Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans: The Declaration of Another(New) Colonialism

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate how a film director, Michael Man manipulates James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans and James L. Conway’s 1977 film with the same title to declare that the year 1992 is the beginning of another(new) colonialism to Native Americans. The Indians have tried to overcome colonialism by applying the post-colonialism since the mid-twentieth century, consistently arguing for the returning of the stolen land, the recovery of lost sovereignty, and the regeneration of forgotten cultural heritage. In order to react to the Indians’s resistant efforts, Michael Mann visualizes in his film why and how the Native Americans have to either get Americanized or to vanish by making binary divisions, the Noble Savage and the Vicious Savage, and by demonstrating the superiority of European civilization. In conclusion, I try to evaluate if Michael Mann’s argument can be sustainable in the discourse of Native Americans in contemporary era and to indicate the wide disparities between the visual images of Indians in films and their real life on reservations.