A lot of Native Americans are counting on this summer’s Into the West to set the record straight about what happened between 1826 and 1890 in the American West. Take Charlie White Buffalo, a Lakota instructor at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota: “For me, it was a genocide. What happened way back in Columbus’ time was that the people ran away because they were persecuted. So when they came over here, they became the persecutors.” White Buffalo, who became one of the Native advisers to Into the West, points out, “The Lakota people were just human beings. Sure, at that time they were fierce warriors, but they were also compassionate people.”

Fifteen hundred miles away in Los Angeles, Steven Spielberg was thinking approximately the same thing. Into the West, a six-part saga for cable’s TNT, was conceived by executive producer Spielberg as his generation’s answer to the 1962 John Ford Western about three generations of American pioneers, How the West Was Won. Insiders say Spielberg told his team at DreamWorks and his collaborators at TNT, “Hey, let’s do that movie, but let’s do it right.”

At 12 hours long, Into the West is TNT’s most ambitious, longest, and most expensive—at about $50 million—original limited series. The story of the opening of the American West, it follows two fictional families—one of Anglo settlers, the other of Lakota Indians—through three generations and such landmark events as the gold rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad, the Plains Wars, the rise of the Ghost Dance, and the final confrontation between the cavalry and Native Americans at Wounded Knee.

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