I have been watching the program Into the West on TNT...

I think it is good.

It seems to try and represent the Nativer American POV fairly --- not absolutely accurately --- but fairly...

I wonder if I am missing something...

Is anyone here enjoying the program?

hey taz, I haven't watched the program but am glad you enjoyed it

as for POV, I know that you have been to Rancocas, if you were to see Pine Ridge, Rose Bud, some of the rezs in Oklahoma or the SW you would have a little different picture.

I hope to catch the reruns the next time it comes around, so to start at the beginning. Do either of you know how many shows are in this series? Any idea also when it's final episode will be?

I think there are 10 or 11.

I am certain I would.

I know they are speaking Lakota in the series.

When you see it you will have to let me know where the depictions fail.

Thanks.

During Into the West they just showed the Sand Creek Massacre and then the Massacre of Black Kettle and his tribe by General Custer...

My wife and I were in tears.

This was General Custer...

This was Colonel Chavington...

This was the US policy of extermination...

And when the lynching resoluton was discussed, there was news that resolutions had been passed in the Congress for Native Americans and the Holocaust...but I have been unable to find them...

Senate panel considers apology to American Indians
Reuters ^ | 05/25/05

Posted on 05/25/2005 11:32:48 AM PDT by nypokerface


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. senator on Wednesday urged a Senate committee to pass a resolution apologizing on behalf of the United States to American Indians for centuries of massacres, broken promises and other injustices.

Indian leaders at the hearing said they would need more than an apology to overcome the poverty, substance abuse and health care problems that many of their people face.

The United States has never formally apologized for its treatment of the indigenous people who were living here before European settlement began.

Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican who is spearheading the apology resolution, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs it would be a first step toward healing deep wounds.

"Before reconciliation, there must be recognition and repentance," he said. "It begins the effort of reconciliation by recognizing past wrongs and repenting for them."

Brownback introduced a similar resolution in the last Congress. It was voted out of the committee but the full Senate never acted on it.

The closest the United States has come to a formal apology to Indians came in 2000 when an assistant secretary for Indian affairs apologized for the past conduct of his agency. He said policies of successive U.S. governments had "set out to destroy all things Indian" and left a "legacy of misdeeds that haunts us today."

Brownback's resolution says the United States must acknowledge "the broken treaties and many of the more ill-conceived federal policies that followed, such as extermination, termination, forced removal and relocation, the outlawing of traditional religions, and the destruction of sacred places."

The resolution apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all American Indians "for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on native peoples by citizens of the United States." It also asks forgiveness for massacres such as the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, where as many as 200 Indians were killed, and the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, where about 350 Indians died in 1890.

Indian leaders at the hearing said much more than an apology was needed to help deal with the many problems their communities are facing, including poverty, ill health and poor health care, alcoholism, drug addiction and unemployment.

"The president has proposed drastic budget cuts to many of the programs that are vital to the health and well-being of our people," said Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians.

Edward Thomas, president of the central council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian tribes of Alaska, said it was clear that some in the U.S. government were sorry about the treatment of Indians while others were not.

"An apology to us while ignoring the Third World conditions of so many of our people just doesn't seem genuine," he said.

I also post a link which has some quite hateful and ignorant comments...

This is the Republican party...and their ilk -- though fortunately Sen. Sam Brownback is the exception to the rule it seems..

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1410342/posts

tazvil, I do have the links to the resolutions on disk somewhere, I know I posted them on the Kerry board.....we are off to the hospital for another round of tests today so I will look for them later....

Keeping you all in my prayers....

The final part was this past weekend...

No tears -- just numbness as they did Wounded Knee...

I think Spielberg deserves a lot of credit but I want to hear if this assessment is accurate from Native Americans...

I think it also could have been renamed...The Demise of Native Americans In The West...

For with the coming of Euros (of which I am one) it meant the end of everything that was scared to the American indian.

Euros lied, cheated and stole from the Indian...they raped --- murdered --- and destroyed the Native American culture.

IT was a sad series but an important represenation.

shawneedaughter....

my wife and I are reading the Bible and I have been reminded of another similarity between the Book of the Hopi and the Bible...it seems that the Creator when the indians would not follow the ways of the Creator ...the Creator would destroy the Indians --- this seems very similar to the trials of the Jews in the Book of Judges where they would disobey and be held accountable by God...not destroyed, but it seemed similar to me just the same.

There were 6 episodes. The last one was this last weekend. They should rerun it. I did enjoy it, but it brought up the outrageous Genocide and mistreatment of the Indiginous Americans, by the white culture again for me, and was hard to watch.

The thing I didn't like was the weak connections as people grew older. They had so many characters that it was hard to keep track as to who was whom, grown older.

I have Tivo and just finished watching the one where they are creating the "model" Indian school and they force the children to remove their native clothes and cut their hair and speak only English. It was heartwrenching, even though I was fully aware of that period of history and the cruelty and racism that killed off many Native langauges and cultures.

I really like that the main characters decided they could not continue to support the manner of education that was provided but felt that they should not have left the children in that situation either!

As a person who was born mostly White (entirely accidentally, I might point out), I felt horrible and partially responisible---though without recourse for undoing what was done. And I wondered about my great-grandma who was said to be a Cherokee and what her experiences might have been.....

Though my wife and I are Euros, we found that episode very hard to watch. In fact, the whole series was difficult to watch but an important story to be told.

I wish Indianhead or some of the others how have a better grasp on Native American history could critique it.

Maybe I'll look online for something.

The way the press was so dishonest was also eye opening for me and I wonder how true that was --- but in reality I can see it being true because if they reported otherwise why would the Army continue to allow them access.

The whole thing I found hard to watch.

I wish they had used the same actors throughout. That might have helped.

INTO THE WEST
Regular airtime: Friday-Sunday, 8pm ET (TNT)
Cast: Simon R. Baker, Josh Brolin, Gary Busey, Tonantzin Carmelo, Zahn McClarnon, Keri Russell, Matthew Settle, Michael Spears, Skeet Ulrich
by Lesley Smith
http://www.popmatters.com/tv/reviews/i/int...st-050707.shtml

Anomie

As the history of westward expansion no longer commands primetime territory in popular culture's imaginings of America, a second Western has come to cable. And unlike HBO's Deadwood, which plunges viewers into the day-to-day struggle for survival in a single town, TNT's Into the West aspires to a panorama of the entire 19th century, when both Americans and European immigrants exploited the vast land acquisitions that began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1804.

To humanize this ambition, creators Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, and William Mastrosimone spread the saga over six two-hour films, each done by a separate director, and zoom in on two multigenerational families, those of Virginian wheelwright Jacob Wheeler (Matthew Settle), and Lakota leader Loved by the Buffalo (Simon Baker). Although the integration of a Native American perspective, complete with Lakota speakers and subtitles, follows the example of Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, Into the West takes a courageous step further by linking the two families through intermarriage in the 1820s. This acknowledgement of the prevalence of intermarriage creates a new perspective on the Old West.

At the same time, the focus on only two families leads the series into the curse of the mini-series: the need for plotting mired in farfetched coincidence to guarantee they play leading roles at every historical turn. The desire for coverage tips plotting towards the conventional markers of American historical self-image -- the individualistic trappers, mountain men, and family-based wagon trains that forged the way west -- so familiar from Hollywood movies and TV. In Episode Two, the crises are entirely predictable: the Wheelers' wagon train runs into a fatal cattle stampede, fatal river crossing, fatal cholera outbreak, and fatal runaway wagon. This episode follows the dramatic strategy of A.B. Guthrie's The Way West (and Andrew V. McLaglen's movie of the same name), by teasing out viewers' excessive sympathy for individual characters and then emphasizing the attrition the wagon trail exacted by clinically dispatching them with minimal fanfare or regret. The series sustains a tension between the aspiration to fill in traditional gaps and the pedestrian recollection of past fictions, leaving it more interesting as an intellectual exercise than as a drama.

That intellectual exercise has value, though perhaps not 12 hours worth, for it pushes into popular view three strands of the historic occupation of the west. First, it is honest about the role of women, both Caucasian and Native American. Several women join the two Wheeler brothers as they head for St. Louis and the California trail, as representatives of the thousands of single women, often working as servants, who swelled the wagon trains west. The series, not surprisingly for a piece appearing under the Spielberg/DreamWorks imprimatur, can't quite bring itself to abjure the traditional morality that transgressive women must be punished: one drowns, another dies in agony during an amputation, and the third, Naomi (Keri Russell), is captured by the Cheyenne. But two also marry, across class lines, on the trail west from St. Louis, and Naomi quickly accepts her new life with the Cheyenne. Thunderheart Woman (Tonantzin Carmelo), who eventually marries Jacob Wheeler, survives hostile capture, sexual slavery, and widowhood to raise three children in California.

Second, this marriage to Wheeler avoids the '50s-style pussyfooting of Dances with Wolves in which the Costner character falls in love with a Lakota woman, only to discover that she was in fact a captive American (thus avoiding any crossing of racial lines). This miniseries openly recounts the intertwining of Native Americans and whites over several generations.

While the events that link the family of Loved by the Buffalo and the Wheelers, at least in the first two episodes, are somewhat strained, they do emphasize the close commercial, social, and physical relationships between Native American residents and white migrants in the first half of the 19th century, some essential for the migrants' survival. Thunderheart Woman, sister of the Lakota protagonists, first marries a white trapper, then Jacob Wheeler, and, finally, when she thinks he has died, a third, Californian husband. Naomi not only accepts marriage to a Cheyenne warrior, but also falls in love and has children with him. How the series represents the fates of the children of these cross-racial and cross-cultural marriages is an intriguing question for the next few weeks.

Finally, the initial episodes also convey Native Americans' self-aware, distinctive cultures, as they were perplexed and divided about flood of migrants. But this attention doesn't tip into the ahistorical, '60s-inflected misreadings of warrior tribal cultures as a prototype of "peace and love, man," that has marred some of the reworkings of the Western genre over the last 30 years. The Cheyenne have a reason -- the extirpation of bearers of cholera -- for massacring the wagon train, but they still massacre. While they contemplate the incursions of trappers and soldiers, the Lakota also face conflict with other tribes: it is a rival tribe that massacres Thunderheart Woman's first husband and sells her into sexual slavery.

In the same way, although the migrants are more romanticized than the characters in Deadwood, for instance, the series still manages to show, as do Eastwood's Unforgiven and McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, that the occupation of the west did not represent the clash of two cultures. Instead, it marked the face-off between one group, the Native Americans, who were attempting to preserve a culture, and another group, the dispossessed, the displaced, and the dreamers of the eastern United States (and Europe) who were attempting to create a new society where they would be respected, rather than reviled or condemned. The west of Into the West is messier and less "politically correct" than many of its critics have been able to work out, as these critics don't seem able to step beyond the bare fact of equal screen time for Native American characters.

This messiness is one of the most appealing aspects of the series, even if it's the accidental byproduct of filmmaking courageous enough to attempt to tell a new story but neither visionary nor skillful enough to disrupt genre conventions. As with Deadwood, this messiness doesn't simply represent warts-and-all grittiness, a code of authenticity as easily manipulated to mythic ends as the heroic everyman of the '50s and '60s. Instead, both series recall the picaresque literature that emerged in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries' wars of religion, which satirizes the conventions of epic heroism and offers no consolation beyond the burden of ongoing existence. That literature emerged in response to brutal dislocations at every level of society, and its reemergence in the guise of genre fiction on primetime cable suggests that popular culture is perhaps ready to represent the anomie of the later Bush years. It also suggests that, as the premiere domestic purveyors of America to Americans, the networks may truly be entering a permanent twilight. — 7 July 2005

My wife's family's solution for encroachment by the white man was to keep moving west and north. When the rest of the tribe decided to do what the white man wanted and go to the reservation in Oklahoma my wife's ancestory split to Canada. They were not alone in their opinion of going to the reservation, a good number of Kickapoo upon reaching Oklahoma just kept going south until they reached Mexico.

In either of the scenarios a portion of the Kickapoo tribe rebelled against the policies of the United States towards Indians and went to a foreign country.

Thanks for sharing Marine.

They probably never looked back either.

Its funny how what some think of as civilized others think as uncivilized and visa versa. I think the Indian culture is perhaps one of the most telling and saddest examples of this paradox.

Actually they only stayed in Canada about forty years. If my memory serves me correctly in about 1910 Great-Grandpa decided he wanted to rejoin his tribe and came back to the USA. He made it as far south as upstate Wisconsin where the Chippewa told him he'd never make it to Oklahoma, Indians couldn't just go wandering around like that without getting arrested, so they adopted his family into their tribe.

The Chippewa list his name on the tribal roles but then again, so do the Kickapoo. If you ask his descendents, they don't hesitate in telling you they are Kickapoo.

Well, this Euro American is glad that he returned.

One of the deepest feelings of respect I have is for Native Americans and the pride and dignity they have for their homes which were taken away from them unjustly without compensation.