Chief Dan George
Sagacious Sachem  (1899-1981)

Chief Dan George was over 60 when he became a movie actor. At 71 he won the prestigious New York Film Critics award and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. This success catapulted him into the position of spokesman for the people of Canada’s first nations – a role he performed with dignity in speaking about the past and present plight of North America’s first peoples.

He knew those circumstances well. The son of a tribal chief, born on Burrard Reserve No.3 on Vancouver’s north shore in 1899 and given the native name of “Tes-wah-no” but known in English as Dan Slaholt. When he entered a mission boarding school at age five, his surname was changed to “George” and he, along with the other Indians at the school, was forbidden to speak their native language.

At 17 he left the school to work in the bush. In 1923, his father-in-law secured him a job as a longshoreman that lasted off and on until 1947 when a swingload of lumber smashed into him. No bones were broken, but “my leg and hip muscles were smashed to hamburger,” he later recalled. 

A man of considerable dignity and a noble spokesperson for his race, Chief Dan George (1899-1981) was 60 when he became a movie actor. At 71, he won an Oscar nomination for his role as an old Cheyenne Chief in Little Big Man (1970), losing to John Mills who won best supporting actor for playing the crippled village idiot in Ryan's Daughter. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star/Frank Lennon]
After overcoming these injuries, he began working in construction, and, later, while he was a school bus driver, he was asked to try out for the role of the aging Indian, “Old Antoine,” in the CBC series, Cariboo Country. The actor previously playing the role had become seriously ill and a replacement was needed within a week. Dan got the part and soon critics were describing him as one of the “finest natural actors anywhere.” One episode entitled “How to Break a Quarterhorse” won the Canadian Film Award for best entertainment film of 1965 and Walt Disney studios adapted another of the series into a movie named Smith starring Glen Ford and Keenan Wynn. A critic wrote that Dan George as Old Antoine played the role to “ultimate perfection.”

His performance in Smith led to an invitation to be Old Lodge Skins in the 1970 movie, Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman. Chief Dan’s performance was singled out by Judith Crist of the New York Times who wrote, “This Indian will not vanish from your memory.” He won the New York Film Critics Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award for that role and was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor only to lose to actor John Mills for his performance as the wordless sage in Ryan’s Daughter.

By then he was also a noted stage actor. His stage career began when Dan met playwright George Ryga who was so impressed by him that he enlarged the part of the father in his play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first staged at the Vancouver Playhouse and selected for the opening of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa where it won rave reviews. In 1973 a theatre in Washington, D.C., staged it and a critic wrote, “Chief George’s scene with Rita Joe (his daughter acted by Frances Hyland) when he recalls a story from her childhood ... is a perfect and probably indelible moment of theatre.”

These successes thrust him into another spotlight: he became spokesman for native people throughout North America. One of his first appearances in that role was at Empire Stadium in Vancouver for that city’s centennial celebrations in 1967. He recited his much publicized “A Lament for Confederation,” which, recalling past injustices of first nation peoples, promised the crowd of 35,000, “I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success – his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.”

His message of calling for understanding and integration of native peoples continued during his term as national chairman of Brotherhood Week in 1972. While active in Rita Joe in Washington in 1973, a native group of first nation peoples tried to enlist his support for the militant action taking place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, but he quietly responded, “We buried the hatchet in Canada long ago, and although treaty after treaty has been broken we have never dug it up. We have troubles but we have our council of chiefs to work on them.”

Honoured with a Doctor of Laws degree from Simon Fraser University (1972) and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Brandon the following year, Chief Dan continued to play minor roles in several other movies such as Cancel My Reservation starring Bob Hope. This was criticised by some of the press and public but his reply reflected the words of George C. Scott, “The business of an actor is to act.” He would not, however, play a role that demeaned his race and until his death in 1981, he remained on the reservation where he had been born.

Mel James