Rescuing the Indian Soul in America

Today most of us have heard about how much the western white men devastated American Indians. That happened not only by the hands of Englishmen, but by the hands of many western colonizers who put his/her feet on America’s soil: in South America, mostly Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch; in Central America, mostly Spanish and English; in North America, mostly English, Spanish and French.

Nevertheless, like Nietzsche said, "when one looks at the abyss, one must bear in mind that the abyss is also looking back" (actually I can’t recall the exact words), which means that everything you do belongs to what you are: people reveal themselves not only when they talk or write, but also in their way of walking, looking, acting, anything that they’re doing. One cannot escape from being oneself even when one is not aware of it, would say Jung, according to Nietzsche’s philosophy.

I most of my opinions, I am concerned in exposing some but not all psychological aspects, according to Analytical Psychology, of the human soul when reflected by these movies. This is not an exception.

I’ll pay some attention to the emotional aspects involved in it. When I first watched the "Last of the Mohicans," I liked the movie, and that is an emotional position: it is an adventure in which romance is involved, it happens in a time when the forest was there and wild animals were free to go anywhere, and it has that feeling of something like "I don’t have to show you my ID to be me." This is, at a first glance, what this movie makes me feel.

Now let us take a look at this from the inside: we are living in a world where, if you take a walk out of your home, you have to carry at least an identification, along with some money - otherwise there’s a good chance that you might not get back in peace if you go far enough. It means that today one lives in a world in which one needs something else from the outside, something more to attest the reality of being what one is, something more than just being oneself. It is in a certain way a restriction of one’s personal freedom.

That was not the case in the 18th century: Hawkeye answers to the English Crown’s Officer: "I don’t consider myself subject of much at all," the moment when the Officer criticizes his attitude regarding his enlistment in the English militia against the French.

At that time people could simply take a walk on the forest to find some food and water, which unfortunately is becoming each second more impossible for today’s mankind: fresh, pure water, for instance, is becoming more and more scarce as the clock ticks.

If man could be wilder at that time, they could be in touch with something which is, also, becoming more difficult for both genders in our days. Law is becoming imposed on the relationship between genders now much more than yesterday, for good and bad.

At that time there was no specific law imposed on the sexual nature of relationships between men and women: for good and bad, people were based mostly over the moral constitution of their relationships, which still relied heavily on religion, while today this is not the only case.

While civilization advances and the western world remains unaware of the need for the improvement of the relation between the human being and Nature, it becomes proportionally difficult to keep those cultures which, adversely, are well related to Nature, preserving wildlife in and outside their own lives. At a certain point of our lives, however, we need to look back and realize how much we have lost of ourselves when we lost our capacity to live in harmony with Nature.

So, lets get back to Hollywood. It is a school of arts and entertainment, sometimes more entertainment than art and sometimes more business than entertainment, but well, everything becomes blurred in the time we’re living in, things are not only black and white, and I do agree that if you want to pass a message, you must do it sometimes like Hollywood does: to get the attention of many people. It is not a movie for heavily intellectualized discussion, it is an adventure film from Hollywood, which has those elements that will take you to a dreamworld in which the grandpa and grandma of the grandpa and grandma of your grandpa and grandma lived in. At least, it has the imagination of how it was from a romantic perspective, something we lack everyday in our industrialized lives. So, poetic license, people at Hollywood would say.

Yes, we need poetry, while we need to consider ourselves adventuring our lives. This is why such a movie succeeds so much, and that’s why other movies in which there is wild life and romance will still find the road to money at the box office: they remind us of something which we might never had at all.