I pondered whether to include any adjective at all? to describe the boy.? ?I am not knowledgeable of the particulars, but I am generally aware of? the plight of the indigenous population in New Zealand.? Because it is similar to the plight of the Native American population in my country, the United States, of which I am all too aware.

The way I figure it, by merely describing the young boy as indigenous –particularly at that point in the 20th Century —? is to say he’s f**ked from Day 1.

I was particularly intrigued by the risky relationship with a pedophile he must engage in out of desperation. That, for me, was the story hook.

This is a movie I would like to see.? Very best wishes your writing.

The movie narrative carries a lot of ethnic, environmental, and psychological baggage — er, subtext, Strip it all away, and this, I suggest, seems to be the essence of the plot:

When a decorated Civil War officer finds himself posted alone to an abandoned frontier fort, he must win acceptance from the Native Americans to survive.
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Only after he has been accepted and assimilated into the Lakota tribe, do circumstances (the inevitable encroachment of European “tribes”) create a dilemma that forces him to choose which tribe to fight for.? That is the unintended and ironical consequence of pursuing his original goal.??And a logline is about the protagonist’s original, intentional objective goal.?

The soldier achieves his original objective goal midway through the story.? And then come a necessary (but well foreshadowed) reversal, a plot twist.??I say “necessary” because (as Aristotle observed in his “Poetics”),? the heart beat? (systole/ diastole)? of drama entails peripeteia?, that is, a plot reversal .? If the protagonist achieves his objective goal by the midpoint (as is the case in “Dances with Wolves”), then his fortune must flip from better to worse.? Otherwise, the plot is finished: Fade to the Credit Scroll.