Dances with Wolves

[lcumberl at indiana.edu]

According to a companion book to the film, S. Dakota was chosen because there
was a large buffalo herd there. (Even the Civil War scenes were shot there, and
trees  and grass were spray-painted to make it look like the southeast.) Perhaps
the location dictated the shift from Comanche to Lakota.  As noted in earlier
messages, there were only two fluent Dakotan speakers in the cast, Doris Leader
Charge (Lakota) who served as the language coach, and Floyd Red Crow Westerman
(Dakota).  Incidentally, most of the  scenes with more authentic Lakota speech
were cut for the theater version, but have been restored in the director's cut
(4 hrs. long, but with the virtue of allowing skipping to the restored village
scenes where the two fluent speakers have more extended conversations with each
other.)

Linda

Quoting Anthony Grant <Granta at edgehill.ac.uk>:

> It may have something to do with people's difficulties in finding
> speakers of the language who can coach others for the purposes of syaing
> their lies in the relevant language.
>
> Remember that Michael Blake's novel fratured Comanches rather than
> Lakhotas as the tribe that Dunbar settled among. I do wonder f the
> switch was made because it was easier to find a Lakota-speaker to coach
> people in dialogue than a Comanche speaker.  (Though John Ford must have
> found one of the latter during the filming of The Searchers.)
>
> Anthony
>
> >>> bi1 at soas.ac.uk 02/12/2003 11:13:37 >>>
> Sorry, but why does the nature of Pawnee and Arikara lead to it
> becoming gibberish in films.  I'm fascinated
> Bruce
>
> On 1 Dec 2003 at 14:20, Parks, Douglas R. wrote:
>
> Date sent:      	Mon, 1 Dec 2003 14:20:17 -0500
> Send reply to:  	siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> From:           	"Parks, Douglas R." <parksd at indiana.edu>
> To:             	<siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Subject:        	RE: Dances with Wolves
>
> > Anthony,
> >
> > It has been several years since I watched Dances with Wolves, but
> the
> > "Pawnees" in the movie were not speaking Pawnee--or anything like
> it.
> > My impression was that the speech is nonsense.  (But maybe if I
> listened
> > again I might hear a Pawnee word or two.)
> >
> > That is also the case for most of the Arikara speech that occurs in a
> TV
> > serial on Custer that aired five or six years ago.  The character
> > playing Bloody Knife (Custer's favorite scout) says, "Kaakii',"
> which
> > means "no."  The English subtitles, however, gave two or three long
> > sentences for Kaakii'.  The other Arikara is jibberish.  Ditto the
> > Arikara in the sequel to "A Man Called Horse."  That's not
> surprising,
> > though, given the nature of Arikara and Pawnee.
> >
> > Doug
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> > [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Grant
> > Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 1:43 PM
> > To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> > Subject: Dances with Wolves
> >
> > Folks:
> >
> > As far as I could tell, based on my reading of the works of Douglas
> R
> > Parks, James R Murie, Gene Weltfish and Ferdinand Hayden.at least
> some
> > of  the Pawnees in the film were speaking Pawnee. I recall earing
> > something like /tawit/ 'three' and also a large number of words
> ending
> > in /-ks/. I think I heard /tsahriks/ 'person' in there somewhere, but
> I
> > may be mistaken.  Plus the phonology of the language was NOTHING
> like
> > that either of Lakhota or Cherokee.
> >
> > Anthony
> >
> >
>
>
>
>