Briselance, Marie-France & Morin, Jean Claude
1991 The Indians Were There First. America's Indians Series. Princeton: Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Notes: 1 videocassette (13 min.); sd., col.; 1/2 in. VHS color.Reviewed 18 May 2001 by:
Raymond A. Bucko <bucko@creighton.edu>
Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, USAMedium: Film/Video Subject
Keywords:Indians of North America - History
Iroquois Indians
ABSTRACT: This film provides a cursory introduction to theories regarding the arrival of humans on the North American continent, along with an estimate of the Native American population at the time of European contact, and a brief description of select cultural groups located in the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Northeast and Southeast.
This film, The Indians Were There First, is one of a six part series entitled AmericaÆs Indians which also includes When the White Man Came, The Bison Hunters, The Trail of Tears, The Warpath, and The Death of the Bison. Each film is 13 minutes long. The Indians Were There First begins by expounding a rudimentary version of the Bering Strait theory, stating that Indians, probably pursuing game, first came to North America 35,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. The narrator explains that at the time of the European incursion the population of the Americans was between 80 û 100 million inhabitants with North AmericaÆs population at about 1 million. The film states that there were about 1,500 tribes in North America, each speaking a different language. Using historical drawings as well as some contemporary film footage, the film focuses on five geographical/cultural regions of North America know to anthropologists as culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northwest Coast, and the Northeast and Southeast (considered here as a single region while anthropologists split this into two areas). For each region the film briefly describes clothing, subsistence patterns, language, ecological adaptation, transportation, games, and social customs of some of the tribes. The film focuses particularly on the Iroquois, describing their political structure, marriage customs, and village organization. The film employs a background of traditional music from a variety of culture areas and orients the viewer with maps indicating the route of migration to the Americas as well as the location of each cultural area examined.Films this brief do more harm than good by suggesting that topics so broad and so marked by academic and cultural controversy can be addressed with confidence and accuracy in 13 minutes. The description of the migration of the Indians to the Americas is simplistic at best and leaves out the hot debate over the antiquity of the initial human colonization of the Americas for which researchers have come up with various dates between 14,000 and 27,000 years ago. The narrator fails to reveal how the date of 35,000 was derived and makes no mention of archaeological research and dating techniques or the geological and ecological phases of glaciation in the region. The film also fails to discuss the possibility that the first settlers may have arrived by way of Bering Strait coastal or inland routes, or via sea routes or even, possibly, by way of Atlantic coastal routes. No mention is made of the debate over single or multiple arrivals of Native peoples into North America. The film also ignores the rather interesting and important fact that some contemporary Indian groups simply reject the Western scientific migration model claiming that they have always been in the Americas.
While the culture areas presented do give some geographical, cultural, audio and visual introduction to Indian groups as well as some useful facts, the brevity of the work results in lumping unique groups within the culture areas into broad stereotypes. There are also several glaring errors in the film: the Huron speak an Iroquoian and not an Algonkian language; ômagical figuresö is a woefully inadequate description of the elements on a totem pole; potlatches were held for a variety of reasons depending on the cultural group; and each tribe did not have its own language (some spoke dialects of core languages and some groups shared a common language with small differences such as the Lakota).
The film's generalizations about linguistics are equally inaccurate. Robert Spencer and Jesse Jennings (The Native Americans) estimate that there were about 200 languages spoken at the time of European contact that can be verified rather than the 1,500 touted by the film. The number given for inhabitants of North America, 1 million, is also hotly contested. For a summary of this debate see David Henige's Numbers from Nowhere (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). The film uses some Plains Indian music although there is absolutely no discussion of this group. Finally, the film omits any mention of a wide variety of cultural groups from the Plains, California, Great Basin, Greater Southwest and Plateau cultural areas. No reason is given for the filmÆs seemingly random selection of cultural areas.
This film is of little use beyond a surface introduction to some of the issues in contemporary Indian studies and as a brief but incomplete and sometimes stereotyped introduction to the peoples in select cultural areas of North America.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Bucko, Raymond A.
2001 Review of The Indians Were There First. Anthropology Review Database. May 18. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1687, accessed February 10, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)