Shirley Sneve
ICT
Filmmaker Ken Burns’ latest series, “The American Revolution,” examines the nation’s War of Independence with a close look at the impact on Indigenous communities.
The six-part, 12-hour series, by Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, will be featured on PBS stations starting Sunday, Nov. 16, and is available to stream from the PBS website and the Passport app.
Philip J. Deloria, a Yankton Dakota author and the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, was among the consultants on the project who helped craft the Indigenous view of the war.
“This is a war very much about Native land and about the construction of American wealth on the backs of Native land,” Deloria told ICT. “And of course, this has been something that has concerned scholars and Native folks for a very long time. And we’re really starting to see the dimensions of wealth that was built around Native land. And here’s where it all starts.”
Burns’ publicist, Joe DePlasco, said the series takes a new look at the American Revolution.
The series looks at the Revolutionary War as a global conflict that included European and Native nations,” DePlasco told ICT. “The film follows the chronology of the war but constantly pulls back to go deeper into what life was like in North America at the time.”
He continued, “It’s also a very difficult story, given the brutality of the war and, of course, the long-term impact on Native people and lands.”
Other advisors for the Native American content of the series include Maggie Blackhawk, Ned Blackhawk, Darren Bonaparte, Colin G. Calloway, Jennifer Loren, Claudio Saunt and Michael John Witgen.
Deloria described how impactful the war was on tribes.
“This is all about clearing the decks for the Americans to actually fund their revolution and fund their country on the backs of Native people and their land.” Deloria said. “Ken makes several arguments in the film that this is a rebellion that turns into a revolution, that this is a bloody vicious civil war, where people are killing each other all the time. … And I think this represents not only Ken’s interests, but the sort of voices of Native folks who are advising that this is a war about Indian land.”
The Haudenosaunee, Cherokee and Stockbridge were a few of the tribes that were nearly destroyed in the fighting. Ironically, Indigenous people fought on both sides – for the colonists and for England.
“Among Haudenosaunee people, among Cherokee people — Native folks are completely embroiled in the fighting of this war from start to finish,” Deloria said.
A segment in the series talks about the Stockbridge regiment.
“It’s right there at the very beginning in the siege of Boston and which is completely devastated in a fight outside of New York City,” he said. “It has consequences for the Stockbridge community, which then moves to Brotherton,and ends up moving to Wisconsin. So you can see the outlines of Native country in the sort of struggles that are happening here.”
The series features a segment around the Clinton-Sullivan campaigns in New York state that devastated Haudenosaunee homelands, sending 5,000 people fleeing to Fort Niagara. Dozens of Native settlements were burned, as well as orchards, cornfields and food stores.
“As Michael Wittgen says in the film, some of these are long houses and some of them are wood frame houses with windows,” Deloria said. “And what happens is the clearance of this land, the dispossession of these people in a military kind of way, and the greedy eyeing of this land by every soldier who is in that force, right? And the minute the war is over, what happens? The vast expansion, the rapid expansion into what will become New York, the Western part of New York State.”
He continued, “These folks are watching Haudenosaunee land. They’re seeing how beautiful it is. They’re seeing how productive it is under Haudenosaunee sort of nurture and governance. And they want that land for themselves.”
The Haudenosaunee were not the only ones affected by violence, he said.
“The same thing happens at the beginning of the war with the burning of the Cherokee towns,” he said. “They do not want the British to restrain them. This speculation is happening before the war even starts, people who are signing treaties and land contracts for vast, vast tracts of land.”
More info
Extensive classroom resources are available at https://ouramericanstory.org/ and https://ket.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/kenburnsclassroom/film/the-american-revolution/