Warning: the following contains SPOILERS for 1883.
In 1883 season 1, episode 9 “Racing Clouds,” the Lakota warriors who mistakenly attack the caravan and then later encounter James Dutton (Tim McGraw) never apologize for attacking James' family. This seems strange because after one of the Lakota warriors lethally wounds Elsa (Isabel May) with an arrow, Elsa then informs the warriors that the people of the caravan aren't the horse thieves that the Lakota were looking for. In fact, James, Shea Brennan (Sam Elliot), and Thomas (LaMonica Garrett) went after and killed the horse thieves for the Lakota. Unfortunately, they were too late to stop the Lakota not just from brutally slaughtering many of the immigrants in the caravan, but potentially killing Elsa as well.
1883's ninth episode finally explains what happened before the harrowing first scenes of the series pilot. The slaughter of the caravan was an honest mistake by the Lakota. After coming home to find their settlement defiled and their families murdered, the Lakota warriors sought out the closest group of white travelers they could find and logically pegged them as the ones responsible. However, after everything was cleared up, why didn't the Lakota leader at least apologize to James?
While 1883 isn't free from historical errors, it accurately depicts the savage relationship between white colonizers and Indigenous Americans in the late 19th century. The Lakota warrior didn't apologize to James for the same reason that James didn't expect any apology: the Westward Expansion of America came at the cost of the systematic genocide and displacement of every Indigenous American nation. White people slaughtered Lakota all the time. As one of the horse thieves told James, Shea, and Thomas, many whites regarded Indigenous Americans as “prairie maggots and nothing else, you gotta kill 'em where you find 'em.” – a statement that was promptly ended with bullets. The horse thieves were also self-styled lawmen who admittedly deputized themselves, a symptom of how white colonizers used the law to slaughter and displace large populations of Indigenous Americans from lands that they've occupied thousands of years prior.
As 1883 is based on the true story of white America's cruel past, it would be ridiculous to expect the Lakota warrior to apologize for treating white settlers the same way white settlers treat the Lakota people, a fact that's not lost on James. Moreover, apologies won't bring back the dead – not the immigrants in the caravan, and certainly not the thousands of Indigenous Americans murdered in the wake of the Westward Expansion of America. As one of the Lakota warriors tells Elsa when she asks why they're doing this, “Your people do this.”
1883 certainly doesn't hold back when it comes to depicting the facts that matter. In terms of historical accuracy, things don't always add up in Taylor Sheridan's Neo-Western universe. However, in this scene from 1883, the absence of an apology uncovers uncomfortable truths about how America was founded as a nation, a theme that continues in the Yellowstone spinoff 1932.
1883 releases new episodes Sundays on Paramount+.
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