Austin Barney

Classic movie that, in spite of some historical inaccuracies (notably that the Mohicans are still here), captures the mood and general atmosphere of the French and Indian War/Seven Years War, and ought to be talked about more as it was an early (to us), consequential catastrophe that shaped the modern world, along with the American Revolution not long after. Both conflicts were disasters for the indigenous people involved, who would rather have avoided them but were caught in the middle, though those on the American side could take some comfort knowing they'd helped kick out the old crown-centric colonial Britain, even if they faced new problems in the emerging American nation. The Mohicans themselves are worth studying about; as influential as any indigenous nation in the formation of the United States, they were one of the earliest with substantial European contact (Henry Hudson), had a long history of education and writing and acted as diplomats among other indigenous nations and the U.S. government. The Mohicans (Mahicans is another name, closer to their endonym Ma'eekuneyuk) were forced to move multiple times westward from their Hudson Valley homeland due to past U.S. government and private business' destructive looting of land and disregard for Native rights. They merged with culturally related Munsee Lenape people and are based in Wisconson, where they have a reservation as the federally recognized Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation.