ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that how the generic logic of the family romance was embossed in Dances with Wolves with the American Adam myth and the historical legacy of Native American cultures. Taken together, the epigraphs are good examples of a very old, and still ongoing, process of the American imagination: the White discovery of, and the renaming and adoption into, the tribal society of the American Indian. One answer to the question of national identity proposes that the original inhabitants of North America represent "True Americans," whose character deserves emulation. In retrospect, one should be surprised neither at Dances with Wolves' enthusiastic reception nor at the many modern Americans who found going Indian a still viable trail to follow through the American imagination. The scene in the original Dances, then, is literally a repression of the novel and the shooting script, a repression of the massacre.
