Showing posts with label
Native American Heritage month.
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Showing posts with label
Native American Heritage month.
Show all posts
In honor of the Native American Heritage Month the Window on America center Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine) presented the film "Dances with Wolves" (1990) to all who wish to improve their language skills.
Plot: Lt. John Dunbar, exiled to a remote western Civil War outpost, befriends wolves and Indians, making him an intolerable aberration in the military.
Dances with Wolves is a 1990 epic western film directed by and starring Kevin Costner. It is a film adaptation of the 1988 book of the same name by Michael Blake and tells the story of a Union Army Lieutenant who travels to the American frontier to find a military post, and his dealings with a group of Lakota Indians.
Costner developed the film over five years, with a budget of $22 million. Dances with Wolves had high production values and won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. Much of the dialogue is in the Lakota language with English subtitles. It was shot in South Dakota and Wyoming.
It is credited as a leading influence for the revitalization of the Western genre of film-making in Hollywood.
In 2007, Dances with Wolves was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
Today’s session of the Gabfest Club at the Information and Resource Center "Window on America» (Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) was dedicated to the topic “Native American Heritage month in the USA”. We have listened to the on-line lecture by the US educator – “Native American Cultures 1491-1607”. It turned out that the Club members know very little about the Native Americans. So the lecture that classified the cultures and explained the basics about each of them was very educational for the group. The lecturer had wonderful American English, but his irony was sometimes lost on the group. The second activity offered to the club members was a culture quest from the site of the National Museum of the Native American. We decided to explore the details about the Inuit nation and their way of life. The third language activity offered to the group was to create an Indian-type name for themselves. Some new comers did not understand the task, but some others were very creative and came up with such names as “Lazy Beaver”, “The Eastern Wind”, “Calm Waters”, “Searing feet”, “Dark Bison”, etc.
The last part of the session was dedicated to the topic of Halloween costumes one would try to wear some day. The answers ranged from Pumpkin to Frankenstein and Death. We also started to plan the event for the coming Thanksgiving.
Number of participants – 27 persons.
