A new historical documentary “We Shall RemainŽ tells the history of American Indian resistance over four centuries. 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.
Most humiliating “We Shall RemainŽ seeks above all to move from paradigms of victimhood to a sober celebration of Indian valor in the face of white savagery. The 90minutes 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.
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. Later, the film gets to the 1970s and accounts 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. 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.Ž
The New York Times
O autorovi| Stránku připravila Marta Pelechová
