From: "Heather Glaisyer" <heather-AT-teknopunx.co.uk> Subject: Re: nomadology (book) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 20:34:43 +0100 ----- Original Message ----- From: "shawn wilbur" 6:43 PM Subject: Re: nomadology (book) snip The essay on the Ishmaelites in "Gone to Croatan" fascinated me, but aside from rereading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Prairie," which features some version of their story, i've never followed up much. H Um........personally, shawn-I wouldn't give any weight to a single word that dude had to say about anyone............ H James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) penned his famous "The Last of the Mohicans" in 1826, setting the stage for numerous films and adaptations. Although a rebellious youth, Cooper married and lived an agrarian life till his writing career proved successful enough to cease farming. Cooper's story takes place during the French and British war of 1757 (The Seven Years War). Two Mohicans, Uncas and his father Chingachgook, befriend Hawkeye and some English colonists including Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British Colonel. In the original story, an Iroquois guide named Magua (meaning "Bear" in Algonkian) kills the younger Mohican, leaving the old man to be the final member of the Mohican race. Being a legitimate writer, anyone might assume that Cooper would get the rightful facts -- but he did not. With his mainstream acceptance and downright gullible popularity, Cooper's DEAD "Mohicans" have overshadowed the REAL Mohicans, who remain quite alive! I'm no Cooper literary critic, but apparently Mark Twain had something to say about it: "Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig... If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of 'situations' suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly." [Mark Twain] While Twain's 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (excerpted above) critiques Cooper's literary skills, it is the last band of Mohicans living today that takes issue with his subject matter. With only a hairbreadth appreciation for the lives of American Indians, Cooper had no clue who he was writing about, nor the effect his work would have on his living subjects. Unknowingly, Cooper even confused the Algonkian-speaking Mohicans with the Pequot-speaking Mohegans, two differing tribes. So, after hearing jokes such as "Oh ... are you the second-to-the-last of the Mohicans?" and variations ad-nauseam, I decided to compose my own story, "The Last of James Fenimore Cooper." Not to be over-shadowed by ridiculously bad spin-offs however, my version is different. "The Last of James Fenimore Cooper" combines the plot of Cooper's original story with that of a much older Mohican story about the Snow Monster of the North. In my version, Cooper is a character in his own story and becomes transformed -- his brainless deed forgiven. "The Last of James Fenimore Cooper" is an act of forgiveness and transformation by someone who daily walks through the eclipse of his statue, blasting sunlight through the dark silhouette. What would I tell Cooper if I met him today? "Obviously, the best way to know ABOUT Mohicans is to KNOW a Mohican -- better luck next time!" I therefore dedicate this work to the surviving Mohicans, the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Community, and to our perseverance, longevity, humor and unique way of life. "The Last of James Fenimore Cooper" was commissioned for the Miro Quartet by the Caramoor International Music Festival for A String Quartet Library for the 21st Century, and is published by Blue Butterfly Group (www.brentmichaeldavids.com). -- Brent Michael Davids The claim that opposition to nomadic tri-racial-isolates was the context for early US experiments in forced sterilization and other eugenic nastiness is certainly worth looking into. -shawn danceswithcarp wrote: > http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/defining.htm > > "This notion of a journey back to the primitive as a passage back to > origins is echoed in the title of a > recent volume edited by Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline: Gone to Croatan: > Origins of North American Dropout Culture. > As the book's opening page explains, "The first "drop-outs" from English > colonization in North America left the "Lost Colony" > of Roanoke and went to join the natives at Croatan.' However, in making > this linkage, radicals such as Sakolsky and Koehnline > are unwittingly aligning themselves with notions of the primitive that are > endemic in the West -- notions that are used to underpin > racism and imperialism." > > Dang it. I *know* a Bey was involved in this wirk (WIRK?). Maybe he was > one of the essaysists. The more I think about it the more I misremember > it, but a Bey is in this picture. It's where I first started looking at > moorish temple issues. > > carp
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