200 words summary

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans: The Columbus Quincentenary and Neocolonialism in Hollywood Film

M. Elise Marubbio

Visually seductive, Michael Mann’s 1992 version

of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans draws the viewer in with long panoramic

landscape shots of mountainous wilderness and raging waters. The scenery and the love story position

us in the turbulent world of the American frontier during the French and Indian Wars, and against the

familiar backdrop of American expansionism, im- perialism, and colonialism. Although not the original auteur of The Last of theMohicans, Mann’s signature

is evident in his specific use of cinematography and in his manipulation and development of certain

traits from the original story and from Hollywood adaptations—specifically George Seitz’s 1936 nation-

building epic. While Mann’s film reinforces the nationalist and racialist themes prevalent in Cooper’s

1826 story, his film adaptation also reflects the legacy of Cooper’s story in Hollywood and in American mythology. Mann’s stylistic choices and narrative

twists take on specific late twentieth century relevance in the United States particularly in the post-colonial

and Quincentenary moment of its release—a time when Americans were questioning the historical

accuracy of our foundational cultural myths. The year of the Quincentenary—1992—marked a

tumultuous moment in contemporary U.S. and world historical consciousness. It was a period when main-

stream American culture was forced to re-evaluate its historical narratives, its political heroes, and its heritage on this continent. Debates abounded regard-

ing whether the Quincentenary should celebrate Columbus and the ‘‘civilizing’’ of the Americas, the

multicultural encounter, or 500 years of indigenous survival in the wake of colonialism and genocide.

Summerhill and Williams’ Sinking Columbus, Axtell’s Beyond 1492, Time’s special issues (7 Oct. 1991 and

Fall 1992), Newsweek’s Fall/Winter 1991 issue, and Northeast Indian Quarterly’s special edition (Fall 1990) illustrate the intense self-reflexivity that acade-

mia and the American public underwent during this time. Clearly, the Quincentenary offered a venue for a

multiplicity of voices and opinions. This was particu-

larly important for Native Americans who sought to educate mainstream Americans about their current

economic, religious, and political positioning as colonizedpeopleswithin the UnitedStates. Apositive

result of these Quincentenary debates was that American myths surrounding the Columbus encoun-

ter, Western-European global expansion, and the civilizing of the American continent were confronted by and positioned against the realities of colonialism,

invasion, slavery, and racism. In respect to the post-Cold War global political

positioning of the U.S. at this time, one is struck by the complexity of these debates in relation to

American nationalism. During 1992, Americans witnessed President Bush’s famous ‘‘New World

Order’’ speech, the third greatest period of U.S. immigration,

1 a rise in anti-illegal immigration

measures, 2 and a decline in employment opportu-

nities. As Walter Zinn suggests, events such as rising unemployment, U.S. economic expansion overseas,

and the U.S. military action in Iraq culminated in insecurity, even ‘‘alienation...in every part of the

country,’’ causing many Americans to question how they fit into their own country, and to question their

role in global economic politics. 3 Within this milieu

the Quincentenary was ‘‘[n]o longer an innocuous

ethnic celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America, it had become a battleground for our entire view of Western culture.’’

4

In synchronization with more liberal voices during 1992, The Last of the Mohicans was promoted

as a multicultural 5 film dedicated to a more sympa-

thetic and authentic 6 rendering of Native American

cultures than Cooper’s original story or Hollywood’s past productions. Indeed, its spectacular visuals,

attention to costume and language, and references to inter-group conflicts could seduce the viewer into accepting such a billing. However, an analysis of the

editing, camera work, and narrative structure reveal an alternative reality that reinforces the original

139

Anglo nation-building agenda of the novel and

promotes a neocolonial theme constructed through the use of visual colonial rhetoric.

7 While neocoloni-

alism generally refers to the economic activities of powerful nations, I propose that it is also applicable

to the economically motivated Hollywood film industry that perpetuates a dominant U.S. colonial

hegemony. Neocolonialism in film incorporates, as visual and verbal rhetoric, some of the elements of

colonialism that create and sustain a dominant group’s power over another group: surveillance, imposed point-of-view and privilege of voice, hier-

archy of language and images, and stereotypes of the colonized group. These are seen most overtly in

Hollywood period pieces set during the colonial era, which glorify the colonial-imperial process. Such is

the case with Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. As did Cooper’s original colonial narrative,

Mann’s neocolonial discourse builds on a legacy of rhetorically positioning Native Americans as con- tinually colonized peoples whose fate, history, and

environment are manipulated and presented through the dominant culture’s perspective. Mann’s use of

cinematography and narrative, in conjunction with point-of-view, dialogue, actors’ screen-time, and

specific character coupling, reinforces a hierarchy of white racial and political dominance reflective of a

number of ongoing American myths: the Vanishing American, Manifest Destiny, and the American

Frontier. The result is a film that effectively reduces Native Americans to stereotyped erotic and exotic accoutrements of the main subjects—the white

American hero and heroine. Thus, Michael Mann’s choice and representation of this particular story at

the height of the Quincentenary debates suggests, not a multicultural endorsement of American history, but

rather a glorification of the colonization process through a reinforcing of nationalist myths. The

following article will explore the visual colonial rhetoric that emerges in Mann’s film in order to demonstrate this thesis and to illustrate how the

viewer is inculcated into the process. Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans opens

with a series of intertitles. 8 The first and second locate

us intheAmericancolonies in1757andinformusthat

it is ‘‘the third year of the war between England and Francefor thepossessionofthecontinent.’’The latter

reads: ‘‘Three men, the last of a vanishing people, are on the frontier west of the Hudson River’’ (italics

mine). The camera pans from a ridge-top out across an impressive view of the expansive wilderness; the cinematography in this brief moment does not

penetrate the landscape but gazes on its untouched

entirety. Mann has presented us with a variety of

symbols:acolonialencounter,awarbetweenimperial powers, a vanishing people (vanishing due to the

encroachment of white civilization), a western fron- tier,andavirgin landasseenfromabove.Inamanner

reminiscent of Mary Louise Pratt and David Spurr’s notion of the ‘‘colonial gaze,’’

9 and visually portrayed

as a National Geographic 10 spread, Mann seductively

drawsus intoacontext inwhichwe,asanextensionof

the camera’s eye, take on the role of external surveyor of this American Eden.

11 As the imperial eye, we take

the first step in the colonial expansion process: We

scout the seemingly untouched frontier wilderness— viewing its resources, its attributes—anticipating the

cultivation of this Eden. As both Spurr and Pratt’s work explain, the

colonizer’s eye, its gaze and ‘‘the commanding view [make] possible an understanding of the non-Western

world as an object of study, an area for development, a field of action.’’

12 Mann’s style of cinematography

does this by suggesting the wonder of the land to the

viewer,andweasthecamerastandontheridgeof this pristine landscape, noting the absence of civiliza-

tion—roads, deforested settlements, and noise. Also included in the colonial/imperial surveillance of a

land suitable for exploit is the purposeful disregard for its indigenous inhabitants—an avoidance of their

presence. According to Pratt, ‘‘[t]he landscape is written as uninhabited, unpossessed, unhistoricized,

unoccupied’’ 13 in order to justify the Imperialist’s

penetrationofthe land(anactionreminiscentofrape) and his claiming of its fertile and abundant resources,

both natural and human. We have knowledge of the ‘‘vanishing people’’ (the intertitle cards have given us

this information) but because they are not yet visible, we disregard them, successfully establishing our

distance from them. Mann’s peaceful introductory panoramic and the

viewer’s initial gaze over blue hazy mountains is suddenly shifted downward from the exterior to the voluptuous, dark, and sensual interior landscape of

the colonial frontier. In the next few scenes, Mann’s rhetorical strategies further define the colonial situa-

tion and the cultural division between the viewer, positioned with the camera as the neocolonial eye,

and three of the primary characters. A long tracking sequence concentrates on three men—Hawkeye,

Uncas, and Chingachgook—as they run through the forest in pursuit of a stag. They are handsome,

physicallyfit,andattunedtoeachothers’actions. The length of their run, the agility of their actions (Hawkeye throws his rifle to Uncas while removing

hisshirtandUncaseasilycatches it—bothinfull run),

140 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

and their prowess (exhibited through Hawkeye’s bare

chest and their stamina) attest to their connection to each other and to their environment. The use of the

Munsee Delaware language, clothing, and ritual establish these men as Native American.

Mann has already verified their status as a disappearingrace (‘‘Threemen, the lastof avanishing

people’’) and he has triggered the viewers’ knowledge ofAmericanhistory, remindingusthat theEastCoast

was colonial America’s first frontier. Thus through this sequencing, Mann sets the stage for a meta- narrative about Native Americans as racially exotic,

erotic, and ultimately at ease in and part of the wild landscape. In addition, the sequencing keeps us at a

distance from them, excluded from their world, which effectively positions us as a surveying neocolonial

presence attached to the camera eye. However, as does a National Geographic, Mann allows us to

participate peripherally in their exotic world when Chingachgook, ‘‘speaking words of respect and sorrow in Munsee Delaware,’’ blesses the dying stag

as Uncas and Hawkeye look on. 14

The English subtitles give us knowledge and intimacy regarding

their actions. This coupled with a close-up shot of Hawkeyeashepositionsus inhisgun-sightduringthe

stag-shooting scene, suggesting that he knows we are watching, completes the panoptic voyeurism

15 of this

moment. The viewer continues to participate in the

narrative’s colonial discourse by classifying the three men racially (a move referencing back to Cooper’s original racial hierarchy that positioned the three

primary races intermixing on the colonial frontier: White, Native American, and Black). While Mann

alters Cooper’s story by depicting all three men as culturally Native American, his overt focus on

Hawkeye throughout the stag scene accentuates Hawkeye’s whiteness and centers him as the main

character differentiated from Uncas and Chingach- gook through actions and skin-color. As Gary Edger- ton has documented:

Scene 1, the deer hunt, effectively establishes the film’s

culturaland ideologicalagenda....All told, thisfirst scene is

composed of 34 shots, lasting 2minutes and 34 seconds.

Hawkeye dominates the proceedings, being in 21 of the

shots for 106 seconds; Uncas is next with 16 shots for 77

seconds; Chingachgook is in7 shots for 43seconds.... More

importantly, the deer hunt is photographed from Haw-

keye’s point-of-view. He leads the chase, and the 5 shots

thatpicture the stagonlyappearwhenhe looks towardsthe

animal. 16

Edgerton’s analysis suggests that the cultural and

ideological agenda of the film is Anglo-centric and presented from a ‘‘white patriarchal viewpoint,’’

17

and that Mann’s camera work underscores this. Indeed, the viewer’s gaze is preoccupied with

Hawkeye’s actions—his running, stripping, and kill- ing of the deer. Hawkeye’s removal of his shirt forces

the viewer to acknowledge his whiteness and to contrast it with Uncas’ and Chingachgook’s clothed,

but darker, skin color. Through the camera’s point- of-view shot from Hawkeye to the stag we are momentarily positioned as Hawkeye. A racial hier-

archy supported by narrative and camera work is established in this scene that will continue throughout

the film. 18 Hawkeye’s identification as both white and

Native American creates a niche for the viewer, and

we are coded into this hierarchy through our identification with him. We are already conditioned

to view him as the focal character but his hybridity and our shared viewpoint allow us to negotiate between the white world and the Native American

world. From here on in, Mann’s rhetorical tactics shift, positioning us as participants in the colonial

‘‘War for Empire’’ (to borrow from Schwartz) from the perspective of Hawkeye—the hybrid colonial

Native. Establishing Hawkeye’s cultural hybridity in a

frontier setting positions the primitive and natural environment we just witnessed within a contact

zone. 19 According to Mary Louise Pratt, contact

zones are ‘‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in

highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination.’’

20 Within these zones, there is dis-

order and chaos that must be ordered. In the case of The Last of the Mohicans, the ‘‘disparate cultures’’

include a variety of Native American tribes, the Anglo-colonials, and the French and British

imperialists. The disorder revolves around land disputes, interracial mixing, and the interaction between ‘‘civilized’’ peoples and ‘‘savages’’ who need

tobe‘‘ordered’’ throughdominationorelimination— something Mann’s (as did Cooper’s) narrative

achieves by the end of the film by removing the most ‘‘savage’’ and unruly elements from the setting.

Classifying, according to both Spurr and Pratt, is a fundamental part of colonial strategy for ordering,

regulating, and defining the unfamiliar, the untamed, andtheuncivilized.

21 It remainsadeeply ingrainedbit

of colonial rhetoric in contemporary discourse about marginal peoples in Third World nations and the U.S., and it is clearly prevalent in Hollywood film

representations of the Other, especially Native

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 141

Americans. Hollywood’s narrative film utilizes a

stylized and reductive image of Native Americans based on a descriptive tradition that began with

Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci’s encounters with ‘‘Indians’’ in the Americas. These

earliestdescriptionsreducedNativeAmericanswithin a dichotomous structure, positioning the positive

image of the noble and beautiful Indian against the negative image of the savage and ignoble Indian.

Hollywood’s rendition of this binary adds the modifiers assimilative or unassimilative, further confining the Native American to the role of

an interpolated Indian Other; a specific kind of sig- nifier.

22 Through this representational history, the

Native American signifies both the United States’ iconic national symbol and its national Other,

23

resultinginanambiguousrelationshipwhichisdeeply inundated with issues of race and colonialism.

Following Cooper, Mann’s film participates in such a discoursive legacy by positioning Native American characters into racializing classificatory

systems that reduce them to stereotypes which either idealize or debase them. Adopting Cooper’s structure

and following the classic Hollywood binary, Mann reduces his Native characters to either the Noble

Savage—Uncas and Chingachgook—who is accep- table to Anglo society because of his innate goodness

or because of his dedication to protecting white society, or to the Vicious Savage—Magua and his

followers—who, out of revenge or pure malice, wish to destroy Anglo society—to ‘‘wipe out [its] seed.’’ Mann’s caricatures are indicative of Hollywood

cinematic narratives in which, according to Daniel Bernardi,

people of color are generally represented as either deviant

threats to white rule, whereby requiring civilizing or brutal

punishment,or fetishized objectsof exoticbeauty, icons for

a racist scopophilia. 24

Uncas and Magua are Mann’s primary focus for such

racializing structures. Uncas and Chincgachgook are Cooper’s quintes-

sential Noble Savages—innocent, loyal, and wise. Their primary role is to function as Hawkeye’s adoptive family and as his companions. However, in

a twist on Cooper borrowed from George Seitz’s 1936 version, the narrative presents Hawkeye as a young

man akin to Uncas rather than as the older companion and friend to Chingachgook. This change

is significant both in Seitz’s version and in Mann’s because it positions Hawkeye as a believable love

interest for the Anglo woman (Cora in the 1992 version and Alice in the 1936) and subsequently, his

love gives him reason to cross back into white society.

Mann adds his own personal touch of period authenticity through Chingachgook’s adoption of

Hawkeye as his Mohican son and through his foresight in educating both his sons at Reverend

Wheeler’s school. He creates an environment for the eventual crossing-over of Hawkeye from the Native

community into the white community. Chingach- gook and Uncas’s presence accentuates the best of

Native America, reflects an interracial American community (American colonists and Native Amer- icans),andpositionsHawkeyeas the futureAmerican

hero (a point I will discuss in more detail later). As Noble companions, they risk their lives repeatedly

in response to Hawkeye’s agendas, which revolve around Cora Munro and the American colonials who

are fighting for the British. Uncas is drawn further than his father into the role of assimilated Native by

taking on the function of Alice’s valiant protector. And as does his brother, he will attempt to cross the cultural barrier and assimilate into white culture;

unlike his brother, he will fail. Ironically, Chingach- gook and Uncas both also represent the assimilative

Noble Savage who acknowledges white superiority and eventual colonial rule, and sanctions it by

participating in his own erasure. Mann adopts both the 1920 and the 1936 films’

narrative strategy of depicting Uncas as a fetishized erotic Other. This objectification in addition to his

alreadyracedstatusmarkshimasdoublyfeminizedin colonial discourse. As a raced figure, he is reduced to the position usually assigned to women in cinematic

discourse. In Mann’s version, his body is presented to us in tight close-up shots which either exhibit his

desire for another (the white girl—Alice Munro) or isolate parts of his body—his buttocks and legs or his

face—for our consuming pleasure. As feminist film theoristshaveargued, this typeofcinematicapproach

effectively reduces the ‘‘woman’’ to a position as an object of desire for the viewer who derives scopo- philic pleasure in ‘‘her’’ ‘‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’’

25

This multiple looking doubly objectifies Uncas who is reduced by his race to an exotic object and by his

sexual positioning to an erotic object. The double power structure further reduces Uncas to both an

object and a representational sign of his racial and sexual difference. Teresa de Lauretis’ insight that

cinema denies ‘‘women the status of subjects’’ by positing them ‘‘as at once object and the foundation

of representation,’’ and as object and sign of man’s culture and creativity, is also applicable to this semiological and psychoanalytical discourse of

Uncas’ position in Mann’s film narrative. 26 The result

142 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

of such a reading is that Uncas, as dissected object, is

neither a full subject within the film narrative (his role is marginal) nor completely male.

Uncas’ positioning is emblematic of the gender/ race organization that inevitably feminizes the Native

American male in film. In this colonial model, racism and violence render him an impotent Other to the

male colonizer and an object of erotic lust for the colonial woman. Hollywood cinematic discourse is

grounded in such white patriarchal narratives of dominance over women and non-whites of various genders and sexualities. The inscribed point of view is

that of the white male or, in psychoanalytic terms, ‘‘the Father,’’ whose self-image is defined through an

oppressive fear of sexuality. As Mary Ann Doane’s psychoanalytic feminist film approach explains,

‘‘sexuality is the realm where fear and desire find their most intimate connections, where notions of

otherness and the exotic/erotic are often conflated.’’ 27

Doane suggests that psychoanalytic theory (which studies the fear of sexuality, the fear of the Father,

etc.) has often neglected issues of race, and that there is a tension between the two, deriving from Freud’s

project’s link ‘‘to the colonial imagination and its structuring binarism.’’

28 Thus, from a psychoanalytic

view, sexuality is deeply embedded in the fear of the Other (the woman) who embodies the exotic Other to

theman.Thecolonialist translates this familiarfearof white women’s sexuality onto all Others whose

sexuality somehow threatens his secure positioning in the symbolic order of things. Mann, like his predecessors, perpetuates the symbolic order through

his ‘‘white patriarchal viewpoint’’ 29 and through his

feminizing of Uncas.

While both the Noble and the Vicious Indian are feminized infilm, the former is much more likely to be

subjected to this overtly through the female sexual gaze or fetishization. As in all preceding versions,

Uncas is temporarily tolerated as a possible love interest for a white woman as long as he is infantilized and symbolically or physically eliminated in the end.

Magua, in contrast, is not an erotic character. Rather he is always positioned as violent and, through his

abduction of the women, a sexual threat to white purity. However, just as Uncas is positioned as

sexually and racially inferior so also is Magua. In Mann’s version, his emasculation is sealed when he is

visually and verbally rejected by the white colonial men and women he desires to impress. His humilia-

tion in front of his own people and his questionable character force him into self-exile where he dies (read castratedoreliminatedasasexual threat)at thehands

of the other Noble Savage, Chingachgook.

Magua’sportrayal fuels theassertionthatMann’s

neocolonial rhetoric is deeply ingrained in all aspects of the film. While presented as an intelligent and

multilingual Indian, Magua’s status as savage is ensured by Mann’s editing. When General Montcalm

asks Magua why he hates ‘‘the Grey Hair,’’ Magua responds:

When the Grey Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart.

Before he dies, Magua will put his children under the knife

so the Grey Hair will know his seed is wiped out forever.

We are not privy to the causes of Magua’s angst and hatred until many scenes later. Again through a conversation with General Montcalm, we learn that

his blood vengeance against Colonel Munro stems from Munro’s responsiblity for the wiping out of

Magua’s children, for the loss of his wife to another, and for his enslavement by the Mohawks. This

moment of colonial truth—displacement of Native peoples, land loss, and genocide—is skillfully ren-

dered powerless through Mann’s editing which dampens our sensitivity towards Magua. Mann

ensures that Magua’s actions outweigh his justifica- tions. For example, shortly after we finally hear Magua’s story, we watch him yank the still breathing

Colonel Munro’s heart out with his bare hands. In this ambush scene, Magua attacks Colonel Munro,

throwing him from his horse. He is filmed in a medium close-up shot standing over Munro and

plunging a long dagger into his chest. Munro is visually represented as the prone white colonial order

threatened and literally under the knife of the Vicious Savage. This positioning and his violent action negates the sympathy warranted by Magua’s expla-

nation and justifies his death in the end. In addition, Magua’s death at the hands of another Native

American is a subversive message in the colonial rhetoric of the narrative. Magua is positioned as the

unassimilative savage and the representative of the militant faction, fighting for land and honor. His

militancy threatens the progressing colonial order (something very familiar to pro-Columbus celebra-

tors of the Quincentenary whose ideology and history were threatened by anti-Columbus back- lash—both peaceful and militant—to the interna-

tional Quincentenary celebration). By using the assimilative Chingachgook to kill the savage reac-

tionary, Magua, the film signals approval of white colonial actions—assimilation, forced acculturation,

and genocide—that will lead to the vanishing of the Native American race. Mann’s editing and Magua’s

actions advocate this colonial action and the suppres- sion of those who resist.

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 143

The Noble/Vicious Uncas/Magua binary repre-

sents the two most popular extremes of the Native American in white iconography. As a creation of

five hundred years of white popular culture, the Noble/Vicioussplitalsorepresentstheextremesofthe

white psyche. The racialization of Magua as a demonic figure and Uncas as the Noble Savage

creates a doubling 30 of the Native American male in

which neither character exists without the other.

There isnoneedforUncastorescueAlice(Corainthe 1832, 1920, and 1936 versions) or for their resulting love if there is no Magua to threaten her with life as a

captive (itself a reference to white captivity narratives and the legacy of fear for white purity that they

project). This doubling and the connection to Alice imply that Uncas cannot be far removed from

Magua’s personification of savagery. The events leading up to Uncas’s death by Magua and Magua’s

death by Chingachgook (the latter is taken from Seitz’s version and is a revision of Cooper’s story which has Hawkeye killing Magua) reinforce the

tribalness (read as primitiveness) of Native ‘‘blood vengeance’’ codesandunderscores that theyareall,as

Hawkeye tells Cora, ‘‘a breed apart’’ from Anglo culture. By creating such a dichotomous split, white

culture ensures a hierarchy and distance from the savage, the uncivilized. Native Americans are

effectively incorporated into the binary creating a dichotomy between the outside pressure from

white society for them to assimilate and progress towards a more civilized state, and white society’s negation and fear of accepting them as part of

its own. Continuing within The Last of the Mohicans

legacy, Mann’s film works within the Noble/Vicious binary and also perpetuates a white desire for erotic

mixing, scopophilia, racial violence, and redemption of white superiority. It does so by reducing the Native

Americantoasystemofvisualandsymbolic language that plays across the screen to be interpreted by a white audience.

31 While interpretations of the various

narratives’ and Mann’s symbolic language may vary, certain themes prevail: the Native American char-

acters are less civilized than the Anglo characters; they represent a threat of violence to white women

and children; they are available for our erotic pleasure; and their resistance to colonialism must be

eliminated. The rhetorical colonial policy towards the Native characters—classification and stereotyping,

idealizing and eroticizing, and debasing—clearly mark Native Americans as culturally and racially Other totheEuropeanandAmericancharacters.And

within the contact zone of the ‘‘frontier west,’’ they

are the fundamentally disparate and subordinated

culture. ThroughoutthefilmMannpositionsthevieweras

the neocolonial eye of the camera and incorporates us into the colonial strategies of the visual narrative. We

have witnessed Mann’s use of specific rhetorical tactics to position the Native American characters

as stereotypically Other to the white colonial char- acters. In addition to these maneuvers, Mann

(arguably less so than Cooper and other developers of the theme) minimizes the effects of the colonial/ imperial mission on Native American cultures,

further subordinating them culturally to the white mainstream. Issues such as sovereignty and land

rights that were pertinent to Native Americans during the colonial period, and which remain relevant today,

are reduced to peripheral or background staging for the plot’s memorializing of the American battle for

empire. During the colonial period, Native American

tribes made treaties with the imperial European

nations as sovereign nations. As such, their participa- tion in the French and Indian Wars signals not only

their loyalty to treaty agreements, but also their willingness to fight to keep their quickly dwindling

land. Many fought to defend what was left of their territorial homeland—a fundamental component of

tribal identity. However, Mann’s choice of narrative ignores theirstatusasprimaryplayersandreducesthe

importanceof thesestruggles.WhileMaguainfers the loss of tribal land when he talks of losing his home and his family (an evasive reference to genocide), and

the introductory intertitles indicate Native land loss by labeling it and them part of a vanishing frontier,

Mann never directly discusses this. Rather, the viewer must deduce this from the few brief moments when

land is mentioned. Hawkeye brings the land issue to our attention in a dialogue with Cora; ironically,

however, he is not talking about Native land loss, rather, he is explaining to her that the frontier is the only affordable land left for poor, white colonials.

Cora, in turn, expresses to her father (symbol of the BritishEmpire) that thecolonials ‘‘donot livebyyour

leave but hack it out of the wilderness with their bare hands, burying their women and children along the

way.’’ Through these exchanges, Mann diverts atten- tion from the Native struggle and repositions it onto

the settlers, glossing over the Native American historical reality in favor of a colonial perspective.

This maneuver, in connection with the film’s back- drop—the ‘‘War for Empire’’—disregards the tribes’ sovereign right to the land and affirms a colonial right

tothecontinent. In lightof this,Mann’spromotionof

144 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

the film as multicultural suggests a commodifying,

romanticizing, and trivializing of Native American history and Native American struggles against

dominant American political interests for the domi- nant society’s viewing pleasure.

32

Mann’s ambiguity in promoting a film that represents a variety of cultures on an equal basis is

also observable in his use of Native languages which are presented occasionally throughout the film to

authenticate the differences between tribes and to accentuatethegapbetweenAngloandNativeculture. Chingachgook and Uncas, for example, speak

English and Munsee Delaware, and Magua speaks Huron, English, and French. These moments

of authentication, coupled with the accurate use of hairstyles, clothing, and weaponry, suggest that

Mann is promoting a more progressive and sympa- thetic rendering of the Native American in respect to

past Hollywood depictions or even Cooper’s. How- ever, close analysis shows that Lakota is substituted for Munsee Delaware and Cherokee for Huron,

suggesting that Mann’s attention to language is superficial and that Native American language

accuracy is less important than having the dialogue sound Native.

33 This along with Uncas’s reduction to

a sexual fetish and ultimate death undermine the positive aspects of the authentic moments. Chingach-

gook’s switchtoEnglish inthefinal sceneof thefilmis also troublesome. In this scene, Chingachgook and

Hawkeye are sending Uncas off in prayer. Chingach- gook, in a rare moment, speaks in English rather than Munsee Delaware—a jarring reversal of Mann’s

attempted authenticity. This sudden loss of language skills recalls, for the Native viewer especially, the

ramifications of tribal language loss and forced assimilation.

34

Both these enduring legacies of colonialism—loss of land and language—are issues that past film

versions ignored and that Mann’s film glosses over in favor of the colonial perspective. Likewise, Mann relegates the Native American characters to positions

of lesser importance by minimizing their presence on screen. While they are presented as intelligent

(knowing how to defeat the British in forest warfare), multilingual, and diverse (multiple tribes are pre-

sented), they are still confined to swarming the woods in camouflage, ambushing and slaughtering women

and children, and coveting white women as sexual objects. These damaging representations (swarming,

slaughtering, would-be rapists) are borrowed directly from Cooper and have become stock footage in film renditions of the story. Significantly however, the

reification of these tropes in Mann’s film forces one to

move past his visual seduction and pro-Native

authenticity back into the reality that this film is no more than a revival of the Vanishing American myth

that allows the viewer to participate in colonial voyeurism, imperial nostalgia, and a re-vanishing of

the Native American. The vanishing of the Native American happens

most subversively in the lack of screen time given to Native characters. As Gary Edgerton makes very

clear, Mann’s Native characters physically vanish from our view. They are rarely given full screen and they are most often positioned peripherally or

adjacent to a white character that takes center screen. Gary Edgerton offers a succinct analysis of this:

[O]f all 40 scenes in the movie, along with an overall

rendering of which characters have primary and secondary

focus in each, Hawkeye...is given...23 primary scenes of the

26 in which he appears.... Magua is third (7 primary and 3

secondary scenes)...Chingachgook (2 primary and 1

secondary scene) [and] Uncas (1 primary and 1 secondary

scene). Intermsofplotstructure,ChingachgookandUncas

remain second-class citizens. 35

Edgerton also points out that Chingachgook and

Uncas’s screen time is matched or surpassed by Heyward, Jack Winthrop (a very minor character), and Colonel Munro.

36 In effect Mann vanishes them

in order to refocus the camera predominantly on the Anglo hero and heroine.

The quintessential example of this happens toward the end of the film after Uncas plunges to

hisdeath.Wehaverisenoutof the tumultious interior and are again positionedabove the wilderness. A long

panoramic shot of mountains and deep valleys, reminiscent of the opening sequence, pans right to focus on a tiny group of three: Chingachgook,

Hawkeye, and Cora. The scene, a touching repetition of the first scene with the dead stag, situates the three

as a microcosm in the wilderness, bidding farewell to oneoftheirown.Asthecamerapansinward,wefocus

on Chingachgook who is giving his final eulogy to Uncas in English. Cora is positioned peripherally as

Hawkeye’s replacement for Uncas. Chingachgook’s use of English during this important ritual moment

symbolically eradicates his Native past (Edgerton). Mann reinforces this death of Chingachgook’s history by rewriting Cooper and representing

Chingachgook as the ‘‘last of the Mohicans,’’

Great Spirit, maker of all life, a warrior goes to you swift

and straight as an arrow shot into the sun. Welcome him

and let him take his place at the council fire of my people.

He is Uncas, my son. Tell them to be patient and ask death

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 145

for speed, for they are all there but one—I, Chingachgook,

the last of the Mohicans.

Mann also erases an important cultural recognition that Hawkeye, as Chingachgook’s adopted son (in

this version), would be considered Native and, therefore, would be the last of the Mohicans.

37 In

effect, Chingachgook’s rewritten speech removes this aspect of native tradition and positions him as

childless and futureless. Mann’s removal of the Native characters makes

room for the emergence of a new breed of frontiers- man—the hybrid Anglo-Native and the predecessor to the Western Hero

38 —who is more suited to the

future of the Anglo-American West. As mentioned earlier, Mann clearly designed the plot to recognize

Hawkeye as a Native American character, one of ‘‘three men, the last of a vanishing people,’’ the

adopted son of Chingachgook, ‘‘a breed apart’’ from Anglos, a skilled hunter, and a native speaker of

Munsee Delaware. In every way except in his skin color, Hawkeye is presented as a Native American

character, which raises the issues of the appropriation ofIndiannessandoftheWesternherosupplantingthe Native American. Mann has already visually erased

Cooper’s Uncas and Cora love story and displaced it through a mimetic relationship to past The Last of the

Mohicans’ films and to Cooper’s text onto Uncas’s love for Alice.

39 According to Cooper’s racial

hierarchy, Uncas’s love for Cora, whose tainted racial heritage positions her more closely to Uncas than to

Heyward or any other white character, allows for the possibility of miscegination. By shifting Uncas’s love to Alice who is a narrative referent to past ideals of

white purity, Mann sets up a narrative that ‘‘erases Cooper’s—and nineteenth century America’s—racist

understanding of savagery’’ and undermines the historical purpose of the original text.

40 Brantlinger’s

article, ‘‘Forgetting Genocide,’’ suggests that Mann’s version recycles the imperialist racism of Cooper’s

novel by rewriting the story into another type of sentimental narrative, one that erases the genocide

and racism inscribed in Cooper’s version. According to Richard Slotkin’s introduction to the 1986 reprint of The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s representation

of ‘‘savagery’’ was proportional to psychological and spiritual darkeness and reflective of race and evolu-

tionary status; thus, Native Americans were placed lower on the evolutionary scale and were, therefore,

closer to primitive and ‘‘savage’’ man. 41 Thus, in

Brantlinger’s view, ignoring Cooper’s racism by

eliminating his miscegenation theme perpetuates an erasureofAmericanandNativehistorythat is in itself

racist. He suggests that the sentimentalizing of white

America’sparticipationingenocidalhistory isequally racist.

42 Within the context of the film narrative, this

shift from Uncas and Cora to Uncas and an unobtainable Alice effectively removes the possibility

of an American future born of Anglo-Native blood and grounds America’s mythic heritage in purely

Anglo bloodlines. Mann’s displacement and almost complete re-

movaloftheNative-Anglolovestorysuggestsadesire to ignore the very real racist reactions in our country to the issues of interracial mixing and miscegenation.

But as a narrative strategy, it makes Hawkeye’s Nativeness disposable, as Chingachgook’s final

speech demonstrates, and his hybridity and Native- ness part of his erotic attraction. Cora is clearly

attracted to Hawkeye because of his difference: his world ‘‘is more deeply stirring to my blood than any

imagery possibly could be.’’ But, I would suggest that she is drawn to his hybridity (part white, part Native) rather thantohimsolelyasNative.Mannensures this

by reducing her conversations and contact with Uncas and Chingachgook to a minimum. In fact,

she rarely speaks to any of the Native characters— Magua, Uncas, or Chingachgook—which suggests

that her interest is not in Native American men, per se, but in Hawkeye’s representation of both whiteness

and Nativeness. The emphasis here is on the attrac- tion of certain qualities of the Other—in this case, his

mystery as the Native man, his sexuality and power illustrated by his often bare chest and running skills, and his dark and passionate soul which matches

Cora’s. Cora, like many Anglos throughout U.S. history, is attracted to the Noble Savage character-

istics thatHawkeyerepresents,butwhethershewould take on the full responsibility of Nativeness—marry-

ing into a Native community, accepting the encroach- ing Anglo culture and its threat of genocide, and the

lifestyle of a Native American woman—is question- able.

43 In choosing Hawkeye, as opposed to Uncas or

Magua, she underscores the tendency for superficial

attraction to the exotic within the safety of whiteness. Through their relationship, Hawkeye becomes

the symbolic exotic Other who is more appealing than the ‘‘real’’ Indian (to white audiences) because of his

partial link to the familiar white culture. For all Mann’s equality in presenting Native Americans, this

maneuver undermines the positive. He, like Seitz, consciously supplants Uncas and Chingachgook and

their situation as part of a vanishing people with Hawkeye who chooses Cora (Seitz’s Alice) and her whiteness over his Indian family. In addition,

Hawkeye becomes the symbolic Uncas of the

146 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

historical Cora-Uncas relationship, suggesting that

the erotic story of the mixed-blood relationship can exist within a surrogate mixed-blood Hawkeye as

long as he is paired with Cora. This is concisely presented cinemagraphically in the last scene where

Chingachgook visually and verbally separates from his adopted son. As described earlier, a long panning

shot right across a vast valley comes to rest on Chingachgook spreading cornmeal into the wind. He

is joined by Hawkeye who participates in the blessing ceremony for Uncas, while Cora stands off to one side. After Chingachkook releases Hawkeye, Cora

walks into the frame, faces Hawkeye and embraces him in a long close-up shot. In so doing, she halts the

ceremony and positions herself with Hawkeye as central to the frame, forcing Chingachgook to the

periphery. The scene ends with a medium close-up shotframingall three inprofile:Chingachgookclosest

to the viewer, Hawkeye, and Cora almost invisible to the far right—a representation of the pre-colonial orderofthings.Thecameraquicklypansonehundred

andeightydegreesreframingthethree inprofile,Cora closest to the camera with Hawkeye at her side and

Chingachgook farthest right and almost excluded from view—a representation of the new colonial

order. Mann then cuts to a long shot of the three standing with their backs to the camera, gazing out

across the wilderness. Hawkeye and Cora are posi- tioned together as a couple and Chingachgook stands

off alone to one side. The framing of these scenes combined with Chingachgook’s declaration of him- self as the last of the Mohicans, severs his connection

to his white son, in effect giving Hawkeye permission to return to whiteness. Hawkeye is no longer one

of three vanishing men. But, he is still Cooper’s ‘‘Man-who-knows-Indians’’ and possesses qualities

of both the frontier Western hero and of Nativeness. He is the metaphorical mixed-blood whose union

with Cora represents the new future that, unlike Chingachgook, will not fade into history.

Hawkeye and Cora’s union represents a future

America built on the image of the Native American but through the hereditary blood of Anglo-heroes, a

fundamental part of the Myth of the Frontier, the Myth of the West and Manifest Destiny,

44 and

American nation-building. The myth of the frontier subscribes to the ideology that progress is associated

with territorial expansion. 45 According to Richard

Slotkin, this

is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a

body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and

polemics produced over a period of three centuries.

According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of

the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the

Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been

the means to our achievement of a national identity, a

democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a

phenomenally dynamic and ‘‘progressive’’ civilization. 46

The American frontier myth and the concept of progress are based on unavoidable violence to those

who stand in the way—Native Americans most specifically. The frontier, like Pratt’s contact zone, is

aplace of violence and conflictwhere the clashingand intermixing of peoples results in the subordination of one group by another. It is also, as Fredrick Jackson

Turner’s1893frontier thesismadeclear,aneconomic, political, and psychological demarcation between the

East andthe West, civilization andsavagery.Turner’s thesis clarifies that the frontier represents free land

and with it economic freedom built on the continual struggle of conquering the land and its inhabitants.

The resulting, distinctly American, sense of national- ism or ‘‘American character’’ is based on democracy,

liberalism, and individualism. This nationalism and the frontier character gain symbolic currency under the assumptions of racism, democracy, and Manifest

Destiny. The myth of the frontier as it relates to progress then is linked to this particular form of

violent action. The Indian, as a part of the symbolic language of the myth, takes on the role of representa-

tive surrogate for ideological and political struggles facing the American populace.

As Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation illustrates, there is a pattern of reciprocal influence in which politics shape the concerns and imagery of movies, and

movies in turn question or promote current political and social attitudes. The early 1990s witnessed the

ending of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet system, the drawing to a close of the conservative Republican

presidential reign, and the increase in American imperial behavior overseas in places such as Panama

and Iraq. Also in the early nineties, Native Americans in both North and South America began to mobilize

against theQuincentenarycelebrations inEuropeand theAmericas.

47 Multiplevoiceswereheardduringthe

Quincentenary both questioning and defending the

colonial past. For Ward Churchill, the celebration of ‘‘Columbus and the European conquest of the

Western Hemisphere he set off is greatly analogous to celebrating the glories of nazism and Heinrich

Himmler.’’ 48

The Traditional Circle of American Indian Elders and Youth promoted it as a time for

the United Nations to recognize the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

49 Many

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 147

Italian-Americans saw 1992 as a celebration of their

historical roots, innovations, and heritage. 50

Considering the turmoil of the early 1990s, which

culminated in an intense questioning on the part of many Americans of their national past and their

imperial and neocolonial present, Mann’s film must be read as reflecting social and political concerns of

the time. The regeneration of America’s mythic frontier and its Noble/Vicious Savage in The Last of

the Mohicans during the Quincentenary debates then is hardly surprising. Howard Zinn explains that internally in the United States

[a] citizenry disillusioned with politics and with what

pretended to be intelligent discussions of politics turned

its attention (or had its attention turned) to entertainment,

togossip, totenthousandschemesforself-help.Thoseat its

margins became violent, finding scapegoats within one’s

group (as with poor-black on poor-black violence), or

against other races, immigrants, demonized foreigners,

welfare mothers, minor criminals (standing in for untouch-

able major criminals). 51

Arguably, Mann’s Native American characters, whose savagery, difference, and armed resistance

may be read as taking on the role of symbolic scapegoats for mainstream fears of rising illegal immigration problems, joblessness, and loss of

political, social, and economic positioning in Amer- ican hierarchy. They, unarguably, also reflect the very

real positioning of Native American cultures as internal Third World nations within the United

States. In relation to this, their image in the film as a group that must be ordered and silenced—forced into

assimilation—is readable as a reaction to the rising activism of Native Americans since the 1960s. I suggest this, not to isolate Mann, but to call attention

to a trend in media to portray and treat the Third World (both internal and external) as ‘‘material

for some mental human interest of melodramatic entertainment.’’

52 Thus, the reality of reissuing

Cooper’s story in 1992 was that it could not possibly, no matter how revised, have been anything but a

neocolonial narrative. The historical memory of the story, its legacy in film and media, the point-of-view

andcinematographyofthefilm,andmythic themesof domination and subordination through vanishing make any other reading impossible.

What the film’s reincarnation does illuminate is, as Spurr points out, an alarming trend evident in

contemporary media of

distantiation, transformation, privilege, displacement, con-

sumption, and alienation. Taken together, these terms

imply a certain possession of social reality which holds it at

arm’s length and makes it into the object of beauty, horror,

pleasure, and pity. When this act of possession becomes a

mode of representation by which a powerful culture takes

possession of a less powerful one, it can be understood

quite literally as colonization. In this sense, aestheticization

doesnotsomuchfalsifyas it takesholdofandcommodifies

reality, securing it for the expansion of the observer’s

sensibility. 53

Mann’s film reduces a poignant and violent

moment in American history to a romantic revitaliza- tion of the birth of America and the all-American hero whose emergence is through and over the bodies

of dying Native Americans. The insensitivity to the effect this might have on Native American viewers is

balanced by the equally disturbing realization that Mann is objectifying and commodifing our colonial

past in a celebratory manner. In so doing, Mann, like other Hollywood

producers before him, revives the romantic rhetoric of expansionism, imperialism, and racial homogene-

ity that informs our greatest national myths. His revitalization of the American frontier and the frontier hero whose expansionist dreams and actions

are promoted by Manifest Destiny trivializes the very real concerns and problems voiced by Native

Americans today. His film becomes, especially in 1992, as Jaimes suggests about literature, ‘‘an

insidious political force, disinforming people who might otherwise develop a clearer understanding of

the struggles for survival faced by an indigenous population.’’

54 This is not to suggest that Mann is

himself racist or intended his film to have this effect,

but in context of what was happening in 1992 and in context of the film’s narrative myths, one cannot

avoid the neocolonial implications. Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans offers a lens

through which to understand the depth to which racism and colonialism are embedded in our culture.

This example from popular culture illustrates that even those attempting to deconstruct America’s

foundational myths end up reconstructing or validat- ingthem. The insidiousness ofcolonialism andracism ensures its inscription into our language, our cultural

and political structures, and our myths. As the work of Albert Memmi, Franz Fanon, and Robert K.

Thomas continually remind us, the legacy of coloni- alism is the interpolation of both the colonized and

colonizing subject into the continual validation of the system.

55 Thus, while Michael Mann may very well

have intended a film that celebrated a multicultural American heritage, the results are a neocolonial

148 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

sanctioning of white American supremacy that the

viewer, including the Native American viewer, participates in reinforcing.

A special thank you to Natanya Sell for her editing skills.

Notes

1 Stephen J. Summerhill and John Alexander Williams,

Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and

Mythmaking during the Quincentenary (Gainseville: UP of

Florida, 2000): 114. 2 K. R. Dark and A. L. Harris, The New World and the

New World Order: U.S. Relative Decline, Domestic Instability

in the Americas and the End of the Cold War (Houndmills,

Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillian P; New York: St.

Martin’s P, 1996): 58. 3 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

1492-Present. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995):

600. 4 Summerhill and Williams, Sinking Columbus, 119. 5 Multiculturalism is a problematic term that has come to

mean different things to different groups of people. It is

overtly political and is often used to commodify and pay

token tribute to the growing demand by minority groups in

the United States for greater recognition of the multiple

histories, cultures, languages, and viewpoints that make up

this country. In academia, the term has, unfortunately, often

come to represent a trend towards a superficial inclusion of

history, literature, music, and language from ‘‘other’’

cultural groups than the dominant mainstream. See Clara

Martı́nez’s quote in note32. For acomprehensive look at the

issues that fall under the rubric of multiculturalism see David

Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader

(Cambridge, MA and Oxford, England: Blackwell Publish-

ers Ltd., 1995). 6 According to Appleford,

audiences increasingly desire fictional films to ‘feel like knowledge’

and thus appear to be somehow more realistic than their counter-

parts, film companies and publicity departments make authenticity

a vague but emphatic selling point for their films. (Robert

Appleford, ‘‘Coming out from behind the Rocks: Constructs of

the Indian in Recent U.S. and Canadian Cinema,’’ American Indian

Culture and Research Journal 19.1 [1995] 98).

This clearly seems the case with Mann’s film, which is

based on a fictional tale by James Fenimore Cooper and also

loosely references the French and Indian Wars. In an

interview, Mann states that he

wanted to have the scale of a geopolitical conflict—the ethnic and

religious conflicts, the struggle of white imperialism on a grassroots

level...and the struggle between the Euroamerican and European

powers and the American Indian population. (Gavin Smith,

‘‘Interview with Michael Mann,’’ Sight and Sound 2.7 [Nov. 1992]:

10)

Expanding on this authenticity, his 400 foot replica of Fort

Henry (Gary Edgerton, ‘‘ ‘A Breed Apart’: Hollywood,

Racial Stereotyping, and the Promise of Revisionism in The

Last of the Mohicans,’’ Journal of American Culture 17.2

[Summer 1994]: 7), the accuracy of colonial and tribal dress,

weaponry, and language convey the idea that the film is

based on reality not on fiction. 7 Neocolonialism, as an extension of colonialism, is the

controlling of underdeveloped nations’ social, political, and

economic systems through the industrial and financial

capital of an external and more powerful nation. In other

words, neocolonialism is based on outside economic

manipulations which also affect the internal class, political,

and social constructions of the dominated country (The

Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd ed. [Cambridge, MA

andOxford, England:BlackwellPublishers Ltd.,1994],415).

The United States is a dominant nation which, in addition to

its external global neocolonial activity, continues to have a

complicated colonial/neocolonial relationship internally

with its indigenous tribal populations. It seems to me that

if one looks closely at the trends of the Federal Government

in relation to Native American tribes over the last thirty

years, one sees that ‘‘Self-Determination and Self-Govern-

ance’’ are moves away from outright paternal/colonial rule

and towards an internal neocolonial approach to govern-

ance. While the Federal Government gives more autonomy

to tribes and recognizes greater levels of sovereignty for

Native American people, it continues to control their

economic, political, and cultural resources from a position

slightly removed. As does the powerful neocolonial State

with underdeveloped nations, the United States has a

controlling economic and political interest in the nations

that reside within its borders. 8 These informative texts preceded the credits and the

title of the film in such a way as to be removed from the

viewer’s mind by the time the actual film images begin.

Without this information, the viewer is situated within the

film as the ‘‘sole surveyor’’ for the first minute or so of the

entire entry scene. 9 I utilize the term gaze as suggested by Mary Louise

Pratt and David Spurr to isolate the particular imperial and

colonial action of surveying a land or territory under

conquest. As both Spurr and Pratt’s work explain, the

colonizer’s eye, its gaze and ‘‘the commanding view [make]

possible an understanding of the non-Western world as an

object of study, an area for development, a field of action’’

(Spurr 25). According to Pratt, ‘‘[t]he landscape is written as

uninhabited, unpossessed, unhistoricized, unoccupied’’ (51)

in order to justify the Imperialist’s penetration of the land

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 149

(an action reminiscent of rape) and his claiming of its

fertile and abundant resources, both natural and human.

Pratt’s work concentrates on how the classifying systems

utilized by the explorers, scientists, historical travel writers,

and the bourgeoisie travelers informed one another to

create a system of writing that ordered the unknown worlds

for the European public. Likewise, Spurr analyzes how

colonial discourse found in travel writing, journalism, and

governmental writing all utilized common basic rhetorical

features. Both theorists suggest that these modes of

identification and recording are ingrained in colonial

language and colonial ideology to the point that they still

exist today. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel

Writing and Transculturation (London and New York:

Routledge, 1992) and David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire:

Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and

Imperial Administration (Durham and London: Duke UP,

1996). 10 I refer the reader to Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’

work which traces how American identity is formed against

an exotic ‘‘Other’’ drawn from images of Third World

peoples as they are presented in cultural productions such as

National Geographic. The seemingly non-political agendasof

the magazine actually work to reinforce narratives of

cultural supremacy where those depicted are ‘‘either cut

off from the flow of world events or involved in a singular

story of progress from tradition to modernity’’ (13). See

Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National

Geographic (Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P,

1993). 11 The myth of America as an Edenic garden is deeply

rooted in Western culture extending back to the colonial

period. In this construct the American continent is con-

structed as an American Eden waiting to be populated by the

offspring of the American Adam and Eve. The American

Adam incorporates the qualities of Hawkeye—a truly all-

American man whose connection to Nature and individual-

ism is a rejection of European corruption. This mythic

garden scenario sets the stage for American nationalism and

expansionism. See Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her:

Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860

(Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina P, 1984)

and Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in

American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: The U of North

Carolina P, 1975), and Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of

the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day,

1968). 12 Spurr 25.

13 Ibid. 51.

14 Gary Edgerton, ‘‘ ‘A Breed Apart’: Hollywood, Racial

Stereotyping, and the Promise of Revisionism in The Last of

the Mohicans,’’ Journal of American Culture 17.2 (Summer

1994): 9.

15 I utilize the term panoptic voyeurism in a way that

melds Pratt’s colonial gaze with Foucault’s panopticon. It

seems to me that the way in which Mann situates the viewer

in these first scenes is as a colonialist perpetrator of

surveillance, and as an informed and latent participatory

colonial agent. Because we are positioned as the eyes of

the colonial power structure, the act of surveillance

does become one of authority and power over a confined

and contained population—a population that knows we are

watching as Hawkeye’s catching us in his gun-sight

suggests. 16 Edgerton, A Breed Apart, 8-9.

17 Ibid. 9.

18 Such a racializing practice is by no means new to The

Last of the Mohicans story. The original story positioned

three distinct races on American soil—White, Native

American, and Black—who intermix socially and sexually

(represented initially through Cora’s mixed-blood heritage

[Mulatta], and later through her possible union with Uncas),

but who are confined to specific social and cultural

boundaries because of their skin color. Further, Cooper’s

narrativeprivileges thewhiteraceoverallothersbutsuggests

that Native Americans are somehow closer to the purity

inherent in whiteness than Africans because of their noble

character. In many of the Hollywood renditions of Cooper’s

story, the African blood of Cora is extinguished as a

narrative element and the racial hierarchy is reduced to its

Native American and Anglo components. For example,

Tourneur and Brown’s 1920 silent film version hints at

Cora’s mixed-blood heritage through her dark-hair and her

brooding nature while Seitz’s 1936 remake completely erases

Cora’s ‘‘darkness’’ by recasting her as a very white-skinned

blond. Hawkeye also is lightened in this version. In the 1920

film he (like Cooper’s Natty Bumpo) is an older, dark-haired

manwhosereticencetowardswhiteculture isportrayedinhis

minimal interplay in the story and with the other white

characters. By 1936 Hawkeye is a young, light-haired and

carefree woodsman who draws the viewer and the other

characters to him, making him the focal point of the film.

Mann’s version borrows much from Seitz—Hawkeye’s

youth and centralization as a main character—but moves

back towards Cooper’s darker-haired Hawkeye and Cora.

SeeJamesFenimoreCooper, The Last of the Mohicans,1826,

Intro. Richard Slotkin (New York: Penguin, 1986); The Last

of the Mohicans, Dir. Maurice Tourneur and Clarence

Brown, Perf. Harry Lorraine, Theodore Lerch, Albert

Roscoe, Wallace Beere (Associated Producers, 1920); and

The Last of the Mohicans, Dir. George Seitz, Perf. Randolph

Scott, Phillip Reed, Bruce Cabot, Robert Barrat (United

Artists, 1936). 19 Pratt uses contact zone in two important ways. In her

work it ‘‘is often synonymous with ‘colonial frontier’...

grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the

150 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe)’’ (6-7). But

contact zone is also

anattemptto invokethespatialandtemporalcopresenceofsubjects

previously separated by geographic and historic disjunctures, and

whose trajectories now intersect. (6)

20 Ibid. 4.

21 Pratt concentrates on how the classifying systems

utilized by the explorers, scientists, historical travel writers,

and the bourgeoisie travelers informed one another to

create a system of writing that ordered the unknown worlds

for the European public. Likewise, Spurr analyzes how

colonial discourse found in travel writing, journalism, and

governmental writing all utilized common basic rhetorical

features. Both theorists suggest that these modes of

identification and recording are ingrained in colonial

language and colonial ideology to the point that they still

exist today. 22 I think that Bonnie Duran sums up the controversy

that many Native Americans find themselves in daily in

reference to being signified as Indian

[T]he struggle is over the sign ‘‘Indian’’ as a signifier of ethnicity,

ancestry, cultural tradition, geography, and historical experience

versus a stage in a social evolutionary ladder, the embodiment of a

genetic wholism or degeneracy, a psychological archetype or a

shadow projection of an entire continent. This overdetermined and

overloaded sign was, and is, always more or less than real tribal

people could ever hope or dread to be. Within American popular

and elite culture, Indianness is more than an ethnic assignment (like

being Italian or Irish). To be a real ‘‘Indian,’’ one is compelled to fit

one of the binary oppositions or cease to be.

See Bonnie Duran, ‘‘Indigenous Versus Colonial Discourse:

Alcohol and American Indian Identity,’’ Dressing in Feath-

ers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular

Culture, Ed. S. Elizabeth Bird (Boulder, CO: Westview P,

1996), 111-12. 23 I will discuss this further later in the article, however, I

take my cues from authors Leslie Fiedler, Gretchen Bataille

and Charles Silet, and Robert Berkhofer who discuss in their

respective works how the image of the Native American has

become an ideological construct to represent Americanness.

Refer to Gretchen Bataille and Charles Silet, The Pretend

Indian: Images of Native Americans in the Movies (Ames:

Iowa State UP, 1980), Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s

Indian: Images of the American Indian From Columbus to the

Present (New York: Random House, 1979), and Leslie

Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York:

Stein and Day, 1968). 24 Daniel Bernardi, Introduction in the Birth of White-

ness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, Ed. Daniel

Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996), 5.

25 In ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ Mulvey

argues that the image of woman is only a creation for men’s

viewing pleasure.

The image of woman as spectacle and fetish sets in motion another

chain of metonymies, linking together various sites in which

femininity is produced in advanced capitalist society: woman as

consumed and woman as consumer of commodities, women

exchanged in image and women transforming themselves into

image through commodity consumption. (xii)

Cinema allows for the visually violating scopophilic,

voyeuristic, and sadistic desires of men. See Laura Mulvey,

‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ Visual and Other

Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP,

1989), 14-28. 26 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semio-

tics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 8. 27 Mary Ann Doane, ‘‘Dark Continents: Epistemologies

of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and

the Cinema,’’ Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory,

Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991),

217. 28 Ibid. 216.

29 Ibid. 9.

30 I use the term ‘‘double’’ in reference to the psycholo-

gical relationship often shared between two characters: the

good one and the bad one. Generally, one must kill the other

in order to survive, but in the process one takes on the

characteristics of the other. 31 The remarkable legacy of some of this ‘‘language’’ is

shocking: the Noble/Ignoble Savage, the mixed-race lover’s

fall from a cliff, the violent massacre scenes outside

Ft. Henry, and the Noble Savage’s fetishized body. Cooper’s

originalnarrative incorporatesmostof these,whichmaybea

justification for Hollywood and Mann’s retention of them.

However, the Noble/Vicious glyph remains a reductive

signifier of the Native American in Hollywood’s discourse

of racism. 32 IwouldliketothankClaraMartı́nezforpointingouta

similarly disturbing trend in elementary education. Accord-

ing to Martı́nez, there is a

phenomenon in elementary education, whereby the curriculum is

called multicultural even if it does not offer disparate points of view

from ‘‘other’’ cultural members, and even when the literature,

history, and music of the culture are presented superficially and

infrequently.

33 I would like to thank Tom Holm, Professor of Native

American Studies, University of Arizona, and Sam Robert-

son, Lakota Sioux, for their information on some of the

languages spoken in the film. According to Tom Holm,

Magua—played by Cherokee actor Wes Studi—actually

speaks Cherokee throughout the film rather than Huron.

Celebrating with The Last of the Mohicans 151

Sam Robertson confirmed that Chingachkook—Sioux actor

Russel Means—speaks Lakota rather than Munsee Dela-

ware. It is unknown to me what other Native languages

might be in use by the Native actors in the film. 34 One of the main concerns for Native Americans today

is languageretention. Many elders feel that it is throughtheir

language that traditions, world views, histories, and ways of

being are expressed; therefore, the loss of language is the loss

of one’s identity as a group, and a killing off of Native

Americans as unique peoples. 35 Edgerton, 13.

36 Ibid., 13.

37 Again, thank you to Tom Holm for this important

insight. 38 I would argue that The Last of the Mohicans is a

Western set on one of our country’s earliest frontiers, and

that Hawkeye is the prototype for the emerging Western

hero. I agree with John Harkness’s conclusion that ‘‘without

Cooper, there is no Shane, no The Virginian, no My Darling

Clementine, no The Searchers, no Unforgiven’’ (John Hark-

ness, ‘‘White Noise,’’ Sight and Sound 2.7 [Nov. 1992]: 15);

but I would also extrapolate and add that the emergence of

Hawkeye as the young hybrid frontiersman is a visual link to

the filmic youth and star qualities of Alan Ladd’s Shane, the

Lone Ranger, and a young John Wayne’s Ringo Kid.

Hawkeye’s union with Cora also reflects the settling theme

prominent in such Westerns as Hell’s Hinges, Stagecoach,

Winchester 73, and My Darling Clementine. A few of the

articles in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye’s collection, The

Book of Western, Ed., Cameron, Ian and Douglas Pye (New

York: Continuum, 1996), also refer to Cooper’s Leather-

stocking series and the The Last of the Mohicans, making

similar historical connections between Hawkeye and the

Western Hero. See for example Pye’s ‘‘Introduction,’’

‘‘Genre and History: Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot

Liberty Valence,’’ and ‘‘Double Vision: Miscegenation and

Point of View in The Searchers,’’ and Richard Maltby’s

‘‘A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians’’ in

The Book of Westerns. 39 As didGeorge Seitz in his1936version, Mannrewrites

Cooper’s tale and the preceding films by situating a light-

haired Alice with Uncas and a dark, sensual Cora with

Hawkeye.Mann’sAlice isavisual reminderof the1936Cora

and she incorporates some personality traits from Tourneur

and Brown’s 1920 Alice and Cooper’s Alice. Mann’s

redefinition of Alice de-emphasizes the racializing narrative

of purity and whiteness created in the earlier films but retains

Alice’s characteristics of an innocent and wounded child.

Mann’s Cora, on the other hand, has the more somber

personality of the 1920 Cora, the spunk and vitality of the

1936 Alice, and the dark hair of both; but, like the Alice of

the 1936 film, there are no visual references connecting her to

‘‘tainted blood.’’

40 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘‘Forgetting Genocide: Or, The

Last of The Last of the Mohicans,’’ Cultural Studies 12.1

(1998): 24-25. 41 See Richard Slotkin, Introduction to The Last of the

Mohicans, 1826, James Fenimore Cooper (New York:

Penguin, 1986), xxiv. 42 Brantlinger 24.

43 It should be noted that Mann does not portray the

lifestyle of Native women in a positive light. They are shown

occasionally at British outposts carrying baskets and work-

ing, and in the Delaware camp they are portrayed as

positioned behind Native men. It would seem unlikely that

the outgoing and self-sufficient Cora would allow herself to

become such a woman. It is more likely that she and

Hawkeye would take on the lifestyle illustrated by the dead

Camerons—as a pioneer family. 44 Manifest Destiny isa termperhaps firstutilized in1846

by William Gilpin, the first territorial govenor of Colorado,

whodeclaredthat ‘‘theuntransacteddestinyof theAmerican

people is to subdue the continent’’ (Stephen Daniels,

‘‘Frances Palmer and the Incorporation of the Continent,’’

Fields of Vision [Cambridge: Polity, 1993], 180). However,

the ideological underpinnings of Manifest Destiny were

deeply ingrained in the initial colonization of the East Coast. 45 Slotkin 10.

46 Ibid. 10.

47 Zinn 582-613.

48 Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race:

Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of the American

Indians, Ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Monroe, ME: Common

Courage P, 1992), 81. 49 Alexander Ewen, ed, Voices of Indigenous Peoples:

Native People Address the United Nations, With the United

Nations Draft Declaration of Indigenous Peoples Rights

(Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1994), 21. 50 See Summerhill and Williams.

51 Zinn 552.

52 Spurr 54.

53 Ibid. 59.

54 Annette Jaimes, ‘‘Introduction’’ in Churchill, Ward,

Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the

Colonization of the American Indians, Ed. M. Annette Jaimes

(Monroe, ME: Common Courage P, 1992), 1. 55 Memmi, Thomas, and Fanon all discuss the ramifica-

tions of colonialism on the colonized subject. Thomas in

particular focuses on how colonialism in the United States

has affected Native Americans, specifically, how the process

has been internalized by Native Americans, resulting in a

vicious circle of internal and external racism that is very

difficult to escape. For more information see Albert Memmi,

The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon P, 1965,

1991), Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Trans.

Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove P, 1967), and

152 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures

Robert K. Thomas, ‘‘Colonialism: Domestic and Foreign.’’

New University Thought IV.4.

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M. Elise Marubbio is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in the

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154 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures