FORGETTING GENOCIDE: OR, THE LAST OF THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Abstract

In the wake of the 1992 debates about Columbus, the discovery of the Americas, and whether terms such as ‘holocaust’, ‘genocide’, and ‘racism’ should be applied to what happened to Native Americans, Michael Manns film remake of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans continues a process of historical erasure or forgetting that Cooper and his contemporaries began. The sentimental racism expressed in Cooper's novel involves the ideas of the auto-genocide of ‘savagery’ and the inevitable extinction of all Native Americans - ideas commonly held about other so-called primitive races in other imperialist contexts (for instance, about the Maoris of New Zealand). Though Mann purported to take great pains in his film to be historically accurate, the film is only accurate in relation to trivial details. It thoroughly scrambles major aspects of Cooper's text, including converting the ageing Natty Bumppo into a young sex-symbol (Daniel Day-Lewis). More importantly, the film completely erases Cooper's sentimental racism by, for instance, turning Chingachgook rather than his son, Uncas, into the ‘last’ of his tribe, and thereby overlooking the motif of the futureless child central to that racism. But in eliminating Cooper's racism, the film in a sense perfects the novel, because the sentimentalism that softened the racism was already a form of erasure or forgetting.