The Lasting of the Mahicans

The Lasting of the Mahicans

When I was younger I remember watching with my parents, one of their favorite movies, The Last of the Mohicans. In school, I can only remember covering a very brief and erroneous section on Native American history, so growing up I had always referred to The Last of the Mahicans’ indigenous people as the prototype of Native Americans.   I had formed a stereotype of what Native Americans were like, in my head, based off of this 1992 “historical epic” film by Michael Mann.   When I first, signed up for this class the first thing that popped into my head was this movie.   When I was informed that we had to write a paper on whatever topic we wanted I jumped at the opportunity to write about this topic.   I was curious if the depiction of the Mohicans in this movie was accurate.
The movie is based off a novel by James Fenimore Cooper, a popular American writer of the early 19th century. To my understanding, the movie did not completely follow the book. Some of the roles and fates of the characters are changed in the movie, hence confusing Cooper’s purpose. I have never actually read the novel so I decided to do a little background research on it.
One of the first things I stumbled across in my investigation was that James Cooper had confused important details from the two separate tribes, the Mahicans (Mohicans) and Mohegans. In the novel, he confuses their name and history with the Mohegans from eastern Connecticut. This misconception has confused popular understanding of the tribes of the present day.   Cooper had named the main character, Uncas, after a well-known Mohegan sachem who had been an ally of the English in the 17th- century Connecticut. Even the title, The Last of the Mohicans, is misleading. To begin with, the spelling “Mohican” confuses the independence of these nations from the Connecticut group in a story about the Massachusetts/New York group. Mohican and Mahican refer to the same tribe from upper New York State. They are...