Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 13, 2009 NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES ON PBS

'We Shall Remain' begins tonight on PBS

The Southern

Beginning tonight, WSIU will air a PBS "American Experience" special, "We Shall Remain." The five-part series presents a provocative and multi-faceted look at Native American ingenuity and perseverance over the course of more than 300 centuries and establishes Native history as an essential part of American history.

One of the episodes, airing April 27, focuses on the Trail of Tears. The trail was the path taken by the Cherokees and other Native people during a federally enforced migration from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma in the early 1800s. Thousands of men, women and children perished because of cold, disease and hunger. During the harsh winter of 1838-39, hundreds died along a six-mile portion of the trail that traverses Southern Illinois. Each Monday during the series, Illinoisan will present a feature that tells a story of life and people along the Trail of Tears.

All episodes are from 8 to 9:30 p.m. Monday nights.

Tonight: "After the Mayflower" - In 1621, the Wampanoag of New England negotiated a treaty with Pilgrim settlers. A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English and a confederation of Indians, this diplomatic gamble seemed to have been a grave miscalculation.

April 20: "Tecumseh's Vision" - In the course of his brief and meteoric career, Tecumseh would become one of the greatest Native American leaders of all time, orchestrating the most ambitious pan-Indian resistance movement ever mounted on the North American continent.

April 27: "Trail of Tears" - Though the Cherokee embraced "civilization" and won recognition of tribal sovereignty in the U.S. Supreme Court, their resistance to removal from their homeland failed. Thousands were forced on a perilous march to Oklahoma.

May 4 "Geronimo" - As the leader of the last Native American fighting force to capitulate to the U.S. government, Geronimo was seen by some as the perpetrator of unspeakable savage cruelties, while to others he was the embodiment of proud resistance.

May 11: "Wounded Knee" - In 1973, American Indian Movement activists and residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation occupied the town of Wounded Knee, demanding redress for grievances. As a result of the siege, Indians across the country forged a new path into the future.

A NYT television critic was not impressed...

From the New York Times

Centuries of American Indian Valor, Celebrated and Recreated

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

To the extent that certain kinds of sweeping historical documentaries on PBS feel like junior-high social studies, “We Shall Remain,” which begins Monday and unfolds over five weeks, is the sort of information-intensive class that lends itself to copious note taking if not enlivened argument. The subject is the history of American Indian resistance over four centuries. Our instructor is Benjamin Bratt, a longtime supporter of Indian causes, who serves as off-camera narrator and never wavers in his tone of earnest contrition. He speaks as if he has been asked to apologize for the sins of white oppression. His effort at an ethnically authentic pronunciation of Lalawethika, a Shawnee leader, is alone an exercise in cultural amends.

The film proceeds in a straightforward chronological fashion, beginning in the 1600s with an examination of the Wampanoag of New England, whose ranks were decimated by the end of the century after a protracted war with English colonists. Those who weren’t killed off were sent into slavery. Originally Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, had formed an alliance with the British to help protect his people against tribal rivals, but the relationship proved tenuous when the population of colonists, and hence the pillaging of land and resources, swelled. Among the lesser-known indignities that they perpetrated were raising pigs that consumed the food the native people needed to survive.

"We Shall Remain" seeks above all to move from paradigms of victimhood to a sober celebration of Indian valor in the face of white savagery. The 90 minutes spent on Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader who presided over spits of land in Ohio and Indiana in the early 19th century, is particularly illuminating.

By 1805 he could no longer protect his people. His men were lost to warfare, his villages were predominantly made up of women. A few years later he would proclaim himself the chief of all Indian leaders on the continent, aiding the British against the Americans in the War of 1812 and gaining so much respect from his new allies that one British commander said of him, "A more gallant or sagacious warrior does not exist."

Tecumseh, who had only 24 warriors at hand, forced Americans to retreat south of Detroit. With a British commander he orchestrated the capture of the city, battling American forces six times the size of his makeshift brigade and thus inflicting what the film describes as one of the most humiliating defeats ever suffered by an American army. The British rewarded Tecumseh by completely abandoning him toward the end of 1813, discarding any effort to help him reclaim parts of the Midwest from the Americans.

The early chapters of the film rely heavily on historical re-enactment, recreated battle scenes and lots of war paint and cowhide. I cringed when I thought I spotted an actor who appeared on the first season of "24" playing a colonial; I like my re-enactors to be recognizable only from appearances at restoration villages. Re-enactment is the default device of historical documentaries now, but I don’t think it is too much to ask that a project with the apparent ambitions of this one try a little harder not to feel like a Thanksgiving play.

The aesthetic matures by the time we get to the 1970s and the film's account of the American Indian Movement's occupation of the town of Wounded Knee. The group, formed in Minneapolis during the height of late '60s radicalism, seized sites like Plymouth Rock and Mount Rushmore and vandalized the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, capturing the news media's attention and providing filmmakers with plenty of footage. In many ways this chapter of Indian struggle is the most interesting because it will be to many viewers the most unfamiliar, the actions of the group lost to the larger history of the civil rights movement. As one surviving activist puts it in the film's final hour: "Every tribe in this country has a time of horror, I mean a time of absolute horror."

WE SHALL REMAIN

After the Mayflower

On most PBS stations on Monday night (check local listings).

Directed by Chris Eyre; written by Sharon Grimberg, Anne Makepeace and Mark Zwonitzer; Ms. Grimberg, executive producer; Paul Goldsmith, director of photography; Akeime A. Mitterlehner, production designer; John Kusiak, composer; Mark Samels, executive producer for "American Experience."

A friendlier view from the USA Today...

Native Americans aren't victims or warriors in 'We Shall Remain'

By Janice Lloyd, USA TODAY

Major Ridge is cosmopolitan. Clean-shaven, resplendent in top hat and tailored suit, he is shown stepping into a horse-drawn carriage in front of his elegant plantation home.

What's different about this character from the 1830s? For starters, he is not wearing war paint. He is a savvy diplomat who knows the president of the United States — and he is Cherokee.

We Shall Remain, a 7½-hour, five-part look at pivotal moments in Native American history, premieres tonight on PBS (9 ET/PT, times may vary). The third episode focuses on Major Ridge, who is posed as a prime example of one of the important but little-known leaders and heroes who emerged even as Europeans shaped the United States.

He was no saint — he also owned slaves — but he struggled to do the right thing. He signed a treaty with the U.S. government outlining how the Cherokee Nation would move west to Indian Territory, an act for which his people vilified him.

"We're very aware of native people being presented in two-dimensional terms," says senior producer Sharon Grimberg. "They were either hapless victims who have no control over their fate, or they've been ferocious and brutal warriors. There's never been something in the middle."

In seeking that middle ground, the producers consulted native advisers and academic scholars and cast Native American actors in central roles. The American Experience series, which spans more than 300 years and took three years to make, is being rolled out with a community outreach program in 15 cities and a proposed curriculum for social studies teachers.

Though they're far from being the first departure from B-Western portrayals of Indians as nobles or savages, the 90-minute episodes, each focusing on a pivotal moment in history, are sweeping in reach, Grimberg says. All the episodes differ in style; the first three in particular are almost entirely dramatizations, a big departure from the PBS Ken Burns-style epics of still images and narratives. "This is definitely the biggest leap we've made into dramatic work," Grimberg says.

The reason? "There really aren't any still images to use," she says. Often the only images available were of landscapes and deeds. And even in the acted and filmed portions, a desire to stick close to history was hampered by a lack of documentation.

That changes as the series advances; the final episode uses footage from the Wounded Knee uprising in 1973. "We knew from the beginning the films wouldn't look the same," she says.

The series stretches from the 1600s with the Wampanoag, a tribe that befriended struggling English settlers, to the 1970s with the armed leaders of the American Indian Movement defying U.S. Marshals. "The history of America is normally told by the point of view of Europeans looking West," Grimberg says. "We said, 'Let's reverse the lens, and look from the point of view of Native Americans.' "

'Therapeutic' for star Studi

For Wes Studi, a Cherokee who has appeared in more than 50 TV shows and movies (Dances With Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, NBC's Kings), it was eye-opening to star as Ridge. This is the first film in which he has spoken his language.

"One thing I really appreciated was there was no stick with feathers hanging off of it," he says. "You know what you usually see, with eagles screaming in the distance and the mountains? I didn't see that, and was happy to walk on the set."

Studi says the role "was therapeutic to myself as a Cherokee, and I hope it will be so for other Cherokees as well. (Ridge) was in the minority in terms of thought. It wasn't anything malicious that he and the treaty party were doing. They thought what they were doing was right."

The episode tells a story Grimberg says few Americans know. President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision allowing the Cherokees to stay on their ancestral lands.

Ultimately, government forces forced the Cherokees to march 850 miles to new lands. Four thousand Cherokees, more than a quarter of those in that march, died on the "Trail of Tears."

"The United States gained a lot of land, but the loss for American government is the stain it put on our national honor," says Russell Townsend, a narrator of the film and historic preservation officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. "What they did in the 1830s to southeastern Indians is ethnic cleansing."

Reaching out to communities

The retelling of the "cleansing," done in a five-minute segment, is portrayed in stark visuals. Director Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne and Arapaho, filmed the route over the mountains in black and white, emphasizing the bleak, endless terrain.

"I think we're pretty honest in this series," says Eyre, who won a 2005 Peabody Award for Edge of America and a 1998 Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker's Trophy for Smoke Signals. "One of my favorite scenes is an out-of-focus image of a young boy walking through the snow, holding the hand of someone else. It's impressionistic, and it forces the audience to participate by getting them to imagine what else is going on around this boy."

Eyre hopes the series helps young Native Americans identify some new leaders and teach them some "self-esteem and self-love." He says that when he visited an Indian boarding school during filming, he was concerned after asking the students whom they identified as heroes.

"They said Tiger (Woods) and Beyoncé," Eyre says. "They might have some Indian blood in them, but they are not the kind of example I was hoping to hear."

Previews to Indian groups are playing to "somber audiences," says Chad Smith, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, who viewed the series in Washington recently. Smith's ancestor Ancie Hogtotter led a cow over the Trail of Tears at the age of 13.

Between the series and outreach efforts with Native American organizations, "our sincerest hope is that this story gets out and the American public begins to understand the complexity of issues our people faced," Smith says. "We're not just a Washington Redskins caricature."

'These lands are ours'

The series' name is taken from a speech given by Shawnee chief Tecumseh in the early 1800s, when white settlers were pushing into the Ohio Valley.

The lead character in Episode 2, Tecumseh is portrayed as a gifted leader. Among several speeches repeated in the series is this: "These lands are ours. No one has the right to remove us. The master of life has appointed this place for us to light our fires. And here we shall remain."

Tecumseh worked with the British and forged an Indian confederacy to regain some lost lands before dying in battle against U.S. forces in 1812.

"These people belong in the pantheon of inspirational leaders because they showed incredible courage and were ingenious and imaginative," Eyre says.

The series closes at Wounded Knee, the site of the last massacre of the Indian Wars in 1890 and of another siege in 1973. The American Indian Movement faced off with the FBI, brought national attention to problems at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and sparked Indian activism to save their cultures.

AIM leader Russell Means still lives on the Lakota reservation. The segment weaves together footage of him, Dennis Banks and others with new interviews. "We were about to be obliterated culturally," Means says in the series. "This was the rebirth of our dignity and self-pride."

In an interview with USA TODAY, Means says, "I was taught to be proud. I grew up in Northern California at a time when the cowboy-and-Indian movies were at their zenith and we were the bad guys. My brother and I were the only Indians in town, so we had to fight everyone."

He is happy Wounded Knee closes the series: "It leaves open questions in the audience's mind, that this is unfinished business for Indians."