TV

'We Shall Remain' reclaims native past

PBS examines the honor, complexity and the broken hearts of American Indians over the span of 350 years in a different kind of 'Roots' story.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, April 10, 2009

Tecumseh lived here, on American lands, born in the wilds of Ohio in 1768. The great Shawnee devoted his life to the welfare of his people, to freedom and principle and honor, to the establishment of a peaceful confederacy of native tribes — a United Indian States of America — below the Great Lakes. He dared to stand tall before immigrant Americans who sought to displace his people in the name of progress. And in the end, Tecumseh was killed for it, by the U.S. military, in the War of 1812.

Tecumseh lived here. So did the Arapaho, the Chippewa, the Navajo, the Narragansett, the Sioux. The Apache and the Cherokee lived here. The Wampanoags lived here. They dreamed and thrived and died on their native land, these American lands — victims of U.S. policy bent on physical and cultural extermination. Miraculously, traces of their cultures survive yet.

"We Shall Remain" aspires to tell their story. This five-part television documentary, which debuts 8 p.m. Monday on PBS' "American Experience," focuses on native history in the context of American history, from the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620 through the American Indian Movement and the siege at Wounded Knee in 1973.

Tecumseh gets an entire episode in Week Two. The title of the series — "We Shall Remain" — is his words, his cry, his challenge in the 21st century.

"Native history has always been put on one side of American history," says Sharon Grimberg, executive producer of "We Shall Remain." "I think all of us tend to see America as a nation of immigrants. We understand that trajectory, that story, pretty well. But what that ignores is that there were millions of people here already."

Grimberg and her crew of directors have tried to document — sometimes in traditional documentary tones, sometimes employing re-enactment, consistently punctuated with soaring cinematography — an American story of interaction. As in: What happens when the immigrant American story bumps against the Native American story?

"We came to understand, in making the series, that Native Americans have been painted in two-dimensional tones, either one extreme or the other. They're either the hapless, pathetic victims or ferocious, savage warriors," says Grimberg. "So what we wanted to do was portray a series about real people who faced devastating circumstances who did the best they could to resist and survive."

A quilt of stories

"We Shall Remain" does not set out to be comprehensive, encyclopedic. The producers sensed there was too much story, stretching over too much time, to tell in a single documentary. Instead, the series presents five stories — each a 90-minute segment — broadcasting in chronological sequence, each with a distinctive geographic flavor.

The five segments: the Thanksgiving story, set in New England; Tecumseh, anchored around the Great Lakes; the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which opens in 1830s Georgia; Geronimo, set in the Arizona desert of the late 19th century; and the South Dakota "Wounded Knee" uprising of 1973. Astute viewers will notice that "land" is a major character in all five episodes.

The series employed seven directors, including Cheyenne-Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre ("Smoke Signals"), Emmy-winning documentarians Ric Burns and Stanley Nelson. Native directors collaborate with non- native directors in four of the five segments.

From the beginning, Grimberg and co-producer Mark Samuels recognized the challenge of establishing in the series a creative and aesthetic unity.

"We had hundreds and hundreds of hours of film footage from Wounded Knee," recalls Grimberg. "Now, set that against the first episode, where there isn't even a painting of the Thanksgiving story. There's nothing! We realized we couldn't tell the stories in the same way."

In the end, the producers decided to present the series as five select panels taken from a quilt of a thousand panels — a format that, despite its discordant moments, despite the different colors used in each episode, reflects the truth of history. There never was a singular Indian nation but a patchwork of separate tribes, with separate languages, separate customs.

A whisper of Shakespeare

"We Shall Remain" is fascinated with people — and how the central characters in each episode wrestle with moral choices. There's clearly a Shakespearean whisper in this western wind. The directors tell complex, important stories, rich with the elements of family and fate.

Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag tribe, befriends the starving Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony in 1621 — not strictly in the name of humanity, but because he hopes an alliance with Anglos might protect him from warring tribes to the east. He has no idea of the horrific consequence of that gamble.

Major Ridge, a leader of the Cherokee Nation in the 1830s, wrestles with a different, wrenching question: Might it actually be humane to betray his own people — to sell their homeland to the antagonistic U.S. government without Cherokee approval — in the gamble that the sale might save them from an even greater heartache, an even greater pain?

The impulsive Chiricahua Apache warrior Geronimo is ruled by the spirit of vengeance. But who among us would pass judgment on him? Mexicans massacred his mother, his children, his wife; the U.S. military betrayed and humiliated him at every turn. Yet Geronimo's thirst for retribution, his quest to reclaim his people's way of life, to save his own life, consistently places at risk his tribe's very survival. Where to draw the line?

Tecumseh

"I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., 20 miles from a town called Tecumseh — and I had no idea why it was called Tecumseh," says Ric Burns, co-director with Eyre of the "Tecumseh" segment, the linchpin of the series. "I never once, growing up, thought about the word 'Indian' in the state name 'Indiana.' I'm ashamed to admit it. Yet here's this history that has been as clear-cut east of the Mississippi as the old-growth trees were.

"We may hear the names, but it's as if they were sawed off at earth level. We don't think about it. Yet if you were to ask yourself, 'Who is upholding the principles of the Constitution, or the shining philosophical instincts enshrined in the early part of the 19th century?' you would have to say not one American of this time was greater than Tecumseh.

"Here was a guy who believed in love of country, who believed in patriotism, who believed in the right of self-determination and the light of freedom. As Thomas Jefferson once said, every now and then, the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots. Tecumseh, too, understood that was the case. \u2026

"Tecumseh was a hemispheric talent. ... He was a diplomat, ... an athlete. ... He was quadrilingual. ... He knew when to fight, and when not to fight. ... He knew being an American, essentially, was about hope and freedom. And he was going to keep that alive, even if he died. I tell you, it makes an Indian out of me! I'll swap you one Tecumseh for one Thomas Jefferson any day."

The Austin connection

University of Texas professor Loriene Roy, past president of the American Library Association, worked as a consultant on "We Shall Remain." Roy's primary focus was the series' outreach campaign: community conversations, Web connections, a partnership program on National Public Radio and a film workshop devoted to Native Americans called ReelNative.

She also played a small role in selected the framing image of the series: A photograph, taken at an Indian pow-wow in 1992, of a solitary teepee on a grassy plain, an American flag flying from one of the support poles. Significantly: Roy is Anishinabe, enrolled on the White Earth Reservation, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

"The original graphic image for the series was kind of a petroglyphic hand, a hand-print you'd associate with cultures of the Southwest," recalls Roy, who attended a producers meeting with Paul Chaat Smith in July 2007. "We looked at each other and I said, you know, that's real safe. To me, it says, 'We were there.' But if you're saying, 'We Shall Remain,' why not take a risk?

"We started talking about Lee Marmon's photography, which often works with the idea of a twist, that works with the idea that native people aren't always going to be who you expect us to be. We like humor. A little black humor. Do something that's unexpected."

What was lost

"While making a film on Native American history 15 years ago, I asked Tom McGuane, the novelist, what was lost when we defeated and pushed aside the Indians of the Plains," recalls Ric Burns. "McGuane didn't skip a beat. He said, 'I believe we permanently lost contact of the possibilities of being in touch with the numinousness of an ancient civilization.'

"The Chinese and the Egyptians have been here for thousands of years, and they think of themselves as a people. If we had found a way to organically negotiate our differences ... if we had just ignored the difference between Native and non-Native Americans, and didn't see this bright line ... think about it! This was, arguably, the last chance we had to have that integrated, complex, multicultural relationship, Native and non-Native Americans alike. We pride ourselves on being a multicultural nation. And we so foreclosed on our original opportunity."

The American story

"We Shall Remain" is hard history, tough to watch. For centuries, the United States offered Indians an impossible choice: Stand true to your land and people in the face of slaughter — or submit and assimilate to the extent that your very culture is slaughtered.

Discerning viewers will notice American themes, American tendencies of today's current-events landscape consistently popping in the series. There is the fundamentalist conviction that it's God's will to expand empire. There is a president (Andrew Jackson) who ignores a Supreme Court ruling championing human rights. There is a cultural tendency of Americans to classify those of different races, different religions, different languages as savage or inferior or misguided.

"I think it's a story for today, one we should be open to hearing and understanding," says Grimberg. "We've gone through a kind of tumultuous change in direction in Washington, a huge hinge direction in terms of national policy and international policy that should make us open to looking back at the past.

"I also think, in some ways, everything we've experienced in the past 100 years has led Americans to believe inviolable truths about Americans' place in the world and financial security and global geopolitics. And I think all that's in question. In some sense, that's what our native people found themselves when Europeans came here. Everything they took for granted in their life, a whole way of living, was suddenly under question."

Tecumseh lived here

"The great irony of history, I think, is going to be that we will all become Native Americans, increasingly, as time goes on," says Burns. "We will all come to understand, as we already are in so many ways, that the environment is something we need to inhabit cyclically, so that it can replenish itself. We can't just permanently exploit the resources and assume they're inexhaustible.

"And in respect to the planet's human resources: The native ideals of mutuality, reciprocity, respect are the lifeblood of true civic reality. Not belligerence. Not war-making. It's mutuality that holds us together."

'American Experience: We Shall Remain'

8 p.m. Mondays through May 11, KLRU

pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/

We Shall Remain': A public conversation with Loriene Roy

What: A discussion with University of Texas professor and series consultant Roy about what was covered in the episode, what wasn't and what participants want to learn more about.

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Austin Public Library, Hampton Branch at Oak Hill, 5125 Convict Hill Road

Information: 892-6680