LOS ANGELES -- Adam Beach has left the battlefields of Iwo Jima for the badlands of southern Alberta.
The 33-year-old Ottawa-based actor, already touted as an Oscar contender for his portrayal of ill-fated Marine Ira Hayes in Clint Eastwood's World War II drama Flags of our Fathers, is currently filming the HBO mini-series Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in the Calgary area.
Beach almost didn't take the role of American Indian writer-activist Charles Eastman who, in the late 1800s, promoted the well-being of American Indian tribes. It's not that he's tired of playing Natives, he's just tired of reading for them.
"If you don't have anybody else and you're only looking at me, then what's the problem?" he said.
Things went further south when Beach was asked to do a second reading for which he hadn't prepared.
"I don't put myself in a position where it's half-assed," said Beach, who told casting staff he was leaving. "They were a little disappointed, but you kind of have to put your foot down in telling people, look, I work hard for what I do."
Beach went off to Vancouver to film the Canadian movie Luna: A Way Home. While he was there HBO sent out the head of casting for Wounded Knee to convince him to give the part another try. Dee Brown's 1970 book, which was pivotal in changing American perceptions about Native treatment and on which the mini-series is based, was another factor in his decision.
"This one is playing into the field of 'Why do I have to prove myself to be Indian?' And so I had to fight with myself to say, 'Okay, just do it, because it's a really good book.'"
Beach believes the miniseries, scheduled to air in 2008, will make a strong statement about the poorly conceived 19th century plan to assimilate Indians.
"Their approach was, 'Let's give them these wooden houses and give them their lots of land and put them in these specific locations and we can civilize them,'" he says. "They don't realize the rations were poor, the meat was bad, the clothing was terrible, they lived miles apart from each other. There was no groups anymore, so here you were with starving them -- they had no adequate clothing to live in, box shelters and these clothes and awful foods brought in diseases. And those diseases were killing them."
Beach co-stars with Aidan Quinn and Anna Paquin in the miniseries, which is being produced by Law & Order creator Dick Wolf.
Raised as a Woodland Sioux, Beach's character, Eastman, became a physician who was the only doctor available to the victims of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. He went on to publish a series of books.
"My character was a renowned scholarship student who became a doctor and they used him for the structure of these reservations, hoping that all Indians could become as educated," said Beach. "But in the process Eastman had a struggle with his own identity -- who is he really because he did learn a lot of educated ways, but he lost a lot of his old ways."
Flags of Our Fathers opens Friday. Beach wraps shooting of Wounded Knee on Nov. 17.
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