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Little Big Man is a 1970 Western film that simultaneously adheres to the genre and challenges many of its conventions. Those opposite characteristics are best displayed in the film’s two main characters. Jack Crabb - or “Little Big Man” - follows many Western tropes such as character duality and civilization-versus-wilderness, and Old Lodge Skins offers the genre different perspectives on Native Americans and the mythological narrative. Little Big Man, played by Dustin Hoffman, is a unique protagonist in that he is not the hero a Western tends to offer. Kimberly Lindbergs describes this excellently in her article about the film. “Unlike many films that turned their leading men into heroic outsiders who lead the Native Americans out of danger, Hoffman’s character is a fumbling, weak-willed anti-hero who rarely succeeds at anything that he attempts to accomplish.” While Little Big Man may not be a character we typically look up to, he is a great representation of common Western patterns. He is a man of duality, torn between many different worlds. This naturally plays into the civilization-versus-wilderness theme of Westerns, in that Little Big Man is constantly at edge with wild forces. The main twist is that in this movie, these forces are white men, while the Cheyenne tribe of Native Americans are the civilized people. Barsam and Monahan describe the mythological narrative within Westerns as “representations of Americans as rugged, self-sufficient individuals taming a savage wilderness with common sense and direct action.” Little Big Man is completely void of this mythology, and there is no better example of this than the role of Old Lodge Skins in the film, portrayed by Chief Dan George. As Shane Cubis explains in his article The Evolution of Native American Representation in Westerns, Old Lodge Skins diverged from the typical Western representation of Native Americans and was shown with great dignity. Before this, the typical representation was much more negative, the prime instance being John Ford’s Stagecoach. This movie popularized the villainous treatment of Native Americans. They were stereotyped, labeled as “savages,” and played by actors of different ethnicities, resulting in the use of redface. It’s been called the most damaging movie for native people in history, and it kept the mythological white American alive and dominant. Little Big Man moved away from the ideals of Stagecoach thanks to the work of its director, Arthur Penn. Penn made the decision to cast a Native American actor as Old Lodge Skins, and he also allowed all the Native Americans to speak ordinary English. As Roger Ebert points out, “All the characters who appear in the early stages of the film come back in the later stages, fulfilled…Only Old Lodge Skins makes it through to the end not merely intact, but improved.” Penn was interested in moving away from Western mythology and did so remarkably. Little Big Man is denied hero status and simply experiences the Western elements as a confused man in the middle of a much greater battle, a battle of civilization versus wild. The surviving, noble Native Americans versus the conquering, savage white men. These reversed ideas make Little Big Man a crucial anti-Western film.