An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

104 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

The Last of the Mahicans, published in 1826, was a best seller

throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continu­

ously since, with two Hollywood movies based on the story, the

most recent made in 1992, the Columbus Quincentennial.^2 ° Cooper

devised a fictional counterpoint of celebration to the dark under­

belly of the new American nation-the birth of something new and

wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of

the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European,

not biological merger but something more ephemeral, involving

the dissolving of the Indian. In the novel, Cooper has the last of the

"noble" and "pure" Natives die off as nature would have it, with

the "last Mohican" handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the

nativized settler, his adopted son. This convenient fantasy could be

seen as quaint at best if it were not for its deadly staying power.

Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which

generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what

historian Francis Jennings has described as "exclusion from the pro­

cess of formation of American society and culture":

In the first place they [US historians] exclude Amerindians (as

also Afro-Americans) from participation, except as foils for

Europeans, and thus assume that American civilization was

formed by Europeans in a struggle against the savagery or

barbarism of the nonwhite races. This first conception implies

the second-that the civilization so formed is unique. In the

second conception uniqueness is thought to have been created

through the forms and processes of civilization's struggle on a

specifically American frontier. Alternatively, civilization was

able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique

from the beginning-a Chosen People or a super race. Either

way American culture is seen as not only unique but better

than all other cultures, precisely because of its differences

from them.^21

US exceptionalism weaves through much of the literature produced

in the United States, not only the writing of historians. Although