We Shall Remain-After The Mayflower Analysis

The documentary We Shall Remain- After the Mayflower presented contact and interactions between settlers and Native Americans in the early periods of English colonization. It used a familiar event; the Mayflower and the establishment of Plymouth as a colonial settlement to bring forth the information in a new way. Right from the beginning of the film, it clearly and quite drastically separated itself from other documentaries of its type. While other documentaries, and many have done so, would have focused its story-telling and angle of telling this history on the colonists, this centered on the Wampanoag people. Instead of starting with the Pilgrim’s journey across the Atlantic, and then their subsequent arrival, it started with the Native Americans’ perceptions and thoughts of what was going on beforehand. A review by the Washington Post stated, “The effect [of centering the film’s perspective on the Native Americans] is rather like the psychological shock one gets when the map of the world is turned upside down. It's still a map and still reliable in every way. It's just disorienting.” Even some of the language used by the narrator makes it clear it was. In this case, the word “stranger” was used to talk about the …show more content…
For instance, in many films, Native Americans were often either presented as violent “savages” or innocent; inferior to Europeans in terms of intelligence or knowledge about the world. However, from this documentary, the Wampanoag were presented with a lot more agency than a lot of other mediums have done. Even the title, We Shall Remain, could be taken to have a lot more significance in this context. By contrasting to another film, such as Saints and Strangers, the title doesn’t make events out to be black or white, but rather a complex, ambiguous narrative, trying to keep a European/American bias or slant away from telling the historical