Chapter 17: Hostiles: Revisionist Views about Native Americans and U.S. Government Relations at the Close of the Western Frontier: Film: Hostiles (2018)

Hostiles: Revisionist Views about Native Americans and U.S. Government Relations at the Close of the Western Frontier

The movie, Hostiles, is set in 1892 when the American-Indian Wars were coming to an end. The two main characters represent struggles between native nations and the U.S. government’s power over them. Government domination resulted in aggressions such as removal by force, land cessions and seizures, starvation/destitution, broken treaties, illegal land deals, incarceration, lawless discrimination, anti-Indian racism, cultural ethnocentrism, trickery, military defeat, and life-long prisoner of war camps known as reservations. Attempts to assimilate and “civilize” the people shielded economic, political, and social gains made by defeating the original inhabitants of the North American continent (Hubbard, 2020). One of the movie’s primary fictional characters is an angry, racist U.S. Army Captain, Joe Blocker, and another is Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk. According to the story, the two men were intense adversaries during the December 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee. In the movie, President Benjamin Harrison orders Blocker to accompany the dying chief from New Mexico to his homeland in Montana. Knowledge about causes and consequences of the Wounded Knee Massacre provides context for understanding personal relationships portrayed in this film. The film is “authentic to the time in which it takes place… in a significantly different light in our own time. Families are still broken, traditions are still lost to time, and yet mankind finds a way to forgive and grow itself” (Suzanne-Mayer, 2018, para.6).