The "Dances with Wolves" conundrum: ethnicity, identity and Englishness

Being English is about a relationship with a place called England. It isn’t about being white, even though most English people are white.

In ‘Dances with Wolves’, Kevin Costner’s 1990 film, a white officer in the union army, John Dunbar, embraces Lakota (Sioux) culture and lifestyle and, in the manner of some 19th century British officials in Africa and India, goes native. It’s a work of fiction that, at its core, reflects how the loss of that plains Indian, Lakota culture is an American tragedy. But it also points us towards a more modern debate about race, land, culture and colonialism without too much preachiness or veneration of Rousseau's ‘noble savage’.

In Britain there has been, since the mid-1990s, a resurgence of English identity and the assertion of an idea that, after nearly three hundred years of submersion into Britishness, England and English is a separate thing to Britain and Britishness. Which leaves the question as to what we mean by England and, more significantly, the English. Is Englishness defined by genetic heritage (in which case John Dunbar’s Lakota identity, right down to changing his name, was an appropriation) or by a difficult to distill combination of blood, culture and relationship with place.

To stay in the Great Plains for a moment longer, my view on identity is that Dances with Wolves, once John Dunbar, was prepared to fight and die to preserve the culture and people who had adopted him. I think that gives a man the right to call himself Lakota. Or, since that's our concern, English. You don’t need to trace your ancestry back to an anglo-saxon proto-England to earn the right to say you’re English. I can trace that lineage but somehow feel no more English than my wife’s cousin, the descendent of early 20th century immigrants from Italy and Russia. They played the national anthem at his daughter’s wedding, something we somehow missed out at ours!

Chris Bayliss, writing in The Critic, explores the conundrum of Dances with Wolves, although his case study isn’t a Sioux warrior but a UK prime minister:

“Yet for all that, Sunak does just seem genuinely English. But it’s very difficult for Nelson or others to define why. Clearly, there has been a more profound degree of cultural assimilation in Sunak’s case than in some of those mentioned above; but assimilation into what, exactly?

What we seem to be struggling with here is not a political or racial question, but one of language, in which the definition of a word has been broadened in the name of good taste, to the point that it has lost its descriptive power. Historically, we didn’t need a term to describe people who were ethnically English, because there wasn’t a substantial number of people who were culturally English in the way that Rishi Sunak is, but of a different ethnicity. The term “English” did the job on its own. But now we are becoming a genuinely mutli-ethnic society, people are going to reach for a term that conveys that.”

In the search for Englishness people have, I fear, turned to a sort of science (‘I had a DNA test and I’m 73% English’) rather than struggle with the idea itself and with defining what we mean by the culture and values of the English. When Kenneth Clark stood in front of Notre Dame Cathedral and said "I don't know what civilization is, but I know it when I see it", we understood exactly what he meant. National, ethnic, cultural identity feels like it lives in the same space, Bayliss can say ‘Sunak seems genuinely English’ and we understand but, ask us then to provide a convenient and sensible definition of Englishness, and we quickly arrive at platitudinous cant worthy only of a district council annual report.

Dances with Wolves was Sioux but if a thousand like John Dunbar had dumped themselves on Lakota society would that society still be the same? And if the authorities in Lakota society had insisted that the cultures of those who’d arrived must be respected, supported, even celebrated, would the solution to the conundrum be different?

The problem in England isn’t that people can’t arrive, embrace our culture, tradition and history, and become part of the nation. The problem is that millions have arrived, refused to embrace that idea and, worse, that the authorities of England, instead of insisting that these are our ways, have fallen over backwards to embrace everyone else’s culture. All while pretending that this is part of “British Values”.

Values are not culture. Culture is visceral, fundamental and basic. Right now English culture is being swamped by the influx of people from other cultures. And the old way of gentle integration is over. If hundreds or thousands arrive each year the impact on our society creates a stress that threatens the basis of that culture. Our authorities, transfixed in the headlights of multiculturalism, cannot find a way to defend our culture because to do so is, their advisors tell them, racist.

Being English is about a relationship with a place called England. It isn’t about being white, even though most English people are white. It isn’t just about “the mere uncounted folk of whose life and death is none report or lamentation”, but those were the men and women who made our nation. You can join in, you can be a part of making tomorrow’s England the best place in the world.

Being English means believing England matters. I don’t need a DNA test to believe that. And people who think ancestry is all that matters do England an injustice.

The ten year old kid is in his England shirt, he’s allowed to stay up late by his Nigerian parents, he’s watching England’s U21 footballers winning the Euro Under-21 championship. That kid is watching his country playing another country, and winning. Who the hell am I to tell that kid he isn’t English?