Lakota Sioux tribal police officer Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig) struggles to rescue his older, alcoholic brother, Mogie (Graham Greene), a former football star who was wounded in combat three times in Vietnam.

When Rudy is sent on a police call to an abandoned house, he finds the bloodied, dead body of a young man who has been kicked to death.

Shocked, Rudy visits a friend to get instructions on how to deal with Iktomi's spirit; a combination of home remedies and a sweat lodge ceremony.

Responding to a police call of a man stuck in a trap, Rudy arrives outside a house to find that the victim, now dead, is Mogie's drinking partner.

He climbs to the top, and standing on the head of George Washington, he ponders whether his plan is stupid, he once again sees Iktomi crawling across the paint can.

Seeing this, he makes his tribute to Mogie by throwing the can of paint so that it drips down the side of George Washington's nose, almost like a rivulet of bloody tears.

Through the rest of the film, Mogie's satirical humor makes it clear that the white man's power still looms over Pine Ridge through the faces of Mount Rushmore that ironically watch over the reservation, and that he hasn't forgotten the past.

In more recent history, 1973 was the year that the American Indian Movement (AIM) led the Wounded Knee Incident, resulting in a 71-day stand-off.

As a result, FBI agents, the U.S. Marshall's Service, and the National Guard on the other side blockaded all entrances and exits leading to and from Wounded Knee.

After Wounded Knee 1973, the persecution, illegal arrests, prosecutorial misconduct and numerous as-yet-unsolved murders continued against various members of AIM and several residents of Pine Ridge.

While no reservation in Canada or the United States is without cases of extreme violence, poverty, substance abuse, and hopelessness, Pine Ridge stands alone in the misery index.

Skins explores the tragedy and depth of despair caused by alcohol amongst indigenous peoples of North America, and brings the issue to the forefront in its almost brutal depictions of the disease.

The Pine Ridge Reservation is in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, a gigantic monolith of American expansion and the desecration of sacred tribal grounds.

[2] America's founding fathers were carved into a mountain sacred to the Sioux, highlighting the lack of respect by Euro-American cultures for Native Americans.

[6] Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, citing, "To see this movie is to understand why the faces on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to the first Americans.

"[7] Mark Holcomb of The Village Voice was more critical: "Like his popular 1998 debut, Smoke Signals, Chris Eyre's follow-up, Skins, is a humorless slice of family melodrama that functions as cut-rate ethnography.