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We Shall Remain – Interview with Ric Burns and Chris EyreBy Jay Wertz | American History | one comment | Print This Post | Email This Post We were committed to a style that was as cinematic as possible, in the sense that every conceivable visual element was leaving enough mystery in the frame so the audience’s aesthetic interest is engaged. We Shall Remain, the ambitious five-part American Experience series on PBS that began April 13 with "About the Mayflower" and concludes May 11 with "Wounded Knee," is a collaboration of a number of people and organizations. The producing entity for American Experience, WGBH, sought out a host of scholars and creative artists to work on the project. Two of them are Ric Burns and Chris Eyre. Ric is an award-winning documentary producer, director and writer (The Way West, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film) and long-time contributor to American Experience. He wrote and directed “Tecumseh’s Vision”. Chris is one of the most sought-after Native American filmmakers. He has directed Smoke Signals, a landmark Native American film that won many awards, and other film and television projects. Chris directed three programs, “After the Mayflower,” “Tecumseh’s Vision” (with Ric Burns) and “Trail of Tears.” Though they had not collaborated before, Ric and Chris met on the project and hit it off immediately. In this Historynet.com interview they sit down together to talk with Jay Wertz about the series, its production, and how to place it in the body of visual literature of American history. Subscribe Today
 Directors Chris Eyre (left) and Ric Burns discuss a scene during the filming of 'Tecumseh's Vision.' Photo by Larry Gus. Ric Burns: You have history where passions are still very much alive; it’s not just a cliché to say the struggle goes on. The dust is still settling on what it means. I feel in just 15 years we’ve moved into yet a new phase of a very complicated, four-century relationship between European Americans and the people who inhabited the continent for thousands of years before. I think we now see in Native American history a kind of image of American history – we don’t see it as a marginal thing any longer. We see it as part of the mainstream to the degree that if you don’t know it, you don’t know your own history. And that would be as true for a non-Native American as for a Native American. Chris Eyre: Historically when traumas happen, as in the Native American experience, it takes some distance for people to truly reflect in a way that’s truthful. I think Native people are progressing and healing, and I think we’re looking back in a progressive way at a major trauma that happened over generations, and audiences are more accepting of that than they’ve ever been. RB: I think there’s a really strong way in which, to some degree, we’re all Native Americans now … CE: Yeah. RB: We’re much more conscious that we live, all of us, on a fragile, finite planet, and we need to husband resources and understand our relationship and bearing to other people, other life forms, and to the planet itself. It is, in a way, poetically inevitable. We find ourselves as a people and as a nation and as a species having to understand the modes of accommodation and mutuality and reciprocity that were the heart-blood of many Native American cultures. That gives relevance, optimism and hopefulness to a very dark history. Pages: 1 2 3 4Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to
            Tags: interview, Movies, Native American History
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One Comment to “We Shall Remain – Interview with Ric Burns and Chris Eyre”
I wrote (in my poor English) to the Pres. Barack Obama about a new interpretation to give to Tecumseh’s history and his Correspondence Team answered appreciating hearing from me. “The Pres. has promised the most transparent administration in history, and we are committed to listening to and responding you…so we encourage you to resubmit your message” to a new link they gave me because the former receives “millions of electronic messages”. The matter of my work is: “Why did not USA recognize Tecumseh’s right to form a native, independent nation ?” He said to Harrison that “the US had set him the example of forming a strict union amongst all the fires that compose their confederacy…the Indians did not complain of it – nor should his white brothers complain of him doing the same with regard to the Indian tribes…they really meant nothing but peace”
He alone had expanded a political program upon two simple principles which were very baneful for Jefferson, Madison, Harrison, Jackson…Reagan, Bush: 1) He wanted all the Indian tribes join together in order to form their confederation and to stop the American encroachments 2) the Indian land was not to be owned by a single tribe but it could be sold to USA only if all the tribes agreed: that is never more.
If US had peaceflly agreed, recognized Indians’ rights and stop any more invasion or encroachment upon their land, was there any reason to a war between them? Harrison said: “(The Indians) will never have recourse to arms unless riven to it by a series of injustice and oppression.”
But he after having drawn Tecumseh as “One of the uncommon geniouses which springs up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things” (the order of things the US wanted establish on the Indians, like as the Relocation west of Mississipi – to be read ‘an Ethnic Cleansing’) he wrote also the next words to the War Department.
“If it not were for the vicinity of the US he would perhaps be the founder of an empire that rival in glory Mexico and Peru…He is now upon the last round to put a finishing stroke to his work. I hope however before his return that that part of work which he considered complete will be demolished and even its founadtion rooted up.”
“Before his return”. Harrison knew very well that Tecumseh alone was and had the political structure of Tippecanoe: the Governor crossed up the line North of which the Indians owned their legal land just because he relied on the provoked honor of the tribesmen to obtain on Nov. 11, 1811 the kind of answer the Shawnee chief had strongly forbidden them from giving.
Why a sculptured portrait of Tecumseh is among other portraits of men who made great the US in one of the Power Palaces in Washington D.C.? Why the brochure given at the Tippecanoe Memorial says of him “as both a great Indian and a great American”? Not only he fought the US all over his life for the Indian freedom, but the US fought him and his free, united native Nation till to their death. The brochure: “The Americans fought for a dream…of a great land of free men. The Indian fought for the same land, his happy hunting ground on earth’…’Tippecanoe Monument…righty honors the brave soldiers and Indians that died here. Today freedom prevails in America…the heritage of all that fought here’…’Jefferson wanted the Indian lands for America, he planned to buy land from whichever tribe owned it…he would train the braves to farm and be content without the vast land they had neede as hunters.”
So the Indians were so savages that were not able to fight for their freedom: only the Americans could do it; and the freedom for the Indians was to be deported more and more to West: Alexis de Tocqueville (an admirer of the newborn Republic) nevertheless wrote that the Americans would have joined the Indians where they be gone into ‘ten years’.
But did not the Declaration of Independence proclaim these words which are immortal and applicable to each man, to each people: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all the men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty, pursuit of Happiness…”?
Words written a few years before Tippecanoe…
By Antonio Pantanelli on May 24, 2009 at 6:22 am