I saw Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga–Chapter 1 at a movie theater that puts together a “preshow” of clips and reels related to the feature film content. Thursday night, this show included previews of 1962’s How the West Was Won, a John Ford film starring Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and Henry Fonda. This was followed by Westward the Women, a 1951 film with the tagline “Never underestimate the will of a woman when there is a wedding ring in sight.” And then there was 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, the story of a wagon master and a con man who help Black migrants survive their journey to the West, starring Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ruby Dee, and directed by Poitier.
Initially, I thought these choices made for the perfect setup for Horizon. Here were three “classic” Westerns, each with a different take on the history of the American West. One is an epic of interlocking narratives spanning 50 years and starring a host of Hollywood icons. The second is a film that—despite the sexism of its tagline—highlights the diverse backgrounds and experiences of women in the West. And the third is a movie that makes it clear that not all American pioneers were white.
As I settled in for Costner’s three-hour passion project, I hoped it would prove a compelling successor to these films, and to his own Dances With Wolves (1990) and Open Range (2003). And that Horizon would have rich and complex characters and a storyline that would change many viewers’ ideas of what a “Western” could be. That the Indigenous men and women in the movie would leap off the screen, fully realized people with complicated emotions and motives. And that the film would pass journalist David Treuer’s slightly adapted version of the famous Bechdel test, with “at least two Native characters who talk to each other about something other than white people, or what it means to be Indian, or what the government has done to us.”
But alas.
The film begins with a white surveyor and his son laying out stakes along a riverbank, in the shadow of towering red cliffs, while another man waves from a tent. We are informed that this place is the San Pedro Valley, in 1859. At that time, this valley was the center of Apachería, a vast region of mountains, river valleys, canyons, and high desert that had been the homeland of many Apache bands for more than eight centuries. In the 16th century, Spanish and then Mexican colonists claimed the area, and in 1821, Mexico declared its independence and the valley became part of the territory of Nuevo México. In 1854, the United States brought it into the Union as part of the Gadsden Purchase. By the late 1850s, U.S. surveyors had not yet parceled out these lands, and Mexican land grant claimants had abandoned the area. To the Apaches who lived there, these paper boundaries did not matter. In 1859, this surveyor and his son would have been trespassers on both Native and federal land.
Two Apache boys surveil them while they work, and they are soon joined by a war party. Soon, Americans are dead. A wandering Catholic missionary finds their bodies and buries them. The crosses that mark their graves appear during the film multiple times, indicating the passage of time and reminding the viewer that here we are, once again, in the nascent town of Horizon.
These initial scenes give us a sense of how important family—and fathers and sons in particular—will be to Horizon’s narrative. Over the course of the film, we see father-son relationships in an Apache camp, a burning house under attack, and a Montana cabin. These characters are often separated, and many of them die, as conflicts over Western lands take an enormous toll on families in multiple communities. The opening segment of Horizon also indicates how violent the interactions between Apache peoples and American settler colonists will be.
A few years after that first survey, another group of white migrants has arrived in the San Pedro Valley. It is unclear where they have come from and why, but they have erected a tent city with a large dance hall at its center. This is the first fully populated iteration of the town of Horizon.
As the settlers eat, drink, and dance one evening, an Apache war party approaches in the dark. They attack the dance and kill dozens of men, women, and children, setting fire to the entire town. Several warriors move on to a house that sits on a hill, the home of the Kittredge family. As that structure burns, only Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) survive. The next morning, a U.S. Army detachment arrives. They help the survivors bury the dead and then take in the settlers who want protection.
This fictional act of violence is accurate in terms of its strategy (Apache peoples often attacked at night and used fire to their advantage), but not in terms of scope or severity. By this time, Chiricahua Apaches had been at war with American civilians and soldiers for two years. In the summer and fall of 1861, to give an example, Chiricahuas attacked a party of miners from Tubac who were fleeing to the safety of federal forts along the Rio Grande, and the mining town of Piños Altos. They took large herds of horses from these Americans but killed only five or six people. This was typical of Indigenous fighting styles in the region; Chiricahuas only attacked when they had a significant advantage of numbers and favored quick strikes rather than massed charges.
In the film, Apache warriors are determined to defend their territory against white interlopers, although it is U.S. Army officers (played by an expressionless Sam Worthington and a morose Danny Huston) who articulate the Apaches’ motivations most clearly to the audience. Here, Costner is again walking the path he trod in Dances With Wolves. In that film, viewers see Indigenous people mostly through the eyes and the diary writing of a white U.S. soldier who has fled the Eastern battlefields of the Civil War to see the frontier “before it’s gone.”
Costner has stated in several interviews that he wanted to depict white migration from an Indigenous point of view in Horizon and give the film’s Native characters individuality and dignity. Instead, we see small bands of undifferentiated Indigenous peoples. They are identified as Apaches, but from which bands? Why had they split into peace and war factions? Who is the elder who speaks for peace in the wake of the attack on Horizon? We do not have any answers to these questions, because Costner does not give his Indigenous characters (or any of his characters, really) backstories. We only see them as they confront white migration during the American Civil War and fight among themselves in response.
The reality is that in the 1850s and 1860s, the American West—from the northern Rockies to the southwestern deserts—was dominated by Indigenous peoples who had long been in contact with white people. In both areas, Indigenous peoples had faced large American migrant streams moving through their territories as part of the Mormon migration to Utah (1847), the California gold rush (1849), and the Colorado gold rush (1858–59).
Some bands of “fighting men” did break off from larger tribal nations during this period, but others had always exercised autonomy in their trade and warfare relationships. And during the 1860s, many Indigenous peoples formed alliances with one another. There was a major surge in violent encounters between American civilians and soldiers and Apache, Navajo, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, Dakota, and Blackfoot peoples, as the latter asserted their sovereignty.
During this period, men like Geronimo, Cochise, and Victorio (Chiricahua Apache), Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota), and Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota) emerged as powerful diplomats and war leaders in their communities. In January 1863, after U.S. troops murdered the legendary chief Mangas Coloradas near a copper mining camp in New Mexico Territory, Chiricahua leaders initiated a war with the U.S. government that would last until the 1880s. Indigenous acts of resistance in this moment also put Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull on the road to the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn).
This history of encounter and resistance, in other words, was geographically expansive and central to what happened in the West in the middle of the 19th century. But Indigenous peoples are almost completely absent from the Montana, Wyoming, and Santa Fe Trail narratives of the movie. Horizon takes place in many locations, but Indigenous people seem only to exist in the San Pedro Valley, and in small numbers. In interviews, Costner has repeated that the dominant emotion he wants to show in the Apache engagement with Americans is befuddlement.
“They are confused by the giant population that continues to roll toward them,” he told David Remnick of the New Yorker, “and they think of it as unbelievable.”
But at the time this movie is set, Indigenous peoples across the West already understood the power of the United States, and its massive population. In the wake of Lewis and Clark’s expedition in the first decade of the 19th century, tribes regularly sent delegations to D.C., who reported back on the sights they had seen in America’s towns and cities. They had trade networks that extended across the continent, and they shared information with their kin and allies. The spectacle of confusion and shock may suit Costner better, but that’s just not how it was.
Hollywood has never been particularly good at depicting Native Americans in film. In the first Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s (like those in the preshow previews at my theater), they were the enemies who rode across beautiful landscapes intent on killing and sexually assaulting white pioneers. The revisionist Westerns that followed either erased Indigenous peoples completely (instead slotting in banks and corrupt law enforcement as the big bads) or refigured them as noble, stoic emblems of suffering. As in Dances With Wolves, Costner does cast Indigenous actors in Horizon, and they speak Native languages. They are agents of change. But the dominant focus is still on white protagonists and their emotional and physical journeys, even when they share scenes with often unnamed Indigenous, Mexican, and Chinese Westerners. For Costner, the “we” of Horizon is always white. “We threw their lives into chaos,” he tells Remnick when describing the Apache narrative in the film.
Yes, Costner, like most other writers and directors of Westerns, makes mainstream films for white men. I would love to see a Western set in the 19th century, written and directed by Sterlin Harjo, who created the critically acclaimed series Reservation Dogs (with Māori New Zealander Taika Waititi) for FX. A film focused on Indigenous Westerners who have emotionally resonant relationships with friends and family, and complex motivations. A film with a sense of play, where the intimate details of everyday life are sometimes tragic, sometimes delightful. What a joy it would be to watch a vivid and compelling depiction of the real West, and the people who brought it into being.
