On November 4, 1990, Dances with Wolves, a film about an
American Civil War-era soldier and a group of Sioux Native
Americans that stars Kevin Costner and also marks his
directorial debut, premiered in Los Angeles.

Dances with Wolves took home seven Oscars, including Best
Picture and Best Director, and solidified Costner’s place on
Hollywood’s A-list.

Thirteen years after American settlers founded the city
named for him, Chief Seattle died in a nearby village of
his people.

Born sometime around 1790, Seattle (Seathl) was a chief
of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes who lived around
the Pacific Coast bay that is today called Puget Sound.

Jesuit missionaries introduced Chief Seattle to Catholicism,
and he became a devout believer. He died in 1866 at the
approximate age of 77.

James Wehn’s Chief Sealth statue near the Space Needle.

James Francis Thorpe (1887 – 1953) was an American athlete
who won Olympic gold medals and played professional football, baseball, and basketball.

A citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native
American to win a gold medal for the United States in the
Olympics.

Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports,
he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics
(one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon).

Charles Curtis of Kansas became the first Native American to
be elected to the United States Senate on January 23, 1907.

His tenure later as Herbert Hoover’s vice president (below) 
made him the highest-ranking Native American ever to serve
in the federal government.

"The opening of the fight at Wounded Knee", engraved illustration by Frederic Remington. Appeared in
Harper’s Weekly, 1891.        

On December 29, 1890, in one of the final chapters of America’s
long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry killed 146 Lakota Indians at
Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

A depiction of the Ghost Dance.

US Attorney General Eric Holder laying a wreath at the
site of the Wounded Knee Memorial.