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Here’s another one to send Marama Davidson. Another day, another shattering of the ‘Noble Savage’ delusions of the ‘indigenous’ worshippers. Another actor has been exposed as a particularly nasty serial predator – only this time, it’s not Danny Masterson.
Nathan Chasing Horse, the actor who played the fresh-faced “Smiles a Lot” in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, has been sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting indigenous women and girls. The 49-year-old exploited his status as a Lakota medicine man and Hollywood darling to prey on the vulnerable for nearly two decades.
Wait, what? A tribal ‘big man’ using his status to prey on indigenous women? Who ever heard of such a thing!
Nevada prosecutors said Chasing Horse used his reputation as a Lakota medicine man to prey on indigenous women and girls… for almost 20 years, Chasing Horse ‘spun a web of abuse’ that ensnared many women.
One victim was just 14 when Chasing Horse told her the spirits demanded she surrender her virginity to save her cancer-stricken mother. The assaults continued for years. Victims described betrayal of sacred traditions, shattered faith and lifelong trauma. Chasing Horse, naturally, cried ‘miscarriage of justice’ as he was led away.
This isn’t some isolated bad apple. It’s a grim pattern too often airbrushed by romanticisers of indigenous life. While the commentariat loves to blame ‘colonialism’ for every social ill, the data tells a far more uncomfortable story of dysfunction that long predates European contact and persists with horrifying consistency.
In Canada, indigenous people suffer rates of violent victimisation and child abuse dramatically higher than the non-indigenous population. Statistics Canada reports indigenous adults are roughly twice as likely to have experienced childhood physical or sexual maltreatment. Homicide rates involving indigenous victims run six times higher overall. Indigenous women face rates of intimate partner violence and sexual assault that dwarf national averages.
And it’s not Marama’s “cis, white men” who are responsible.
The same grim reality afflicts New Zealand’s Māori communities. Māori children are twice as likely to suffer abuse and they make up over half of child maltreatment deaths, despite being about 17 per cent of the population. Domestic violence, gang culture and intergenerational trauma churn through communities where traditional structures have fractured under welfare dependency, alcohol and a refusal to confront cultural factors head-on.
Dr Crystal Lee… said Chasing Horse used his status as an actor and medicine man to prey on victims, similarly to other faith leaders who abuse their power.
Exactly. Predators don’t need colonial excuses: they need opportunity and a culture that too often looks the other way or blames outsiders. ‘Spiritual leaders’ like Chasing Horse thrive in environments where deference to tradition overrides safeguarding. The same dynamic appears in too many remote indigenous communities: unchecked authority, substance abuse, family breakdown and a victimhood narrative that discourages internal accountability.
It’s no different, in the end, from priests using their authority to victimise children. Except that, for decades now, we wicked ‘cis, white’ folks have been resolute in confronting such evil. Not just the perpetrators, but those who let them get away with it, have been called to account and jailed.
It’s a very different story, though, when the predator wears a medicine bag, some ochre or a tiki. When the Howard government tried to act on the horrifying revelations of endemic Aboriginal child sexual abuse exposed in the Little Children are Sacred report, the left screamed blue murder about ‘racism’. When not just individual perpetrators, but their entire whanau conspire to enable and cover up the horrific abuse of tamariki, social workers turn a blind eye and feather-light sentences, if any, result.
And too, too, often, ‘culture’ is the shield for these evil scumbags. Horrifyingly, though, they’re not lying.
Traditional Aboriginal culture was, as attested voluminously by archaeological evidence and early explorer and settler eyewitness testimony, brutally violent. Especially toward women and children. Even today, young girls are handed over as sex slaves to old men, as so-called ‘Promise Wives’. Those who demur are beaten and sometimes killed by their own families. Historical accounts of how older women would ‘prepare’ barely pubescent girls for their fate don’t bear repeating.
The noble savage fantasy peddled by Hollywood – noble warriors in harmony with nature, corrupted only by the white man – collapses under scrutiny. Pre-colonial societies had slavery, warfare, and ritual violence. Post-contact, many indigenous groups traded one set of problems for another, but the highest rates of violence and abuse today cluster in communities most insulated from mainstream integration: welfare-dependent, remote and steeped in grievance.
Chasing Horse’s fall should prompt hard questions, not more excuses. When ‘medicine men’, elders or community leaders exploit the vulnerable, the response cannot be blanket deflection to history, let alone lying piously about both past and present realities. Real progress demands confronting uncomfortable realities: family stability, personal responsibility and integration into the broader society that offers the best path out of poverty and predation.
The victims in this case showed courage coming forward. They deserve justice, not another layer of myth-making that leaves future generations at risk. Until indigenous leaders and their progressive enablers stop romanticising dysfunction and start demanding accountability, the cycle will continue, life sentences or not.
