The HUGE Mistake You Never Noticed in Dances with Wolves

Dances with Wolves enthralled viewers around when it debuted in theaters in 1990 and quickly became a classic. The picture, which was directed and starred Kevin Costner, was praised for its stunning photography, moving story, and respectful depiction of Lakota Sioux culture.

It received seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. But even such a masterpiece is not impervious to mistakes.

The film’s authenticity, especially its usage of the Lakota language, has been acclaimed by both critics and fans for decades. To guarantee cultural correctness, Costner and his team collaborated closely with Native American experts.

One such collaboration involved using native speakers to instruct the performers in the proper pronunciation of Lakota speech. The tale deepens here, though, because this precise wording is the source of the HUGE error in Dances with Wolves—a detail so minute that spectators have mostly missed it.

The way part of the Lakota conversation is spoken is the mistake. Many of the Lakota lines are either mispronounced or grammatically incorrect, despite the filmmakers’ commendable attempts to employ the language. Indeed, a number of native speakers who have examined the movie have pointed out that fluent listeners would find some of the phrases odd or even incoherent.

Mary McDonnell’s character, Stands With A Fist, for instance, learns Lakota as a second language, although her lines contain many more errors than one might anticipate from a language student. Similar to this, several of the Lakota characters’ lines, which are meant to be fluid, have mistakes that were probably added during translation or the performers’ training.

Linguists who are knowledgeable with the language said that the errors were caused by time restrictions and the difficulties of teaching performers who were not Lakota speakers. Doris Leader Charge, a Lakota speaker, was hired by the filmmakers to mentor the actors, but despite her experience, the short filming schedule made it practically impossible to achieve flawless fluency.

In addition to grammatical problems, the movie makes a historical error. Dances with Wolves, which is set in the 1860s, shows how the Lakota people used tamed horses with skill and ease.

Does this information make Dances with Wolves a less successful film? Absolutely not. By using Native performers and presenting Indigenous culture in a way that Hollywood had rarely done before, the movie set a new standard for its period. A generation of filmmakers was influenced by it to treat Native topics with greater nuance and respect.

However, this MASSIVE error serves as a reminder that even the most well-meaning producers may make mistakes. It emphasizes how crucial it is to work closely with linguistic and cultural specialists in order to maintain storytelling authenticity.

Viewers may become aware of these mistakes for the first time, or possibly not at all, when they rewatch Dances with Wolves. The power of movies to take us to a different world, even one with flaws, is ultimately what makes them so magical.

Therefore, pay special attention to the Lakota conversation or watch the horses as they gallop across the plains the next time you watch Kevin Costner’s masterpiece. Perhaps you will see the small errors that viewers have missed for more than thirty years.