Television worth watching

The New York Times has a review by Ginia Bellafante of the new PBS series, We Shall Remain, airing on five consecutive Monday nights:

To the extent that certain kinds of sweeping historical documentaries on PBS feel like junior-high social studies, We Shall Remain, which begins Monday and unfolds over five weeks, is the sort of information-intensive class that lends itself to copious note taking if not enlivened argument. The subject is the history of American Indian resistance over four centuries. Our instructor is Benjamin Bratt, a longtime supporter of Indian causes, who serves as off-camera narrator and never wavers in his tone of earnest contrition. He speaks as if he has been asked to apologize for the sins of white oppression. His effort at an ethnically authentic pronunciation of Lalawethika, a Shawnee leader, is alone an exercise in cultural amends.
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 the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, 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.
We Shall Remain seeks above all to move from paradigms of victimhood to a sober celebration of Indian valor in the face of white savagery. The ninety minutes spent on Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader who presided over spits of land in Ohio and Indiana in the early nineteenth 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, and gaining so much respect from his new allies that one British commander said of him: “A more gallant or sagacious warrior does not exist.”
Tecumseh, who had only twenty-four warriors, 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.
The early chapters of the film rely heavily on historical re-enactment, recreated battle scenes and lots of war paint and cowhide. I cringed when I thought I spotted an actor, one who appeared on the first season of 24, playing a colonial; I like my re-enactors to be recognizable only from appearances at restoration villages. Re-enactment is the default device of historical documentaries now, but I don’t think it is too much to ask that a project with the apparent ambitions of this one try a little harder not to feel like a Thanksgiving play.
The aesthetic matures by the time we get to the 1970s and the film’s account 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, capturing the media’s attention and providing filmmakers with plenty of footage. 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.”