10/23/2026
Chief Dan George died on September 23, 1981, at 82, in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Eleven years earlier, he had played Old Lodge Skins in "Little Big Man" (1970), a Cheyenne grandfather whose final mountain scene held an extraordinary secret.
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When Arthur Penn's cameras began rolling in 1969, George was nearing 70. He was not Cheyenne himself. He belonged to the Tsleil-Waututh Nation of British Columbia and had served as its chief from 1951 to 1963. On the Montana sets, he brought an understanding of leadership that no costume could supply. He knew what it meant to watch outsiders decide how Indigenous people should be portrayed, and he was determined not to play another disposable figure in a Western.
Dustin Hoffman played Jack Crabb, a white child taken in by the Cheyenne after a deadly Pawnee raid. Old Lodge Skins became his grandfather and teacher, showing him how to read trails and understand the language. He could also be mischievous. When Jack defended his rival Younger Bear in a confrontation with Pawnee warriors, the elder gave the undersized boy a new name. George declared, "He's a brave. He is little in body, but his heart is big. His name shall be Little Big Man." What happened between the actors was as tender. Near the end of filming, Hoffman admitted he had never had a grandfather and asked to call George by that name. George agreed, joking that with 36 grandchildren already, one more hardly mattered. Hoffman kept calling him Grandfather in letters and later encounters.
But George refused to make Old Lodge Skins merely gentle. After cavalry violence tears through Cheyenne lives, Jack returns to find him wounded and grimly withdrawn. The old man explains that his eyes still see, though his heart can no longer bear their message. When Jack asks whether he hates white men, the grandfather instead describes the difference between people who regard earth, water, stones, and animals as living things and people who treat them as objects to destroy. George delivers the confrontation without shouting. The anger is present, but so is the exhaustion of someone counting names that will never be answered again.
And then comes that strange escape during another cavalry assault. Jack convinces his grandfather that a dream has made him invisible. They walk past armed soldiers toward the river, George grinning as though the impossible business is fun. The men do not stop them. Was it magic, confusion, or simply luck? The old man enjoys the escape either way. It is a brief, human interruption in a story where soldiers kill women and children.
The most revealing moment comes after Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876. Old Lodge Skins climbs a hill, intending to die on his own land. He speaks to the Great Spirit about victories, defeats, blindness, and a people pushed toward disappearance. George later explained that Penn had not dictated his movements or prayer. "That was my own song, my own dance, and my own way of talking to the great white spirit. Those things were all my idea." His own beliefs had entered the performance, not as a borrowed script but through choices he made before the camera.
Then the expected death simply fails to happen. The grandfather opens his eyes, discovers he is still among the living, and accepts Jack's help down the hillside. Penn had changed the book's ending to let him survive. George knew how to carry the disappointment with a little humor, without making the old man ridiculous.
By April 15, 1971, the performance had earned him an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor. Yet Amy, his wife of 51 years, had died on March 27. George had explained his acting modestly, saying that after twelve years as a real chief, he had hardly needed to pretend for the part.
On that hilltop, Old Lodge Skins carried Dan George's own voice. See less
