The Noble Non-Savage

Chief Dan George sits as if he were astride one of the horses he once rode across the British Columbian mountains. His back is straight as the arrows with which he shot deer and bear. His face is a seamed reflection of prairie hardships, crowned by a flowing silver mane. He is 71, but his belly is still taut from a daily regimen of 15 pushups. When asked if he likes life in a place like New York, Dan George is apt to shake his head gently and reply, "No, it is not a good place to live. You have to look up to see the sky."

He may sound like your standard "white-eyes-hunt-the-yellow-iron" Central Casting Indian, but Dan George is the real thing, a former chief of British Columbia's Tse-lal-watt tribe. He is also, thanks to his magnificent performance as the noble non-savage in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, the most astonishingly successful new actor in Hollywood. Much of the film's validity rests on his authentic and serene presence as Old Lodge Skins. When he tells his adopted grandson (Dustin Hoffman), "My heart soars like a hawk to see you," one can truly visualize a pair of swift wings beating across the sky. His remarkable performance has already won him the New York Film Critics' award for Best Supporting Actor of 1970 and made him an early favorite in the upcoming Oscar campaign.

The chief is not exactly an innocent plucked from the reserve. A few years ago one of his sons, who was in the production at the time, landed him a role as a tribal elder in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series, Cariboo Country. His first film was a Walt Disney western entitled Smith!, with Glenn Ford. He delivered the eloquent speech, given in 1877 by the venerable Nez Perce chief, Joseph, with only one hitch: Dan George speaks Squamish, not Nez Perce. They made do with Squamish.

Unbreakable Bones. As Penn began casting about for a white actor to play Old Lodge Skins, he considered Sir Laurence Olivier (who presumably would have dug up his old betel-nut makeup from Khartoum), and eventually offered the part to Richard Boone, who turned it down. Then Gene Lasko, associate producer of Little Big Man, happened to see Smith! and immediately dispatched a script for the chief to read in Vancouver. Says Dan George, in his measured English: "I saw so many lines and dialogues, I got scared. I called Gene Lasko and told him it was too much for me. He encouraged me and said that the director was one of good will and would help me."

That was one of the rare occasions in his life when Dan George needed anyone's help. A descendant of six generations of Tse-lal-watt chiefs, Dan George as a boy hunted on Seymour Mountain with bow and arrow (he scoffs at "white Indian" westerns: "No Indian holds a bow perpendicular. You must shoot with the bow horizontal so the arrow doesn't curve to the ground"). He helped his father log the tribe's timber and often paddled a canoe into Vancouver for supplies. Baptized a Roman Catholic like his father and grandfather, Dan George attended the reserve's missionary school until he was 16, then quit to devote full time to logging. Three years later he was married, and as his family grew (two sons, four daughters) the timber dwindled. "My father-in-law got me into the stevedores' union," he remembers. He worked the docks for 26 years until 1947, when a swingload of timbers crushed muscles in his arms, hips and back (his bones, he says, were too strong to break). Still, he worked at construction jobs and logging until he won the CBC part.

White Philosophy. Dan George is quite pleased with the way things have turned out--especially in Little Big Man. "If you think deeply on the relationship of the white boy and his Indian grandfather it shows the worth of integration. That is what we're doing today and what I've dedicated my life to: the integration of Indians with the white man."

That does not mean that the chief approves of all of the white man's ways. He appreciates the merits of democracy; the chieftain's headdress he wore for twelve years was won by popular election. Yet he is gravely concerned about some of the ignoble byproducts of civilization. "The biggest part of my work is helping our children," he says. "Now that they attend white schools, they've been getting into trouble. They're adopting the white philosophy, and drugs for the first time are becoming a problem to our people. In the beginning I resented the adoption of the white man's ways, but I realize that if our children are to survive, they have to live and work in white society."

Dan George plans to continue acting --if only to see to it that the Indian is accurately portrayed. The idea of becoming Hollywood's resident Rich Indian hardly appeals to the chief. "I think if I stayed there long enough, I could get used to it," he reflects. "I like the scenery in the West; the valleys and the open plains are so beautiful, even when it's raining or snowing. But I like it best where I was born and raised. Moving off the reserve is for another generation."

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