In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Last of the Mohicans| 65 Dear Diary: Time for my yearly meditation on what to do next. Just finished wrapping up the last of the lasts. Thank the Maker that Russell Means signed onto the project. It really does pay to hire real Indians. Keeps down the protests. I’ve learned my lesson: authenticity pays. Woo-hoo, Hollywood TheLastof theMohicans f f f Philip Deloria NeartheendofMichaelMann’sLastoftheMohicans, the camera pulls back to reveal the white protagonists Cora (Madeline Stowe) and Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) standing together with the last Mohican, Chingachgook (Russell Means), mourning his son, the dead Uncas. As the ceremony ends, the camera moves again, this time dollying around to reveal a widening gap betweenwhathadinitiallyseemedtobethreepeoplestandingtogether.WeseethatinfactCora and Hawkeye had been standing close together, with the Indian character somewhat apart. A gentle breeze lifts Cora’s and Hawkeye’s long black hair, and their locks fly together in beautiful unison as the camera frames them in profile, blurring the two figures together. The attentive viewer cannot help feeling a little bit sorry for Chingachgook, who had only an instant before been an equal partner in the scene. The shot is only one of many stunning cinematographic moments in this lush and beautiful film. Part of the explosion of “Indian pictures” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mohicans features an excellent cast of familiar Native actors and extras, including Means, Eric Schweig (Uncas), Wes Studi (Magua), and Dennis Banks (Ongewasgone). Mann takes full advantage of a gorgeous landscape of cliffs, water, and mountains, making the stunning settings of North Carolina Cherokee country masquerade relatively successfully as Iroquois territory. The musical score evokes a kind of polished Scotch-Irish feel that, if not “authentic,” gives a passable filmic 66| Philip Deloria senseofit.AndManndidnothesitatetoeditJamesFenimoreCooper’sbaroquetaleintoatauter brand of drama; indeed, in interviews, Mann suggested that he paid little attention to Cooper, but worked his script around the 1934 version of Mohicans, one of four previous iterations of the story committed to film during the twentieth century. All five Mohicans films depend upon Cooper’s original plot and characters. In the 1826 book, the frontiersman Hawkeye and his Indian companions Chingachgook and Uncas rescue, protect, lose, and redeem two young women, Alice and Cora Munro, the daughters of a British commander who find themselves caught up in the violence of the French and Indian War. The daughters, and particularly Cora, are threatened by the heartless Magua, a French ally who seeks revenge against Munro for a previous humiliation. Against a narrative backdrop that centers on the burning of Fort William Henry, and the subsequent killing of British refugees, are played out a series of love stories involving the penultimate Mohican Uncas, on the one hand, and the dashing soldier Duncan Heyward, on the other. In the end, Uncas dies at the hands of Magua, leaving Chingachgook alone, the last of a vanishing race. Michael Mann’s script diverges from Cooper’s book in significant ways. One suspects that most viewers do not know Mohicans well enough to notice Mann’s changes (the book having been dropped from most literary canons long ago—replaced, if anything, by Mark Twain’s satiricalessayonCooper).Andyet,thetransformationsofthescriptarecriticaltounderstanding the ideologies that drive this film—and to making sense of that final scene, with its separation of Chingachgook from the flying black hair of its white protagonists. The scene’s separation of Indian from Indian-inflected white people offers a fairly obvious visual cue, to be sure, but the scene is only a capstone to the structural narrative that underpins the film. To get at that narrative, however, it is necessary for us to revisit the structural relationships that characterized Cooper’s original novel. Those relationships are built around a series of pairings: Cora/Alice, Uncas/Chingachgook, and Uncas/Magua, among others. Each of these twosomes is set in motion through the introduction of a third character, setting up a series of triangular tensions that are only resolved through complete reshufflings. The story ends with new pairings, which not only give the story its motion, but also explain Cooper’s vision of America and its future. The oppositional relation between sisters Cora and Alice Munroe lies at the heart of his story. Cooper explicitly racializes dark-haired, sensual, and durable Cora, hinting that her mother was “of color” and thus making her the subject (and, in relation to Magua’s lust, the object) of race-crossing. Blond and delicate Alice—the child of a different...

Share