{"id":34157,"date":"2017-10-02T10:50:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T17:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/10\/ken-burns-and-the-americans\/"},"modified":"2017-10-02T10:50:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T17:50:00","slug":"ken-burns-and-the-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/10\/ken-burns-and-the-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Burns and \u201cThe Americans\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hollow Horn Bear–1923 US Postage Stamp<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I\u2019ve been a big fan of Ken Burns\u2019 documentaries\u2014like many I watched the Civil War series as it came out; like many (though not as many) watched \u201cBaseball\u201d explore the post Civil War Civil Rights journey; and I caught most of the recent \u201cVietnam\u201d series the first time around and will watch the one episode and parts of others I missed as they come back to my screen.<\/p>\n

Yet there is a giant hole in the work of Ken Burns. In the September 4 issue of the New Yorker<\/i>, author Ian Parker profiles the documentarian, and the headline writers call it \u201cMr. America.\u201d Parker recounts many of Burns\u2019 triumphs, from \u201cThe Brooklyn Bridge\u201d to \u201cMark Twain\u201d and the \u201cDust Bowl.\u201d And he quotes Burns on at least ten ideas for the future, including \u201cHemingway,\u201d \u201cCrime and Punishment in America,\u201d and \u201cCountry Music,\u201d which is already in the can and set to run. He\u2019s also considering \u201cWinston Churchill,\u201d and chuckles that it fits into his pantheon because Churchill had an American mother.<\/p>\n

Burns is a history buff, an American History buff. But something big is missing: Americans. Here I step back to the original meaning of that term. The current issue of American Indian Magazine<\/i> announces the fall exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian, \u201cThe Americans.\u201d It then explains that<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exhibition\u2019s title is a play on words. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition provided for \u2018American\u2019 is \u2018An indigenous inhabitant of (any part of) the Americas; an American Indian.\u2019 This usage was common until the early 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

I googled. Here is the 1828 Webster\u2019s Definition: \u201cA native of America; originally applied to the aboriginals, or copper-colored races, found here by the Europeans; but now applied to the descendants of Europeans born in America. The name American must always exalt the pride of patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>The NMAI exhibit traces the use of Indian images by government and industry over the entire course of US history, from a 1792 \u201cPeace and Commerce\u201d medal with a bare-breasted and beautiful Indian \u201cqueen,\u201d to the \u201cTomahawk missile\u201d and (my favorite) the Pontiac car, named after an Ottawa Indian Chief who\u2019d beat the British.<\/p>\n

Maybe the most dramatic image is that of Hollow Horn Bear, and I quote at length from the American Indian Magazine<\/i> article because it says it all:<\/p>\n

Already a familiar face in Washington, D.C., Sicangu (Brule) Lakota chief Mat \u00f3 H\u00e9 lo e a, or Hollow Horn Bear (c. 1850\u20131913) became the iconic, if unnamed, \u201cAmerican Indian\u201d by 1923, when his likeness appeared on the new 14-cent U.S. postage stamp. He also appeared on the five-dollar bill, the first and only historic Native to be shown on U.S. paper currency. Hollow Horn Bear fought alongside Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud in Red Cloud\u2019s War of 1866\u201368 and participated in the defeat of Gen. George A. Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. Yet he later served as a delegate to the federal government and marched in the inaugural parades of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and Woodrow Wilson in 1913. His transition from feared enemy to national symbol is one of the mysteries explored in the major new exhibit \u201cAmericans,\u201d opening this fall at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall.<\/i><\/p>\n

The complications: an Indian who lived through the Indian Wars and fought against one-time hero George Custer, but did not live long enough to see the true story of Custer explained to the public\u2014or to see his own image on a US Postage Stamp! Somehow exemplary of the crazy many-sided ways that later Euro-Americans have addressed, and continue to address, the people who were here to meet the Mayflower, Columbus\u2019 boats, and those of the slavers. The \u201c500 Nations\u201d of North America and the many more of Central and South America.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d challenge the historian in Ken Burns to take on this story, one that makes the complications of the Civil War and Vietnam pale, a story about Americans who saved the Plymouth colony and Lewis and Clark, influenced Benjamin Franklin and the first colonialists, and excited Rousseau, the fur traders, mountain men, and generations of movie makers. And these Americans\u2014unlike the Civil War heroes and the fading population of World War II veterans and Rosy the Riveters, are alive today and holding on to languages and cultures that sustained them long before the new Americans hit the shores of the American continents.<\/p>\n

# # #<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollow Horn Bear–1923 US Postage Stamp I\u2019ve been a big fan of Ken Burns\u2019 documentaries\u2014like many I watched the Civil War series as it came out; like many (though not as many) watched \u201cBaseball\u201d explore the post Civil War Civil Rights journey; and I caught most of the recent \u201cVietnam\u201d series the first time around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[481,486,483,484,480,485,482],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}