American War, Foreign Narrator. I chanced to see part of a new PBS documentary miniseries about the French and Indian War called "The War That Made America". It is "presented" — that is, narrated, with some onscreen appearances — by Graham Greene, a Canadian actor. Why?
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During the first hour (of two one-hour episodes of the TWTMA series) I was mainly watching the second hour of a biography of Ozzie and Harriet and their offspring, switching to TWTMA during commercials, so I missed the beginning of TWTMA, and didn't know who was narrating. I became suspicious when I heard the Canadian pronunciation Ee.'ra.kwah for "Iroquois", which is properly said Ee.'ra.kwoi in English. Canadians give it a Frenchified pronunciation. As I listened, I heard other suspicious mispronunciations, like Oswaego for "Oswego" (Os.wee.'go). So I checked the Internet, and sure enuf, Graham Greene (the actor, not writer) is Canadian.
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Not only is he Canadian, but he is also Iroquois, member of a confederacy of Indians most of which took Britain's side in the American Revolution!
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Why was a Canadian Iroquois chosen to "present" a documentary called "The War That Made America"? I thought that perhaps the producers were Canadian (tho it seemed an odd title, and interest, for a Canadian production), and this was just bought by PBS. No, apparently it was made by WQED Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, probably because Fort Duquesne (predecessor to Pittsburgh) features prominently in that war. So an American production company chose a Canadian Iroquois to narrate a documentary series about the making of America.
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Perhaps they define "America" differently than most people do, to mean British North America, including Canada, and that will be spelled out in the remainder of the series, which airs on our local PBS station next week. But that doesn't make sense, because the series focuses on George Washington, who it says played a major role in starting the French and Indian War, then later broke with Britain to divide British North America and remove the bulk of its territories and population from the Empire.
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I'm offended at the choice of a foreign "presenter" for an American documentary series financially supported by a whole bunch of American foundations and by tax moneys taken by the U.S. Federal Government — and not just a foreigner, but a member of a group that fought viciously against the United States in the Revolution. What is wrong with media people?
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The series also seemed to go out of its way to be "politically correct", showing blacks as prominent members of the British colonial army sent against the French. Is that a carefully documented reality or, as seems more likely, an inauthentic intrusion of modern sensibilities into 18th Century history? The French and Indian War was fought in the northern British colonies, and blacks, be they slaves or freedmen, were in fairly short supply around here. Washington came from Virginia, so perhaps we are to believe that lots of Virginians were involved, and Virginia had lots of blacks, so, all things being equal, there should have been lots of blacks in a Virginia regiment. But here's the catch: all things were not equal. In much of the South, blacks weren't even taught to read; would they really have been taught to kill?
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Greene tries to impart a measured and balanced view of Indian behaviors that everyone today would regard as "savage", explaining what scalps and captives meant to natives, as tho somehow we should excuse the monstrous savagery of the Mohawk (Iroquois) allies of the French in the episodes shown Wednesday nite. I imagine the Indian allies of the British were equally unrestrained against the French and France's Indian allies. Certainly the behavior of the Indians whom Britain used against us in the Revolution was monstrous, and Britain continued to incite murderous violence against Americans in our western territories even after the Treaty of Paris, so I can't believe Britain's Indian warriors were any more civilized in the French and Indian War.
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Graham Greene unflinchingly talks of the atrocities, but the narration implies disdain for the Europeans' view of their Indian allies as savages. It's almost as tho murdering and scalping 75 men and women who had surrendered at Lake George and taking 500 more captive wasn't such a terrible thing. One must wonder if he would have indicated comparable aloofness if Europeans had slaughtered and mutilated Indians after their defeat.
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The PBS webpage about the series says that Greene is "an Oneida Indian whose ancestors fought in this war." My father's ancestors lived in the Hudson Valley at that time, but I don't know if any of them were involved in that war. I do know that one served as a private in the Revolutionary War. And the first Schoonmaker on these shores was severely wounded in an Indian attack termed the "Wilwyck Massacre" in 1663 (when the region was still under Dutch control), so it would not surprise me if my family had been involved in some way in the French and Indian War. (Apparently a collateral line, the ones that changed their name to Shoemaker, saw action against the Indians in 1755, but I don't know if that was part of the larger war.)
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(The Oneida tribe is said to have sided with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, breaking with other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. So why was Graham Greene born in Canada? Perhaps his ancestors did not flee after the Revolution with the bulk of the Iroquois but migrated in the 1830s, when some Oneidas went to Wisconsin but others went to Ontario.)
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The behavior of the Indians was often savage indeed, and far from bitching and moaning about mistreatment by white people, American Indians of some tribes should be very thankful they weren't wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. Even sympathetic portrayals, as in a movie Graham Greene appeared in, Dances with Wolves, show savage behavior as normal and normative. In that film, Robert Pastorelli (of Murphy Brown fame) plays a (white) plainsman who is peacefully eating dinner at a campfire when he is murdered by Indians shooting several arrows into his body.
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Most Americans arrived on this continent long after the Indians had been pacified. Those of us whose families got here before then don't have such romantic views of our 'innocent red brothers'. And Americans who know their history have reason to be indignant that WQED chose a Canadian Iroquois Indian to present its series on "The War That Made America".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,222.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:03 AM