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Ted Turner Goes Native Tnt’s

3 minute read
Richard Zoglin

The political voyage of Ted Turner continues. First, the cable entrepreneur became a full-time booster of East-West friendship, sponsoring the Goodwill Games. Then he took up the cause of the environment. Now he is launching his most ambitious educational-programming venture yet: a yearlong series of shows about Native Americans.

The project will include six to eight TV movies (the first two airing on Turner’s TNT this month); a six-hour documentary series on Native American history (coming next fall on TBS); and a 20-part series of reports, The Invisible People, focusing on contemporary Native American issues (on CNN in late 1994). It’s a praiseworthy effort for at least two reasons. First, at a time when TV viewers are being regaled with lavishly researched documentaries on everything from the Civil War to Duke Ellington, American Indian history is still largely ignored. Second, Turner’s effort seems sincerely aimed at making a contribution, not just a buck.

It could do both. Geronimo, the TNT movie that launches the series next week, recounts the life of the notorious Apache warrior with more empathy for Native American culture than ever before, but not without its share of gun battles and scalping parties. (Scalping by the Mexicans, that is; the practice, we are told, was only later appropriated by the Indians in retaliation.) The film has an elegiac tone, opening at a Fourth of July celebration in 1905 attended by an old, sad-eyed Geronimo, by then something of a historical sideshow attraction. In flashbacks we see the education of a rebel, a young warrior who turns vengeful after his wife and baby are killed in a massacre by Mexican troops. A whiff of political correctness hangs over the show, as does some needlessly stilted dialogue (“The one who was my father has been gone from us many years”). But these are overcome by the film’s compassionate attention to a culture traditionally manhandled by Hollywood.

The Broken Chain, which debuts a week later, goes back a century earlier to the confederacy of six Iroquois tribes, an alliance that was shattered by conflicting loyalties during the American Revolution. The focus again is on a legendary rebel — Joseph Brant (Eric Schweig), an Iroquois warrior educated in English-speaking schools, persuaded his tribe to support the British during the revolution and later became a marauding terror to colonial settlers. The acting is more wooden and the drama more sketchy than in Geronimo. Yet the history lesson — that principles of the Iroquois confederacy were an important influence on the American Constitution — is well told.

+ In giving the Indian perspective on American history, the films cannot resist a few cheap shots. When Iroquois representatives visit the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they get warm praise from Benjamin Franklin. “Well done, Franklin,” a colleague confides later. “You do know your savages.” (Franklin’s smug reply: “Thank you.”) Still, these films show that TV history can do more than just confirm our prejudices and indulge our nostalgia (as in the recent orgy of Kennedy retrospectives). It can actually tell us something new.

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