Kevin Costner donating items to benefit SD auction

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DEADWOD, S.D. (AP) - Actor Kevin Costner has donated personal items and movie memorabilia to a charity auction that will benefit a Lakota interpreter at his Tatanka tourist attraction in South Dakota.

Costner's childhood baseball and bat and movie memorabilia including a baseball jacket from "Bull Durham" will be sold at the Saturday auction in Lead. Costner filmed much of his Academy Award-winning movie "Dances with Wolves" in South Dakota, and his Tatanka attraction near Deadwood tells the story of the North American bison.

Proceeds from the auction will help Phillip Red Bird Frame, who hopes to earn a college degree in sociology.

"A degree would help me open more doors and allow me to help more people," he told the Rapid City Journal ( http://bit.ly/1ei2zpY).

The 47-year-old interpreter said he is humbled by the donations of Costner and Chief David Bald Eagle, chief of the Minnicoujou Tribe. Bald Eagle, who was born in a teepee in 1919, appeared in the 1935 swashbuckling film "Captain Blood" as Errol Flynn's sword-wielding bodyguard. His donations include a signed copy of the film and a signed buckskin shirt he wore.

Tatanka General Manager Stephen Laffey acquired the items for the auction to help support Frame's college fund.

"It's all going to a really good cause," he said. "All proceeds are going to a gentleman from South Dakota's Cheyenne River Reservation who is making a difference, bridging cultural divides, telling the story of his people and making residents the world over understand that we're all in this together."

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Information from: Rapid City Journal, http://www.rapidcityjournal.com