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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 CE: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the book, that was a mile marker, everybody said, “Oh, it was so horrible.” The next huge mile marker was Dances with Wolves where everybody celebrated the Indians, and I think We Shall Remain is kind of a denominator in that it’s neither of those things; it’s a very complicated human story, dark and triumphant, of the tenacious past of Americans that forged the America we know. Subscribe Today
HN: These stories required different treatments, yet a common theme had to be established for the series in We Shall Remain. What would you say this common thread is? RB: There was an attempt to do two things. One, to not just tell the story as it’s been told before, but to tell of Native Americans as human beings struggling in real places and real times. They put their pants on one leg at a time and had flaws and conflicts and struggled. And that is complicated history. For example, when you have a slave-holding, plantation-owning Christian Cherokee leader (John Ridge) being murdered by members of his own tribe at a key point in time, you know you’ve got a very complicated story. Tecumseh’s complicated as well. He was considered a renegade in his own tribe. If we present him as a real person then Chris and I have done our job. CE: The thread for me, the thing that binds the five (programs) together is that we know we weren’t told the whole truth in public school, we know there’s more. Ric and I were fortunate to be able to scratch the surface and then dig deeper and learn things ourselves and actually bring people like Tecumseh to life, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes on screen. What that master of politics and leadership must have been like! That’s a gift that we get to participate in, to respect what Tecumseh was and (to do the same for) all the leaders. HN: It seems to me stylistically the programs use an unusual photographic style – muted tones, natural vistas, perhaps used symbolically, as well as tight close ups, wandering camera shots and soft focus at times. What about this? RB: Chris and I and our really brilliant director of photography Paul Goldsmith went out to Indiana to try and figure out how to follow through on what executive producers Mark Samels and Sharon Grimberg wanted the series to be, which was to be different but not just different for its own sake – to somehow to push past the clichés of reenactment on the one hand and the clichés of historic documentary films on the other. We were so fortunate to draw as our cameraman Paul Goldsmith. There was kind of a natural synergy that took place between the three of us. The camera too often discloses too much, gives the audience too much – you see it all and there’s nothing left to the imagination. We were committed to a style that was as cinematic as possible, in the sense that every conceivable visual element – rack focus, atmospherics, aerial photography – was leaving enough mystery in the frame so the audience’s aesthetic interest is engaged in making sense of the story. And once we got it, we were like kids in a candy store. Chris, was that your experience? CE: I have to say, in looking back, I feel like it would be presumptuous of Ric and I and everybody else to think that we could reenact the Trail of Tears, which was an incredible event of human tenacity. To sit there and say we are going to articulate visually what Tecumseh must have been doing – that’s a huge responsibility to be placed on anybody. You think of Crazy Horse, who never had his picture taken. As filmmakers, I think it would be a little irresponsible to think we could show everything and ask people to believe it. It’s really about the things you don’t see that allow these characters to live. RB: It’s the worst idea in the world to take two strong-willed directors and put them in charge of the same project, but it just worked out like gangbusters. It’s been a kind of complete mutuality every step along the way. I have to say this has been one of the most delightful working relationships I’ve had. 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