last mohicans essays

last mohicans essays The French and Indian War of the eighteenth century had uniquely complex qualities, matched by the gravity of its outcome. The myriad of cultures involved the French, Canadian, American, English, Algonquians, and Iroquois whom make this era fascinating. The multi-ethnic element made it a war built upon fragile alliances, often undermined by factional disputes and shifting fortunes. Violent as it was, its battlefields encompassed some of the most beautiful country to be found anywhere. Its richness in diverse cultures, the severity of its bloody violence, and the beauty of its landscape, all combine to make this an era with great depth of interest. It is entertaining and educational to witness a re-enactment event of a historical film and novel called The Last of the Mohicans. In the wake of the 1992 debates about Columbus, the discovery of the Americas, and whether terms such as 'holocaust', 'genocide', and 'racism' should be applied to what happened to Native Americans, Michael Mann's film remake of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans continues a process of historical erasure or forgetting that Cooper and his contemporaries began. The sentimental racism expressed in Cooper's novel involves the ideas of the auto-genocide of 'savagery' and the inevitable extinction of all Native Americans. Though Mann purported to take great pains in his film to be historically accurate, the film is only accurate in relation to trivial details. It thoroughly scrambles major aspects of Cooper's text, including converting the aging Natty Bumppo into a young sex symbol (Daniel Day-Lewis). More importantly, the film completely erases Cooper's sentimental racism by, for instance, turning Chingachgook rather than his son, Uncas, into the 'last' of his tribe, and t hereby overlooking the motif of the futureless child central to that racism. But in eliminating Cooper's racism, the film in a sense perfects the novel, because the sentimentalis...