FORGETTING GENOCIDE - OR, THE LAST OF THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

In the wake of the 1992 debates about Columbus, the discovery of the A mericas, and whether terms such as 'holocaust', 'genocide', and 'racis m' should be applied to what happened to Native Americans, Michael Man n's film remake of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans co ntinues a process of historical erasure or forgetting that Cooper and his contemporaries began. The sentimental racism expressed in Cooper's novel involves the ideas of the auto-genocide of 'savagery' and the i nevitable extinction of all Native Americans - ideas commonly held abo ut other so-called primitive races in other imperialist contexts (for instance, about the Maoris of New Zealand). Though Mann purported to t ake great pains in his film to be historically accurate, the film is o nly accurate in relation to trivial details. It thoroughly scrambles m ajor aspects of Cooper's text, including converting the ageing Natty B umppo into a young sex-symbol (Daniel Day-Lewis). More importantly, th e film completely erases Cooper's sentimental racism by, for instance, turning Chingachgook rather than his son, Uncas, into the 'last' of h is tribe, and thereby overlooking the motif of the futureless child ce ntral to that racism. But in eliminating Cooper's racism, the film in a sense perfects the novel, because the sentimentalism that softened t he racism was already a form of erasure or forgetting.