The 1961 film The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes, took a similar approach.

Curtis played Hayes sympathetically — the film acknowledged his post-war struggles and the pressures that fame had created — but it suffered from the inevitable limitations of a Hollywood production of its era, including the casting of a white actor in the central role.

The film reached large audiences and helped solidify Hayes’s place in the popular consciousness, but it filtered his story through the conventions of 1960s Hollywood storytelling.

Other cultural treatments have varied in their sensitivity and accuracy.