The Vikings were brutal too
I just watched this movie for the first time on TCM. Robert Osborn discussed the film with a Native American film critic, who criticized the movie for presenting Native Americans as brutal and making people fear them.
They say that an oppressed people is finally able to lift its collective head when it is able to laugh at itself and find humor in the eccentricities of its culture – the Jews have always been good at this, especially Fran Drescher in “The Nanny”, and African Americans in shows such as “Everybody Hates Chris”, the Mexicans with George Lopez in the lead, and even the Arabs in the Canadian sitcom, “Little Mosque on the Prairie”! But the Native Americans are still too haunted by the violence of their past to have a sense of perspective and humor about themselves.
It is unrealistic for today’s Native Americans to be in denial about the brutality of Indians 200 years ago. Indians WERE brutal in war. Sure, around the house they were like everybody else – loved their kids, kicked their women, laughed and joked. But in war, they DID commit horrible atrocities, not only toward whites but toward other tribes. And “Drums Along the Mohawk” is a movie about Indians at war, not at peace. So why would a Native American film expert criticize this movie for depicting Indian brutality? It happened. That would be like Norwegians being in denial about the Vikings raiding the coast of England for a couple of hundred years. It doesn’t mean that today’s Norwegians rape and pillage. If anyone should be bitter, it should be the Scots toward the English, who “decimated” the Scottish Highlands (killed 9 out of every 10 men and boys), then kicked the remaining Scottish families out of the Highlands during the Highland Clearances, and destroyed the Highland ecology by turning English sheep loose to lay waste the land.
Even the Scots have moved on.
"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
- Julius Caesar, act 2 sc 1