In Kevin Costner’s first installment of his four-part epic Horizon: An American Saga, bands of settlers head west in search of a so-called promised land, where they can park their wagons and set up a new town. The only problem is that they’re trespassing on Apache land, and the Indigenous inhabitants aren’t happy about it.
While Chapter 1 of the Civil War-era saga, in theaters June 28, focuses mainly on white settlers and the U.S. military, the film also takes viewers into the White Mountain Apache community as its chief and his sons discuss the encroachment — as well as their varying takes on the violent response from some in the tribe.
Given the historically insensitive portrayals of Native Americans in film over the years, the Indigenous actors who signed on to Horizon wanted to make sure that their storylines and depictions wouldn’t be problematic — as in, the men wouldn’t just be the bad guys and the women their “over-sexualized” accessories.
“As a Native actor, when Westerns come along, you kind of have to be very, very careful and wary of what you get involved with,” Tatanka Means, who is Navajo, Oglala Lakota, Yankton Dakota and Omaha, told Yahoo Entertainment.
While he said that digging into the script, “doing your investigations and ripping it apart,” is always key, Means, who also starred in Killers of the Flower Moon, said that who’s involved in the storytelling makes a big difference as well.
Among many Natives, Costner has earned that respect after his 1990 Academy Award-winning film Dances With Wolves not only employed many Indigenous actors but also offered empathetic portrayals.
“I think with Kevin and the way he handled things with Dances with Wolves and other Westerns that he’s done, I think that trust was kind of established there,” explained Means, who plays Apache warrior Taklishim in Horizon.
“For me, as a Native woman, it was really important that we were portrayed accurately,” said Wasé Chief, who is Oglala Lakota.
Chief plays Liluye, the wife of Taklishim, who doesn’t hesitate to speak up when it comes to her family’s next move.
“We were matriarchal societies, and we didn’t necessarily have to do everything that men were telling us to do,” she told Yahoo. “So it was nice that Kevin made sure to portray Native women really strong and independent and free of any kind of restraint from men.”
Owen Crow Shoe, a First Nations actor from the Piikani Nation and Blood Tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy who plays Taklishim’s brother Pionsenay, echoed Means’s perspective.
“Knowing that it was a Kevin Costner film and just knowing already how passionate he is about the portrayal of Native Americans [made a difference],” he said, “and how the characters, reading the script, it’s not just the one-dimensional warriors, like, we’re just kill, kill, kill all the time.”
That said, there is violence in the film — not only between the settlers and the Apaches but also among the settlers themselves. And yes, there is scalping — of Natives — which Chief admitted could be “triggering.”
Some critics have raised questions about the film’s portrayal of the Indigenous characters and how much time they have onscreen. In reviews from the film’s Cannes debut, David Rooney from the Hollywood Reporter argued that it takes an “uncomfortably long time . . . to show sensitivity toward its Indigenous characters,” while Owen Gleiberman from Variety wrote that “the film is not without its problems” when it comes to Native issues. Steve Pond from TheWrap wondered if the Indigenous characters will “get more screen time in subsequent chapters.”
Costner acknowledged in press materials that Horizon is “told mostly from the point of view of the settlers coming, but when we introduce the Native Americans, it was really important to me to give them the dignity, the ferociousness that they had, because they were fighting for their way of life, their religion, their existence.”
He added: “You can’t share the land, so the settlers decided to just take the land. They made a big deal about acting like they were willing to share it, but that was just to get a foothold. They really didn’t want any competition, and they pushed around 500 Native American nations from sea to shining sea. That’s the real story, that’s why we explore the Native Americans’ side in Horizon as well.”
Exploring the Indigenous side of the story also meant weaving the Apache language into the dialogue, with Means, Chief and Crow Shoe taking classes from Apache language teacher and consultant Aurelia Bullis and translator Elva Case.
“It was a real challenge. [Means and Crow Shoe] had more lines than I did, especially Owen. He killed it in the movie,” said Chief, who speaks Lakota. “I was just blown away because when I saw the amount of lines he had, I was stressed out for him because it’s such a hard language.”
“I speak Blackfoot myself, so coming onto this project, I hadn’t really heard Apache spoken before so it was all completely new to me,” Crow Shoe said. “It was always in the back of my mind that there’s gonna be some Apaches that are watching this and we have to do the language some justice.”
While there is still more of the Apaches’ story to tell in the Horizon saga — Chapter 2 opens in theaters August 16 — Chief and Crow Shoe shared what they want audiences to get out of the first installment.
“I just want, hopefully, Native people to feel proud when they see it and be proud that we’re being portrayed as a strong people because we have always and still are such a strong people,” Chief said. “We showed a lot of grace, but also just the strength that we hold, and we’ve always held.”
For Crow Shoe, it’s to show that Indigenous communities are “still here.”
“We’re still a strong people, we’re still powerful people,” he said, “and we always will be.”
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 is in theaters on June 28.
