and the camp finds skinned carcasses left to rot by white hunters before the real herd is sighted.

The buffalo hunt is the sequence people remember, and it deserves the memory. Riders sweep across a 55,000-acre ranch alongside thousands of live, stampeding buffalo, arrows flying, dust to the horizon, Costner doing his own riding as Dunbar, whooped into the chase, shoots a buffalo that was about to trample a Sioux boy. It is chaos photographed as grandeur, and it is the moment Dunbar stops being a guest. Afterward he sits in a circle eating raw liver as a rite of the hunt, and the man from Fort Sedgwick is functionally gone. The camp gives him a new name for the wolf at his elbow: Dances with Wolves.

The rest of his assimilation arrives without a single dramatic conversion scene. He learns Lakota in patient exchanges with Kicking Bird, trades his Army coat, digs the burial scaffold of Stands With A Fist's late husband out of the ground so she can properly mourn, and falls in love with her; Kicking Bird, whose own children were killed, gives them his blessing, and they marry. Then the film turns. Pawnee raiders kill a Sioux boy, and Dunbar hands out the fort's rifles, taking up arms against other Native people on the Sioux's side. When he goes back to the fort for his journal, he finds the Army has garrisoned it. Soldiers shoot Two Socks on the riverbank for sport, beat Dunbar in the face, and ship him east as a traitor, and he refuses to speak English to his captors, answering their questions in Lakota because there is no version of himself left that answers in anything else.

The rescue comes from the tribe, who ambush the escort and kill the soldiers. From the cliff, Wind In His Hair tells him he considers them brothers, the friendship built over two hours of coffee, meals, and a borrowed horse now spoken aloud. But the triumph is brief. More soldiers are coming, winter is coming, and the camp must move. Dunbar chooses to leave with Stands With A Fist so that his presence cannot be used against the people who took him in, telling Kicking Bird there may be a way to reach him someday but he cannot say when. Wind In His Hair shouts his farewell from the hilltop, "Can you see that I am your friend? Can you see that I would always be your friend?" A lone wolf howls, and a title card closes it out: thirteen years later, their homes destroyed, their buffalo gone, the last of the Sioux confined to reservations.

Characters

Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is a decent, stolid man who keeps asking for the edge of things and finds himself there. His transformation is measured in small accumulations: a journal entry, a shared meal, a new name.

Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) is the tribe's holy man and its diplomat, cautious where others are aggressive, and the one who understands that the stranger is a window into a future the Sioux do not want. Greene plays him in small shifts of the face.

Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell) is the white captive whose broken English makes her the fragile bridge between two camps, and whose mourning, marriage, and choice at the end make her more than a translation device.

Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant) begins as the tribe's loudest skeptic and ends as Dunbar's fiercest friend, shouting that friendship from a hilltop near the film's end.

Ten Bears (Floyd Red Crow Westerman) is the aging chief who delivers the tribe's verdict on the white man's offers, and Two Socks, the wolf, is the film's saddest rhyme: something wild befriended and impossible to protect.

Interpretations and controversies

The film is routinely discussed as the archetypal "white savior" narrative, a label its defenders push back on by pointing to the Lakota dialogue, the Native cast, and the ending, in which the white man is the one who has to leave. Screen Rant reads the ending as commentary on the inevitable clash of cultures and the loss of Native autonomy, noting Dunbar's recognition that his own presence endangers the tribe.²³ The film is also credited with helping reevaluate the Western genre after decades in which it was considered dead.²³ Before release, industry insiders, remembering the disaster of Heaven's Gate, had a cruel nickname for it: "Kevin's Gate."²⁴

Sequels, prequels, and universe

There is no film sequel, but Michael Blake wrote a 1994 novel, The Holy Road, that follows the characters after the events of the first story, and a long-gestating film adaptation has never been made.

Origin of the story

Screenwriter Michael Blake developed the idea from his longtime interest in American Indian history, Dee Brown's book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), and a true story about a teamster sent to resupply a frontier U.S. Army fort only to find it abandoned. After writing roughly fifteen unproduced screenplays, he pitched the idea to Kevin Costner in 1986; Costner suggested writing it as a novel to improve its chances of selling. Blake, living out of his car at the time, wrote the novel in nine months, and it was sold to Fawcett Books for $6,500. Costner optioned the film rights before the book's release and commissioned Blake to adapt it.¹

In Blake's novel, Dunbar lives among the Comanche rather than the Lakota Sioux. The filmmakers changed the tribe because the Comanche in Oklahoma offered a small talent pool, while South Dakota had many Sioux who knew the Lakota language. The backstory of Stands With a Fist, a white woman raised by the tribe, drew on the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a white girl captured by the Comanche and mother of the leader Quanah Parker.²

Production

Costner financed the film through his own company, TIG Productions, and it was his directorial debut.² Majestic Films International, a London-based company financed by the Crédit Lyonnais bank, co-produced and provided a substantial share of the financing through pre-sold foreign theatrical rights.⁸ Principal photography ran from mid-July to late November 1989 in South Dakota, and the shoot wrapped 23 days over schedule.¹^•⁹ During production the trade press nicknamed the overrunning project "Kevin's Gate," a reference to the notoriously troubled Western Heaven's Gate (1980).¹⁰

Language and casting. A central effort at authenticity was linguistic. Producer Jim Wilson said two studios rejected the project because the filmmakers insisted that nearly a third of the dialogue be in Lakota, mostly subtitled; Orion Pictures allowed the subtitles. Doris Leader Charge, who taught Lakota language and culture at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, tutored the cast, including Costner, on their Lakota lines.⁵ Many of the actors playing tribal members were themselves Native American: Tantoo Cardinal (Black Shawl) is Cree, Rodney Grant (Wind in His Hair) is Omaha, and Floyd Westerman (Ten Bears) is Sioux; the 150 extras were Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation.¹¹

The wolf Two Socks, which visits Dunbar's post, was played by several animals. Under the American Humane Society's "No Animals Were Harmed" monitoring program, two wolves, Teddi and Buck, shared the role; since neither would howl, a third wolf performed the howling heard at the end of the film.¹²

Release and box office

Orion Pictures opened the film in only fourteen theaters before expanding it after strong public response; it eventually peaked on 1,636 screens.³^•⁸ It grossed $184,208,842 in the United States and Canada and $239,999,963 internationally, for a worldwide total of $424,208,805, about 22.3 times its reported $19 million production budget.³ The Library of Congress later credited the film with disproving the reputation Westerns had acquired in the late twentieth century for losing money.¹³

Awards

At the 63rd Academy Awards, held 25 March 1991, the film won seven Oscars from twelve nominations, beating Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas for Best Picture and Best Director.⁴^•¹⁴ Graham Greene's nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role was the second for a Native North American actor, after Chief Dan George for Little Big Man (1970).² Time has described it as the second film about Native Americans to win Best Picture, after Cimarron (1931).¹⁵

Reception and criticism

Contemporary reviews were largely positive. Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, called it one of the best Westerns he had seen and praised it for allowing the Sioux to speak in their own language and for seeing them "as people, not as whooping savages."¹⁶ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 87% Tomatometer score from 132 reviews, with a critics' consensus that it "suffers from a simplistic view of the culture it attempts to honor" while remaining "a stirring western."¹⁷

Representation debate. Among Native American commentators the reaction was mixed. Filmmaker George Bordeaux (Blackfeet) asked, "who's telling the story. It's certainly not an Indian," while Michael Smith (Sioux), founder of the American Indian Film Institute, said "I don't think 'Dances with Wolves' is ever going to be topped."² Later scholarship has argued that despite advances over earlier Westerns, the film remains focalized through a Eurocentric settler-colonial lens and relies on the "noble savage" stereotype, with Dunbar's whiteness ultimately superseding his adopted Lakota identity.¹⁸^•¹⁹ A Yale University Press essay criticized the film for historical abuses, noting that the filmmakers simply replaced the Comanche of Blake's novel with the Lakota without changing the key historical events.²⁰

Legacy

The Library of Congress, adding the film to the National Film Registry in 2007, described it as one of the more sympathetic portraits of Native American life in American cinema and credited it with introducing the American public to Lakota Sioux folklore, traditions, and language.¹³ Film historian Angela Aleiss wrote in 2015 that the film "created a watershed... no Western has had such a powerful impact."²¹ Its commercial success briefly revived the Western genre, inspiring films such as Posse (1993) and The Hi-Lo Country (1998).⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns, 1980 onward

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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