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Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner) and the teamster Timmons (Robert Pastorelli) are already far along on their way to Fort Sedgewick, on the Indian frontier, when Dunbar asks, "How come we haven't seen any buffalo?" "You can't figure the stinkin' buffalo," Timmons answers, "you can't. Sometimes you won't see any for days. Other times they be thick-like curls on a whore." Timmons explodes with laughter at this crude simile, but Dunbar registers only embarrassment and disappointment. Undeterred by this latest instance of Timmons's unregenerate boorishness, Dunbar asks, "What about Indians?" Incredulous, as if stunned by an impertinence, Timmons replies: "Indians? Goddamn Indians! You'd just as soon not see 'em less'n the bastards are dead. They're nothing but thieves and beggars!" Dunbar is downcast, and the slow procession to Sedgewick continues in silence.
Much later in Dances With Wolves (1990), two of Dunbar's new Lakota friends, Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) and Wind In His Hair (Rodney A. Grant), ride to the fort and present Dunbar with a buffalo robe. Then they ask him if he has seen any buffalo. Dunbar has not, but he realizes that his friends are hungry and offers them food from the fort's stores. The Lakotas refuse, however, and ride back dispirited. Cradling the buffalo robe appreciatively as he watches them, Dunbar speaks as the voiceover narrator, whom we have already learned to identify with the entries in his journal: "Nothing I had been told about these people is correct. They're not beggars and thieves. They're not the bogeymen they have been made out to be. On the contrary, they are polite guests and have a familiar humor I enjoy."
Taken together, Timmons's insult and Dunbar's tribute identify the dialectic whereby Costner as the director presents his idea and image of the raciocultural Other-"these people"-in Dances With Wolves, an Indian western that recommended itself to the public on the strength of its representation of Native Americans. Until then, many maintained, Hollywood Indians had been only useful foils in the story of white mythocultural self-definition. Yet here, seemingly unprecedented, was an Indian western "both sweeping and authentic in its finest particulars on Native American themes" (Schruers 57). "For the first time," Marilou Awiakta wrote, "a highly commercial film portrays Native Americans as...