This movie is the story of Jack Crabbe, who is played by Dustin Hoffman. When he was 10 his family was wiped out by a band of Pawnees. He was adapted by the Cheyenne.

   The movie, remarking on the then current Viet Nam war, shows the aftermath of the Washita Massacre of 1868 in which the 7th Calvary massacred a village of old men, women and children.

   The movie contrasts the two worlds that Jack Crabbe moves between. The white world is hypocritical and with little morality. The Cheyenne world is honest and moral. Old Lodge Skins tells Jack, "If you believe riding against these white creatures is bad, you can stay out of the fight, No one will think the worse."

   Roger Ebert says of Old Lodge Skins :

Old Lodge Skins, played by Chief Dan George with such serenity and conviction that an Academy Award was mentioned, doesn't preach the Cheyenne philosophy. It is part of him. It's all the more a part of him because Penn has allowed the Indians in the film to speak ordinary, idiomatic English. Most movie Indians have had to express themselves with an "um" at the end of every other word: "Swap-um wampum plenty soon," etc. The Indians in "Little Big Man" have dialogue reflecting the idiomatic richness of Indian tongues; when Old Lodge Skins simply refers to Cheyennes as "the Human Beings," the phrase is literal and meaningful and we don't laugh.

   The movie can be critiqued in making the Cheyennes too good and the whites so bad but it is a welcome relief from all the early Westerns and their one dimensional Indian portrayals.