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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I hadn't thought about the Little Big Man incident in years. So I think I might write about it. Thank you for writing your post.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Back in college, a professor screened the movie Little Big Man, a revisionist (and great) western starring Dustin Hoffman. There's a horiffic scene in which the U.S. Cavalry is massacring men, women, and children in a Lakota Sioux encampment. During the scene, horses are also killed and many of the other students—all of them white—audibly reacted to the horse murders. There were gasps. I was taken aback by the reaction and chastisted my fellow students for reacting more strongly to the death of the horses than they did to deaths of the Indians. But, over the years, I've realized that the students were reacting to the real fear and potential injury of the horses. The horses didn't know they were in a movie. Of course, the actors knew they were acting. The stunt people knew they were stunt-acting. I don't know that the other students were conscious of why they reacted so strongly to the horses' deaths. But I think that it's far more difficult to suspend one's disbelief when it comes to animals in films, especially when we're talking about the days when animals weren't protected at all in moviemaking.

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