Dances with Wolves Trivia
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58 free Dances with Wolves trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Kevin Costner was told Westerns were dead, that a three-hour film with subtitled Lakota dialogue would never sell, and that his directing debut would be Kevin's Gate. Dances with Wolves grossed $424 million and won seven Academy Awards. This Dances with Wolves trivia quiz covers the story of Lieutenant Dunbar at Fort Sedgwick, the wolf he names Two Socks, the horse Cisco, Stands With A Fist, Kicking Bird, Wind In His Hair and Chief Ten Bears, and the buffalo hunt that wins him a place in the tribe. Behind the camera there are questions on Michael Blake's unsold script that became a novel, the studios that passed, the South Dakota ranches where it was shot, the woman who translated the dialogue, the seven Oscars and the record they set for a Western, the four-hour special edition, and the criticism from Lakota activists who called it Lawrence of the Plains. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the film, its novel and its cast, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Dances with Wolves opened in 1990, the same year as which film?
Goodfellas
Goodfellas. Scorsese's gangster film opened that September and was up for the same Best Picture Oscar, which went to Costner's three-hour Western.
Q 02What is the surname of the Union lieutenant Kevin Costner plays in Dances with Wolves?
Dunbar
Dunbar. Decorated for a reckless charge and offered any posting he liked, the lieutenant asked for the western frontier, wanting to see it before it was gone.
Q 03Who wrote both the novel Dances with Wolves and the Oscar-winning screenplay adapted from it?
Michael Blake
Michael Blake. He was penniless and had no home of his own while writing the novel in 1986, living on friends' hospitality; five years later the screenplay won him an Oscar.
Q 04Much of the dialogue in Dances with Wolves is spoken, with English subtitles, in which language?
Lakota
Lakota. About a third of the dialogue is in it, and Costner built three weeks of rehearsal into the schedule so that his cast could learn their lines before shooting began.
Q 05In the novel Dances with Wolves, the lieutenant settles among which people, a detail the film changed?
Comanche
Comanche. The film gave him different hosts, but the author's sequel novel stayed with the book and made its hero a full Comanche warrior.
Q 06What is the name of the horse the lieutenant rides in his suicide charge and is later awarded?
Cisco
Cisco. Sioux raiders rope the buckskin and ride off with him, but he breaks loose and gallops straight back to the lieutenant's fort.
Q 07What does the lieutenant name the wolf that visits his fort?
Two Socks
Two Socks. The lieutenant's first instinct is to reach for his rifle; he lowers it, and the wolf with the white forepaws becomes his daily company at the lonely fort.
Q 08What are the Sioux watching the lieutenant do when they decide on the name Dances With Wolves?
Playing chase with a wolf
Playing chase with a wolf. Riders on a ridge see him trying to shoo the animal home, the two of them running circles in the grass, and soon he is greeted by the new name.
Q 09Which actress plays Stands With A Fist and earned an Oscar nomination for it?
Mary McDonnell
Mary McDonnell. A New York stage actress, she arrived on location a month before her first scene and was tutored for hours each day in her character's language.
Q 10Which Canadian actor plays Kicking Bird?
Graham Greene
Graham Greene. An Oneida from Ontario's Six Nations Reserve, he was working as a sound technician for rock bands when he drifted into acting; this part brought him an Oscar nomination.
Q 11Which Sioux warrior calls out, as the lieutenant rides away at the end, that he will always be his friend?
Wind In His Hair
Wind In His Hair. At their first meeting he had galloped up to the lieutenant shouting that he was not afraid of him; his farewell turns the same cry into a pledge of friendship.
Q 12Which singer, later Uncle Ray on Walker, Texas Ranger, plays Chief Ten Bears?
Floyd Westerman
Floyd Westerman. Sent as a boy to a boarding school that forbade his language, the Sioux singer made the album Custer Died for Your Sins and took up film acting only in his fifties.
Q 13Wes Studi plays a warrior from which tribe, the antagonists of Dances with Wolves?
Pawnee
Q 21What is Kicking Bird's role within the tribe?
Medicine man
Medicine man. Kicking Bird, the band's spiritual guide, is the first Sioux to inspect the lieutenant's fort, and it was he who took in Stands With A Fist as a child after a raid orphaned her.
Q 22Why has Stands With A Fist cut herself when the lieutenant first finds her?
She is mourning her dead husband
She is mourning her dead husband. The lieutenant carries the bleeding widow back to her people, which makes for his first, tense visit to the Sioux village.
Q 23How does the lieutenant win the tribe's acceptance?
He helps them find and hunt a buffalo herd
Pawnee. Studi's raider is credited only as Toughest Pawnee; early in the film he kills and scalps the mule driver who had taken the lieutenant west.
Q 14What happens to Major Fambrough, the fort commander who posts the lieutenant to the frontier?
He kills himself
He kills himself. Soon after signing the lieutenant's orders the unstable major toasts him from a window and shoots himself, so nobody at headquarters knows a man was sent out.
Q 15What is the lieutenant doing when Kicking Bird first sets eyes on him?
Walking naked from the river
Walking naked from the river. He has been washing when he finds a stranger eyeing his horse at the fort, and it is the startled visitor who turns and flees.
Q 16What is the name of the deserted frontier outpost the lieutenant rebuilds alone?
Fort Sedgwick
Fort Sedgwick. He finds the post abandoned and falling apart, its water fouled with dead animals, and assigns himself clean-up duty alone.
Q 17At which Kansas fort, the namesake of a state university, does the lieutenant report before being sent farther west?
Hays
Hays. The film bends history a little: the real Kansas post was founded only in 1865, as Fort Fletcher, and took the name Hays a year later.
Q 18Which drink does the lieutenant serve Kicking Bird when the Sioux come visiting at his fort?
Coffee
Coffee. He grinds the beans in front of his puzzled guests, who warm to the brew only once he adds sugar, and he sends them home with presents of both.
Q 19Where do the rifles come from that let the Sioux village beat off a raiding war party?
The lieutenant's buried cache
The lieutenant's buried cache. Afraid the fort's spare guns would fall into the wrong hands, he had hidden them under the sod; later he digs them up to arm his new neighbours.
Q 20The author said Stands With A Fist was based on which real woman, captured as a girl by a Plains tribe?
Cynthia Ann Parker
Cynthia Ann Parker. Seized by Texas Rangers after almost 25 years with her adoptive people, the mother of Quanah Parker never settled among her white relatives and kept trying to flee back.
He helps them find and hunt a buffalo herd. Woken by the stampede passing his fort, he rides to the village by night with the news, and by the next day he is, in his own words, a celebrity.
Q 24What do the soldiers who reoccupy the fort steal, leaving the lieutenant unable to prove his identity?
His diary
His diary. He had ridden back for it because its pages could lead the army to the Sioux; with it gone, the officers have only his word that he is a soldier at all.
Q 25What happens to the wolf that follows the army convoy?
Soldiers shoot him for target practice
Soldiers shoot him for target practice. The troopers squabble over whose shot it is while their chained prisoner fights to stop them, until one of the bullets finds the animal.
Q 26What fate does a guard say awaits the captured lieutenant once the wagons reach headquarters?
A hanging
A hanging. Branded a traitor, he refuses to guide the army to the Sioux camps and is hauled away in chains, until his friends ambush the convoy at a river crossing.
Q 27The closing text of Dances with Wolves says the last free Sioux submitted to white authority at which Nebraska fort?
Robinson
Robinson. The text jumps thirteen years ahead; in history Crazy Horse led his band into the Nebraska post in May 1877 and was killed there four months later.
Q 28Costner won two Oscars for Dances with Wolves, but which actor beat him to the Best Actor award?
Jeremy Irons
Jeremy Irons. He won as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, and in his speech he thanked David Cronenberg, the director of his earlier film Dead Ringers, adding that some would understand why.
Q 29Which studio released Dances with Wolves in North America?
Orion Pictures
Orion Pictures. The film passed Platoon as the studio's top earner, yet the windfall came too late: Orion filed for bankruptcy protection in December 1991.
Q 30Costner turned down playing Jack Ryan in which film to make Dances with Wolves?
The Hunt for Red October
The Hunt for Red October. Its makers wanted him as Jack Ryan, but he was committed to his Western, so the part went to Alec Baldwin and opened a long-running film series.