Reflection on Billy Mills: Part II

In this part of the reflection I’m going to explain a bit more about what I said in the previous blog: how the change in the environment (external journey) can have a big influence in the internal you. Billy is a normal man with a dream. Everyone in the world needs to fight for what they want and Billy isn’t the exception. The true is that Billy needs to work a mile extra because of his race. He is a Native American and we can see in the movie how the people stereotype him. In freshman year Billy won every single raise, he was young, full of hope and energy. The time passed but the stereotypes about him was getting worse. In some way or another those stereotypes was affecting his confidence.

Billy found love with a white girl, she loves him but her parents didn’t like the idea of the marriage with a native. The funny part is when his family (the natives) visited Billy for the first time; they make themselves feel like they don’t belong there. After see how his family reacts, Billy realizes that he was alone. In the world of the white people he was a stupid native and with his family he was a traitor. Billy quit everything and decides to move to his hometown. On the reserve everything was back to the normality except that a lot of people admired him for his work. He was running, feeling free not like in Kansas that he was just a running machine.  He was a example of overcoming for a lot of natives in the tribe including for Frank.

Frank told Billy that he always wanted to travel, get out of the reserve, however for him was to late but not for Billy. After that conversation Frank committed suicide because he was running away just like Billy did.

Reflection on Billy Mills

Billy is the main character of the movie; he is an American native member of Sioux tribe. We can see in the beginning of the movie that Billy is a very talent person and thanks to that talent he found a scholarship that will help him to enter to the University of Kansas. In the movie he practice all the time, for him running is more than just a simple sport, for him running is freedom and spiritual.  To follow his dream he has to leave his family and move to Kansas, but that is not impediment for him. Later in the movie he found out that everything is going to be more difficult than he thought.

First lets see his external journey. He had to move from his pour and confortable house surrounded by his family, persons with the same ideas. When he arrived Kansas everything was new for him including jokes, games and food. We can see in some moment in the movie that his external journal start to affect his internal journal. Billy is a strong person he know very well the felling of losing someone that he loved (like his dad) but we can see in the movie that been far away from his family is a very important thing to him. In the begging of the movie we can see Billy very happy and full of hope, but then we can see him writing a letter for his family very sad, tired, with a lot of stress for his classes and felling alone.

We can see very clearly the interconnection of his internal and external journey. Moving to a strange place with strange people that make fun of him is a big influence for him. We can see that changing his environment also changes his fears, feelings and the way of thinking.