Just watched episode V of the Ken Burns Revolutionary War. There was a whopper of a lie in that one: The story of Mary Jemison.
Mary was a girl from a Scotch-Irish family living near Gettysburg. Shawnees raided the area captured and then killed her mother, father and siblings, ritually scalped them.
Mary they took to what is now Pittsburgh and traded her to a Seneca woman.
The way Burns tells the story, she was “an orphan adopted by Senecas.” Technically true, but grossly misleading.
This story of raiding settlements and murdering most of a family and taking away a captive as a trophy is common in the story of settlement of the continent, and in modern media: The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves.
Thereafter, the narrative relates how US forces killed Indians, burned Indian settlements, destroyed crops, etc.
But here is the methodological problem with the story as told by Burns: many people of European descent could write and left records of their doings, motivations, and results while the overwhelming majority of Indians could not write and therefore left us no records.
There was an old joke about a man under a street light looking for his car keys. A stranger walks past and asks, “Hey stranger, what are you doing?”
"I'm looking for my car keys."
"Where the last place you had them?
“Next to my car over there in the dark."
“Well, if you lost them over there in the dark, why are you looking for them here under the street light?"
"Because here I can see.”
Burns relates in great detail the acts of the US forces against the Indians but tells us almost nothing of the antecedent events. I will guarantee you every soldier in the Continental Army burning an Indian village had seen with his own eyes the results of an Indian raid on the frontier: looted and burned houses, murdered women and children, scalped settlers. They may not have known whether it was Senecas, Cuyahogas, Iroquois, or Shawnees, but they knew it was Indians. And it had happened over and over and over again. I know because it happened repeatedly where I now live in the 1740s through 1760s.
If the Royal government (or later, the American government) had an agreement with a Shawnee chief preventing settlements and keeping the peace, and then other Shawnees, not acknowledging the supremacy of that particular chief, raided the frontier, would the government see the difference? More to the point, would they care? They made a deal with a Shawnee chief, after the agreement, Shawnees had raided the frontier and murdered woman and children. That chain of events would instill rage and the realization that they only way to stop the Indian raids would be to subjugate all of the Indians, to reduce them to dependence.
In Burns’ telling of the story, he covers, in great detail, the harsh treatment American forces dealt out to the Indians. But says very little about the horrors Indians inflicted on settlers. The very clear dynamic is American oppressors/Indian victims. But that is because the only people that left records were the settlers, the Europeans, the Americans. And some of them actually had second thoughts about what they were doing to the Indians. Did any of the Shawnee that murdered and scalped Mary Jemison's family feel remorse and what they were doing? Probably not (that was just their culture) but we don't know because they left no records.
Anyway, good peaceful Indian/terrible, aggressive, cruel Americans is clearly what Burns is intent on showing and it misleads the viewer.
Ken Burns remains a very skilled filmmaker and I enjoy watching his films. You have to take what he is saying with a grain of salt.
Mary was a girl from a Scotch-Irish family living near Gettysburg. Shawnees raided the area captured and then killed her mother, father and siblings, ritually scalped them.
Mary they took to what is now Pittsburgh and traded her to a Seneca woman.
The way Burns tells the story, she was “an orphan adopted by Senecas.” Technically true, but grossly misleading.
This story of raiding settlements and murdering most of a family and taking away a captive as a trophy is common in the story of settlement of the continent, and in modern media: The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves.
Thereafter, the narrative relates how US forces killed Indians, burned Indian settlements, destroyed crops, etc.
But here is the methodological problem with the story as told by Burns: many people of European descent could write and left records of their doings, motivations, and results while the overwhelming majority of Indians could not write and therefore left us no records.
There was an old joke about a man under a street light looking for his car keys. A stranger walks past and asks, “Hey stranger, what are you doing?”
"I'm looking for my car keys."
"Where the last place you had them?
“Next to my car over there in the dark."
“Well, if you lost them over there in the dark, why are you looking for them here under the street light?"
"Because here I can see.”
Burns relates in great detail the acts of the US forces against the Indians but tells us almost nothing of the antecedent events. I will guarantee you every soldier in the Continental Army burning an Indian village had seen with his own eyes the results of an Indian raid on the frontier: looted and burned houses, murdered women and children, scalped settlers. They may not have known whether it was Senecas, Cuyahogas, Iroquois, or Shawnees, but they knew it was Indians. And it had happened over and over and over again. I know because it happened repeatedly where I now live in the 1740s through 1760s.
If the Royal government (or later, the American government) had an agreement with a Shawnee chief preventing settlements and keeping the peace, and then other Shawnees, not acknowledging the supremacy of that particular chief, raided the frontier, would the government see the difference? More to the point, would they care? They made a deal with a Shawnee chief, after the agreement, Shawnees had raided the frontier and murdered woman and children. That chain of events would instill rage and the realization that they only way to stop the Indian raids would be to subjugate all of the Indians, to reduce them to dependence.
In Burns’ telling of the story, he covers, in great detail, the harsh treatment American forces dealt out to the Indians. But says very little about the horrors Indians inflicted on settlers. The very clear dynamic is American oppressors/Indian victims. But that is because the only people that left records were the settlers, the Europeans, the Americans. And some of them actually had second thoughts about what they were doing to the Indians. Did any of the Shawnee that murdered and scalped Mary Jemison's family feel remorse and what they were doing? Probably not (that was just their culture) but we don't know because they left no records.
Anyway, good peaceful Indian/terrible, aggressive, cruel Americans is clearly what Burns is intent on showing and it misleads the viewer.
Ken Burns remains a very skilled filmmaker and I enjoy watching his films. You have to take what he is saying with a grain of salt.
