A murder has taken place on the Sioux's Pine Ridge Reservation in the Dakotas. Since it's a major crime, it falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI, which is superordinate to the Tribal Police.The FBI sends Val Kilmer to investigate, under the supervision of his chief, Sam Shepherd. Kilmer finds that he's in the middle of a kind of tribal civil war, with two factions -- one cooperating with the government and the other a nativistic movement whose goal is to return to the traditional lifeways of the Sioux.Supporting characters are the head of the tribal police, Graham Greene, and the Indian school marm, Sheila Tousey, a graduate of Dartmouth. Things get complicated as an outsider, Fred Ward, is found to be drilling for uranium on the reservation. A find would demolish the place in the interests of national security.The photography captures the weird beauty of the South Dakota badlands perfectly. One wants to wander alone among the cinerous buttes, pinnacles, and spires. It makes your head reel, as I know.The apparent squalor of the Oglala reservation is also nicely sketched in. The houses are unpainted, tumbledown shacks with burlap curtains. Deceptively suspect, they're not really uncomfortable inside, and the discarded bedsprings and the skeletal furniture on the lawn are of no importance to the residents. They abide.Kilmer's FBI agent, it turns out, is part Sioux himself, although he's disavowed his ethnic roots because of his old man's drunkenness. His acting is of the usual professional character. Sam Shepherd is Sam Shepherd, in life an avant-garde playwright whose work is subtle but unnerving. Graham Greene delivers as the Indian sidekick. And there is one of those mystical but savvy old Indian men, all brown and wrinkled; in this instance, Ted Thin Elk. He slouches along is the most endearing way.Shiela Tousey is the kind of "native" woman who shows up in movies from time to time and is usually a hereditary princess or something. Ordinarily, the character is staggeringly beautiful, which makes it easier for the hero to fall in love with the girl, even if she must die at the end to prevent interracial marriage and justify the hero's blowing the villain's heads off. It's okay to schtupp them but you can't marry them. Fortunately, Shiela Tousey is not some Miss Nicaragua of 1995. She's rather zoftig and her facial features are sharp and penetrating. I don't know about anyone else but this parade of Miss Nicaraguas has gotten tiresome. Let's hear it for ordinary looking minority babes.The movie is just about undone by a familiar mistake on the part of the writer and the director, a mistake that John Huston deftly avoided in "The Man Who Would Be King." The Indians here have a bond with the earth. The wind tells them things. The owl is a messenger. They have visions that come true.In fact, they don't have more visions than the rest of us although customs of the past are present all over the place. As an anthropologist I lived with, and studied, four Indian tribes including two of the Sioux's neighbors on the high plains, the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne. What visions they may have, come from the occasional peyote ceremonies that are religious in nature, not at all recreational. That they have a bond with the earth that most of the rest of us can never know is unquestionable. The Cheyenne reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, abounded with sacred springs decorated with lavender ribbons and little bags of Bull Durham tobacco. They loved to eat boiled ribs (resembling buffalo) and potatoes (prairie turnips) and despised the TUNA FISH SANDWICHES. Well, let me not get into it.That big mistake -- introducing mysticism and preternatural powers -- almost blows the rest of the movie away, aside from the fact that the narrative itself is confusing and sometimes seems pointless. Even Graham Greene, who knows his way around outside "the res" is given the powers of Sherlock Holmes. He can tell if a man carries a pistol strapped to his ankle by the way he walks. He can tell a man's weight by the depth of his footprint in the dust. Whew.If you can put all of that aside and not worry so much if a few scenes lead nowhere, then you can sit back and enjoy the scenery, the occasional bursts of violence, and its omnipresent threat. The final shot is nicely done. Kilmer, having rediscovered his roots, drives off the reservation on a dusty road that abuts a highway. The car stops. It could go either way. But it doesn't move. Fade.

After reading some of the reviews posted here of Thunderheart, I am happy to see so many are positive. A few have posted the type of negative review I might have expected more of, that is, that the movie falsely criticizes the American Government of malfeasance and fraud.After seeing Thunderheart several times, I recognize many of the most controversial American Indian issues that have been interwoven into this parable that is set in South Dakota. It might be of interest to those who enjoy this movie exactly what those events were.ARM—Thunderheart centers around an activist Native American movement based on the real organization called AIM (American Indian Movement). President Richard Nixon was genuinely angry when AIM marched onto Washington in 1972 and forcefully, but without any injuries, occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They were led by charismatic leaders such as Dennis Banks and Russell Means, and although their protests were not typically violent, Nixon made sure that they were treated like any other radical and violent organization of that era.GOONs—Fred Ward plays the character "Jack Milton," who is based on the Tribal Counsel President of the Pine Ridge Reservation, Dick Wilson (1934-1990). The name of his private police force, Guardians of the Oglala Nation (or GOONs) was apparently too good to change for the film. The violent acts by GOONs depicted in the film—roadblocks, shootings, and the secret murders of Wilson's political enemies—are all based on true events, for which Wilson was impeached in 1973, although reelected again in 1974. It is also mentioned in the film that GOONs was financed by misdirected money that was intended for humanitarian purposes on the reservation.Bear Creek Indian Reservation—This is a pseudonym for the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.Two dead agents, "family men"—At one point, Cooch mentions two FBI agents who were killed. This is based on agents Ronald A. Williams and Jack R. Coler, who were killed by multiple gunshot wounds on June 26, 1975. A detailed depiction of this shootout, along with the story of Leonard Peltier, who was ultimately convicted of the double murder, is in Peter Matthiessen's book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.Jimmy Looks Twice—Ray asks Cooch if the mission they're on is a "mop up," in other words, he suspects that Cooch is just trying to pin the killing on anyone, just to close the matter for good. Peltier was charged along with three other AIM members in the brutal slaying of Agents Williams and Coler (only Peltier was eventually convicted and is still serving a life sentence). As explained in Matthiessen, the controversy surrounds the way the two agents were first wounded by gunshots from afar, and then "finished off" at close range. The case against Peltier and three other AIM members appears to be nothing more than the FBI railroading some of the more visible activists. Nonetheless, efforts to get Peltier a new trial or possibly even a pardon (as was imminent at the end of Clinton's Presidency) have been unsuccessful. Jimmy is played by John Trudell, a longstanding activist in AIM.Maggie Eagle Bear—Cooch scolds Ray by saying, "Now ARM people think she's an informant." Maggie is undoubtedly based on Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (1945-1975), who was a Micmac Indian (not Sioux) and never attended Dartmouth as Maggie did, but was a mother and AIM activist who was murdered under still mysterious circumstances. Cooch infers one of the theories, that AIM members killed her for being an FBI informant. Matthiessen suggests a scenario more akin to the movie, in which FBI agents might have even dragged their feet to identify her. The film also adds a second layer as a motive for the murder involving uranium mining which was contaminating the water.Richard Yellow Hawk—An agent provocateur in a wheelchair, Richard adds yet another layer to the plot, in that the FBI was planting its own agents into activist organizations like AIM to gather information and discredit them. Although the FBI program COINTELPRO was discontinued in 1971, parts of it did continue into the 1970s to monitor AIM.Red Deer Table—The issue of contaminated water due to uranium mining, or of strip-mining in general, is most prominent not on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. The mining companies, with the help of the Federal Government, invented a Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, in order to move Navajo off of coal-enriched land so they could strip-mine it. That Cooch is motivated by the land deal adds this geographically remote Indian issue to this tale.Thunderheart—Although there are 146 people buried at Wounded Knee, history records that over 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed there on December 29, 1890 (as Grandpa Sam Reaches explains to Ray). The famous Sioux chief Sitting Bull was killed 14 days earlier. When Ray visits the Wounded Knee Monument, he reads "19. Thunderheart," the name of the Indian he is supposed to be the reincarnation of, as the 19th name listed in the mass grave. Actually, the 19th name on the monument, according to some photos on the Internet, is an Indian named Swift Bird.Above all, this film does not claim to be nonfiction. The opening disclaimer says: "This story was inspired by events that took place on several American Indian reservations during the 1970s." Recently, there has been a strong effort from the politically right to show that Peltier really was the close-range executioner of the two FBI agents and that Acquash was murdered by AIM members because she knew this. Although this bizarre version of events has all the twisted logic of Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, it is being employed in a new trial against two AIM activists, John Graham and Richard Marshall. A third, homeless man, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, has already been convicted in 2004 for the murder of Acquash, and his strange testimony is being used against Graham and Marshall.

There's been a murder on a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota and it's connected to reservation politics. Assistant FBI director Fred Dalton Thompson thinks it would be a good idea to specifically assign an agent with an Indian and specifically a Sioux heritage to investigate the homicide, figuring that the insular Sioux might better cooperate with him. Agent Val Kilmer fills the bill and he's assigned to one of the bureau's top operatives Sam Sheppard who reluctantly takes him along. Even Sheppard who's a loner sees that Kilmer just might be useful here.To say that there is more on this reservation than meets the eye is putting it mildly. And Kilmer finds he has a destiny here and he does in fact solve the case with the help of reservation cop Graham Greene.When referring to Indians in the USA their various tribes are called this or that nation. Calling them a nation as far as Thunderheart is concerned is correct in more ways than one. The reservations have their own autonomy in a lot of things, but they are also covered under the Constitution of these United States although you wouldn't think so the way tribal chief Fred Ward runs things. In fact the scenes of his reservation police disregarding basic fundamental rights could come out of some third world nation. That is the scariest part of Thunderheart and the part you will remember best.There's not just murder here, there's corruption on a grand scale and that is the destiny that Val Kilmer has in this film, to root it out and expose it. Just what is going on and who is involved you have to watch Thunderheart for.Although this is a part Lou Diamond Phillips should have played, Val Kilmer does fine in the lead. Another memorable role is that of Sheila Tousey, schoolteacher and Indian activist who has a good idea of what's going on and makes no bones to Kilmer about where his loyalties should lie.Sam Sheppard's role as an FBI agent is one that never would have seen the light of day if J. Edgar Hoover was alive. You'll see what I mean when you watch Thunderheart.Thunderheart is a fine drama, nicely photographed on location with fine performances uniformly from the cast. We can only hope that tribal leaders like Fred Ward are some kind of aberration among the American Indians.

Every now and then a film reaches into the soul of one's ancestry. This film " Thunderheart" did so with me. I found it tugging my heart as Indian chants boomed in the background. The story is taken both from the headlines of the National news and films of the A.I.M. Using documented facts, the story concerns the multiple murders on the Lacota Sioux Reservation in 1992. Two men, one a full blooded (When both parents are Native Americans) Sioux Indian, (Graham Greene) called Walter Crow Horse, the other an F.B.I. agent of Mixed Native Indian Heritage, Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) are thrown together by F.B.I director William Dawes (Fred Thompson) to solve several federal murders on 'the Rez'. Crow Horse is a natural detective and searches for clues by using his instincts. Levoi reminds him, he comes from a land where modern methods will help him discover the real killer. Crow Horse has an aid in an old Medicine Man called Grampa Sam Reaches (Ted Thin Elk). Levoi has a veteran agent called Frank Coutelle (Sam Shepard) and Jack Milton (Fred Ward) who seems to be more of a hindrance as a 'Goon.' Also helping Levoi is Sheila Tousey who plays Maggie Eagle Bear, a resident teacher and social activist. What begins as a routine inquiry, soon has all the characters squabbling over jurisdiction, methods and directional scope of the investigation. For Levoi it's a personal revelation as the past beacons his Indian Ancestory. The movie is an intriguing combination of detective work, national pride and an inner awaking for both the characters and the audience, as it's got what it takes to become a Classic. Good film****