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TV, Documentary, American Experience - Tecumseh's fision - 2010- 1 0-25
The Cherokee would call it Nu-No-Du-Na Tlo-Hi-Lu, "The Trail Where They Cried." On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving them toward Indian Territory in Eastern Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died of disease and starvation along the way. For years the Cherokee had resisted removal from their land in every way they knew. Convinced that white America rejected Native Americans because they were "savages," Cherokee leaders established a republic with a European-style legislature and legal system. Many Cherokee became Christian and adopted westernized education for their children. Their visionary principal chief, John Ross, would even take the Cherokee case to the Supreme Court, where he won a crucial recognition of tribal sovereignty that still resonates. The Supreme Court ruling proved no deterrent to President Andrew Jackson's demands that the Cherokee leave their ancestral lands. A complex debate divided the Cherokee Nation, with Chief Ross urging the Cherokee to stay, and Major Ridge, a respected tribal leader, urging the tribe to move West and rebuild, going so far as to sign a removal treaty himself without the authority to do so. Though in the end the Cherokee embrace of "civilization" and their landmark legal victory proved no match for white land hunger and military power, the Cherokee people were able, with characteristic ingenuity, to build a new life in Oklahoma, far from the land that had sustained them for generations.
The Cherokee would call it Nu-No-Du-Na Tlo-Hi-Lu, "The Trail Where They Cried." On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving them toward Indian Territory in Eastern Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died of disease and starvation along the way. For years the Cherokee had resisted removal from their land in every way they knew. Convinced that white America rejected Native Americans because they were "savages," Cherokee leaders established a republic with a European-style legislature and legal system. Many Cherokee became Christian and adopted westernized education for their children. Their visionary principal chief, John Ross, would even take the Cherokee case to the Supreme Court, where he won a crucial recognition of tribal sovereignty that still resonates. The Supreme Court ruling proved no deterrent to President Andrew Jackson's demands that the Cherokee leave their ancestral lands. A complex debate divided the Cherokee Nation, with Chief Ross urging the Cherokee to stay, and Major Ridge, a respected tribal leader, urging the tribe to move West and rebuild, going so far as to sign a removal treaty himself without the authority to do so. Though in the end the Cherokee embrace of "civilization" and their landmark legal victory proved no match for white land hunger and military power, the Cherokee people were able, with characteristic ingenuity, to build a new life in Oklahoma, far from the land that had sustained them for generations.
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00:00:01Tecumseh and his younger brother grew up in the midst of the American Revolution.
00:00:07And it was an exciting time, I'm sure, for a young Shawnee man to come to manhood.
00:00:13But it was also a time of danger and a time of a certain amount of turmoil.
00:00:18It was a time when Shawnee warriors went south across the river to strike at the frontier forts in Kentucky.
00:00:25And it was a time when the Shawnee villages north of the Ohio were attacked periodically by expeditions of Kentuckians
00:00:32into the region.
00:00:38Named for the Kispakotha war clan into which he was born, whose spiritual patron was a celestial panther leaping across
00:00:44the heavens,
00:00:45he showed promise from the start, quick to learn, graceful and athletic, and touched with a striking natural charisma.
00:00:54There was a certain something in his countenance and manner, a childhood friend recalled,
00:00:58that always commanded respect and made those about him love him.
00:01:04The contrast could not have been more striking with his troubled younger brother, Lalawithaka.
00:01:11Lalawithaka was seven years younger than Tecumseh and grew up in his brother's shadow.
00:01:16He was very unsuccessful as a little child. His nickname was Lalawithaka, which means the noise maker.
00:01:22I think translated idiomatically probably meant loud mouth, a person that makes a lot of noise.
00:01:29As a child of about 10 or 12 years old, he shoots his own eye out while fooling around with
00:01:35a bow and arrow.
00:01:37And just is not a very happy young child.
00:01:46In the end, no Shawnee family would be left untouched by the rising tide of violence in the Ohio River
00:01:52Valley.
00:01:55Tecumseh and Lalawithaka lost their father when Tecumseh was seven.
00:02:00Their mother left for Missouri in 1779 after horrifying warfare between the Long Knives and the Shawnees,
00:02:10so that by the time Lalawithaka was 13, roughly half of their immediate family members had been either killed
00:02:18or had voluntarily removed from Ohio.
00:02:25For the Shawnees as a whole, the outcome of the American Revolution would prove nothing less than cataclysmic.
00:02:33All through the war, they fought valiantly on the British side in defense of their homelands,
00:02:38without losing a battle, only to discover, following the British surrender,
00:02:42that their one-time allies had ceded all lands west of the Appalachians to the new American Republic.
00:02:48At the Peace of Paris in 1783, no Indians are there.
00:02:53The terms of the treaty do not even mention Indian people.
00:02:58And yet, this is a treaty that has huge significance for Indians.
00:03:03Britain transfers to the new United States all territory that it has claimed,
00:03:09south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi, north of Florida.
00:03:14That is Indian country.
00:03:17For the United States, it's a crucial resource.
00:03:22Land is the basis of the new nation.
00:03:26Land is the opportunity to create what Jefferson comes to call an Empire of Liberty.
00:03:32But you have to get that land from Indian people.
00:03:36And within a few years, Indian people begin to recoil from that,
00:03:41and to recognize the degree to which the United States represents a major threat to their existence.
00:03:49Indian nations begin to unite in a confederation to resist that expansion.
00:03:57In the alliance of tribes that now rose up to stop the white invasion,
00:04:01the Shawnees would take the lead,
00:04:02and Tecumseh himself first make a name for himself on the field of battle,
00:04:06in what would prove to be the beginning of an epic 30-year long struggle,
00:04:10waged across a thousand miles,
00:04:12that would permanently shape the physical and moral geography of the new nation.
00:04:18The area they call the Old Northwest, the area north of Ohio,
00:04:21was sort of up for grabs in the period after the American Revolution.
00:04:25The British still had forts in Detroit,
00:04:27and they still had a lot of influence among the tribes,
00:04:31because they were operating out of Canada.
00:04:33And the British are not even sure whether the new United States is going to stand.
00:04:37And they feel that if the United States goes under,
00:04:41they want to be able to move back into this region in force.
00:04:45And so the British keep telling the Indians,
00:04:48well, you should stand up against the United States,
00:04:50and we will supply you with guns and ammunition.
00:04:55For six long years, the Shawnees and their allies kept U.S. forces on the run,
00:05:00all but destroying the American army in 1792 in northern Indiana.
00:05:05Only to be stopped two years later at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northern Ohio,
00:05:10where a well-planned retreat to the safety of a nearby British fort
00:05:13was turned into a disaster for the Indian Confederacy,
00:05:16and a bitter lesson in British reliability that Tecumseh would never forget.
00:05:22Tecumseh fights in the battle and eventually has to withdraw
00:05:25with part of his warriors towards the British fort.
00:05:29The tribal people assume that the British are going to let them into the fort
00:05:32and that there will be another stand made there, but the British refuse them entrance.
00:05:38The British slam the gates of the fort in their faces,
00:05:41fearful of a renewed war with the United States.
00:05:45To the Indians, to Tecumseh, this is another act of British betrayal.
00:05:51Well, Fallen Timbers is a disaster for tribal people, and it is following this battle that the tribes are forced
00:05:59to sign the Treaty of Greenville,
00:06:01giving up about the southeastern two-thirds of Ohio.
00:06:06Tecumseh refuses to sign the treaty. He even refuses to participate in the proceedings.
00:06:14Tecumseh is incensed that they are forced to give up much of his former homeland,
00:06:20but this is the death knell in many ways for the tribes in the Old Northwest.
00:06:27The natural world that the Shawnees knew is changing.
00:06:32Eastern tribes are being pushed farther into their lands.
00:06:35Their observations of deer being less, bear being less, the receding of wild game.
00:06:43And so Tecumseh has to construct some type of plan, and it has to be a large plan,
00:06:49in order to confront this huge westward expansion that begins to pulsate into different areas,
00:06:56into the Great Lakes area and into the southeast parts of the United States.
00:07:00But how do you stop this huge westward expansion?
00:07:09The Treaty of Greenville marked a crucial turning point in the battle for the eastern half of the continent,
00:07:15opening the Ohio River Valley to a flood of white settlers,
00:07:18and hemming the Shawnees and their allies onto dwindling tracts of land too small to sustain the old ways of
00:07:24life.
00:07:26Even in the newly created territory of Indiana, into which Tecumseh and his followers now retreated,
00:07:31hoping to find refuge, a systematic policy of land loss and dispossession was soon put into place by American politicians,
00:07:39eager to effect the transfer of land any way they could, and convinced the Indian way of life was dying.
00:07:47The American settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians,
00:07:52President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1801,
00:07:54who will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.
00:08:02Some tribes are advancing, and on these, English seductions will have no effect.
00:08:07But the backward will yield, and be thrown further back into barbarism and misery,
00:08:12and we shall be obliged to drive them with the beasts of the forest into the Stony Mountains.
00:08:18I don't think we appreciate just how ruthless Thomas Jefferson was as president in 1801,
00:08:27and how ruthless folks like Jefferson's territorial governor, William Henry Harrison,
00:08:33were in the period specifically after 1800.
00:08:36The Americans employed what was called the factory system,
00:08:40and what that was was the establishment of government forts throughout the old Northwest,
00:08:48where the government would accept furs in exchange for goods.
00:08:54And it became a way of making native people into debtors of the United States.
00:09:02And when Thomas Jefferson becomes president in his first term, he writes William Henry Harrison,
00:09:08and says, you know, essentially, through the factory system,
00:09:13native people will incur debts beyond what they are willing to pay,
00:09:17and they will only be able to pay those back through a cession of lands.
00:09:24So, for the Shawnees, for Tecumseh, it was a period of continual dispossession,
00:09:32a continual violence, and continual retreat.
00:09:37There is no place at that time you could really, if you were a Shawnee, have called home,
00:09:45because it was constantly being taken off you.
00:09:51So that, by 1805, native people find themselves confined to a small corridor of land,
00:09:59really a spit of land, in northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana.
00:10:03That's all that's left of them.
00:10:05And it is not enough to continue a hunting tradition.
00:10:12What was happening to them was a tragedy of epic proportions.
00:10:16Men could no longer hunt, they could no longer operate as life-sustaining killers.
00:10:22They could not feed their families via hunting.
00:10:26They were on a constant war footing.
00:10:29And another horrifying aspect of it is that so many men have tried to protect their people through war,
00:10:37and have died doing it, that these villages are totally out of balance.
00:10:44So that there are probably double the number of women as men in any native village in 1805,
00:10:54because of this war of attrition.
00:10:56And so these are not only broken homes, but broken communities.
00:11:03It is a time in which disease flourishes and spreads across many of the tribes of the Ohio Valley.
00:11:11It is a time when alcoholism begins to spread among the tribe.
00:11:15The very fabric of tribal society, the kinship systems, seem to be under stress.
00:11:20It is a time when I think a lot of Shawnees are having second thoughts about who are we and
00:11:25what is going on here.
00:11:26Why has the master of life turned his face from us?
00:11:30What has happened to us?
00:11:33What have we done to cause this?
00:11:40By the spring of 1805, the misery and suffering in northern Indiana had reached the breaking point.
00:11:47In Tecumseh's village along the White River, even so great a provider as he,
00:11:51was helpless to defend his people from the reign of woe now descending upon them.
00:11:56While almost day by day, his younger brother, Lalawithaka,
00:11:59a failed hunter and warrior who had tried without success to support his family as a holy man and healer,
00:12:05sank further and further into an abyss of shame and despair.
00:12:11I think that Lalawithaka fell victim to all of the worst unintended consequences of colonialism.
00:12:21You know, he was an alcoholic.
00:12:24Many viewed him as lazy, prone to violence.
00:12:28He abused his wife.
00:12:31And so every opportunity that Lalawithaka had to distinguish himself resulted in failure.
00:12:44And by most accounts, he could not support his family so that he was dependent upon Tecumseh and others like
00:12:52him to literally feed his family.
00:12:54He was so caught up in the sadness and the despair of dependency upon the United States in the form
00:13:04of alcohol and the fur trade, of land loss.
00:13:08It was so destructive and such a sad time.
00:13:14It would be all the more surprising then, in the dark spring of 1805, as the universe continued to come
00:13:21unhinged for the Shawnees,
00:13:23that a message of terrifying beauty and hope would be brought to the beleaguered people,
00:13:28coming in their very darkest hour, and in the end, from the least likely of sources.
00:13:42To be continued...
00:14:12I don't know.
00:14:49In 1805, his family recalls an event in which Lallahuithika falls into a fire.
00:15:01He collapses, and everyone in his immediate family and in his immediate vicinity believes
00:15:09that he's dead.
00:15:23Lallahuithika
00:15:45But he miraculously comes back to life.
00:15:49He wakes up to report a vision of extraordinary breadth and power.
00:16:06I died and was carried in a dream by the Master of Life down into the spirit world until we
00:16:17came to a parting of the ways.
00:16:22To the right lay the road to paradise, open only to the virtuous few.
00:16:33To the left I saw an army of forsaken souls stumbling on toward three dark houses, fearful dwellings
00:16:47of punishment and pain.
00:16:55I saw unrepentant drunkards forced to swallow molten lead.
00:17:01And when they drank it, their bowels were seized with an exquisite burning.
00:17:12At the last house, their torment was inexpressible.
00:17:15I heard their screams, crying pitifully, roaring like the falls of a great river.
00:17:43When Lallahuithika recovers from his vision, he says that he has come with a message.
00:17:54And the message is, I think, a message of revitalization, of restoration,
00:17:59for a people who have lost their way in the way that he had lost his way.
00:18:03He is a reformed individual.
00:18:06He takes a new name for himself, Tenskwatawa, the open door.
00:18:11And the message that he brings, that Indian people can make themselves whole again
00:18:17by rejecting the worst influences that white people have brought to them.
00:18:22It's a powerful chord.
00:18:24It gives people who may have lost hope, a new hope.
00:18:29It gives them a direction, it gives them an opportunity to remake themselves,
00:18:34to restore themselves by reviving their Indian culture and identity.
00:18:42Well, the impact is he reforms instantly.
00:18:45He suddenly doesn't drink anymore.
00:18:48And he is preaching to others now that if you want to save yourselves,
00:18:53you have to have a personal revolution in your way of life.
00:19:00My children, the Great Spirit bids me to say to you thus,
00:19:08you must not dress like the whites, you must not get drunk.
00:19:17It displeases the Great Spirit.
00:19:21And he formulated a message that appealed to a great many, Shawnee, Delaware,
00:19:30Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, because that was their experience at the time.
00:19:36You know, this is a world totally out of balance.
00:19:42And so his vision is the vision for all Native people in a broad way.
00:19:49It's intended for everyone.
00:19:53And as a recovered alcoholic, you know, he could speak to people
00:19:59who had not had that conversion experience,
00:20:01who were still caught up in that cycle of despair.
00:20:05He took the name Ten Square Tower, the open door,
00:20:09which was a way of...
00:20:10He was suggesting that he was a way that you could reach grace through him.
00:20:16He was a doorway to salvation.
00:20:21Friends and family members were astonished by the changes
00:20:24that had transformed Laloethika almost overnight.
00:20:27And none more so than Tecumseh himself,
00:20:30who all through the fall and winter of 1805
00:20:33looked on thoughtfully as young men from across the Midwest
00:20:36trooped into their village along the White River in increasing number.
00:20:40Drawn by his brother's siren call of renewal.
00:20:43And by his brother himself, who would soon be known simply as the Prophet.
00:20:57Now, my children, I charge you not to speak of this talk to the whites.
00:21:07The world is not as it was at first, but it is broken and leans down.
00:21:17And those that are on the slope, from the Chippewas and further,
00:21:23will all die if the earth should fall.
00:21:30Therefore, if they would live,
00:21:34let them send to me two persons from each village
00:21:39to be instructed so as to prevent it.
00:21:46I think Tecumseh understands that there are a whole bunch of wounded warriors out there.
00:21:53And by wounded, I mean people who are psychologically wounded,
00:21:57people who are culturally wounded.
00:21:58And I think he sees Tenskwatawa's vision as a means of inspiring them to act,
00:22:05to pick up their feet, you know, and to join him.
00:22:09So he parlays Tenskwatawa's vision into that kind of pan-Indian organizational scheme.
00:22:18And very quickly, as early as 1806, you see a political plan coming into it.
00:22:25Tecumseh is saying that we can use this movement
00:22:29to reunify this broken people, the Shawnees,
00:22:34which was a long desired dream of Shawnee leaders,
00:22:38was to bring this scattered tribe together,
00:22:41make them of consequence again.
00:22:59In the spring of 1806,
00:23:02the two brothers took their first decisive step.
00:23:05Eager to establish a center for the new movement
00:23:07and to reassert the Shawnee claim to homelands already ceded by treaty.
00:23:11They moved their village to a new site in western Ohio,
00:23:15on the American side of the line established by the Treaty of Greenville ten years earlier,
00:23:19in open defiance of the American government.
00:23:22Then sent out messengers to villages across the region,
00:23:25often led by Tecumseh himself.
00:23:28The Shawnees have heretofore been scattered about in parties,
00:23:31which we have found has been attended with bad consequences.
00:23:35We are now going to gather them all together to one town,
00:23:39that one chief may keep them in good order
00:23:42and prevent sickness, want, and shame from coming among them.
00:23:49Initially, Tecumseh remains in the prophet's shadow.
00:23:53We know that he's aware of his brother's transformation.
00:23:56We know that the brother lives in, quote, Tecumseh's village.
00:23:59But it is the prophet that first attracts the tribal people to the village.
00:24:07From the start, the new movement sent shockwaves surging through Indian country,
00:24:12unsettling native communities already rocked by decades of change,
00:24:16and deeply dividing the Shawnees themselves,
00:24:18along with other worn-down tribes like the Delawares and the Wyandots.
00:24:23The Shawnee chiefs in Ohio saw a power struggle in it straight away.
00:24:28They saw, this is a man from a junior division of the Shawnees,
00:24:31bidding for power, and we're darn well not going to give it to him.
00:24:36Even within Tecumseh's own nation,
00:24:39there are Shawnees who are now trying to follow the white man's path,
00:24:44who are following the lead of Blackhoof,
00:24:46who is a person who had fought against the Americans
00:24:49through the Revolution up until the Treaty of Greenville.
00:24:52But now, as an older man, is saying,
00:24:54we fought, we've tried that way, it's not working,
00:24:57we need to try this way.
00:25:01In April 1806, eager to win more recruits
00:25:04from among the troubled tribes in Ohio and Indiana,
00:25:08Tenskwatawa issued a direct challenge to any leaders who opposed him,
00:25:11accusing them of witchcraft and of being in league with the U.S. government.
00:25:16He essentially engaged in a series of high-profile confrontations
00:25:20with their leaders to the point where he enters into a Wyandotte village
00:25:26and engages in a ritualized killing of a Wyandotte leader.
00:25:31He essentially accused him and others like him of being a witch,
00:25:36of attempting to undermine them by acting as a kind of wedge
00:25:41for Americans to enter their communities and harm their people.
00:25:47And so people begin to see him as an iconoclast of sorts
00:25:51who is willing to take on government chiefs
00:25:54who are in the pay of the United States,
00:25:56and his message spreads like wildfire as a result.
00:26:06In late April, as a wave of fear and unease rippled through white communities
00:26:10in southern Indiana, the territorial governor,
00:26:13William Henry Harrison, fired off a letter to the Delawares,
00:26:16denouncing the Shawnee prophet as an imposter
00:26:18and urging them to put his supposed powers to the test.
00:26:24My children, who is this pretended prophet
00:26:28who dares to speak in the name of the great creator?
00:26:32Examine him.
00:26:35Demand of him some proof, at least, of his being the messenger of the deity.
00:26:42If he's really a prophet, ask him to cause the sun to stand still,
00:26:48the moon to alter its courses,
00:26:51the river to cease to flow,
00:26:54or the dead to rise from their graves.
00:26:58If he does these things,
00:27:00you may believe he is sent from God.
00:27:04Otherwise,
00:27:06drive him from your town,
00:27:08and let peace and harmony prevail amongst you.
00:27:17And in June 186, the Shawnee prophet predicts an eclipse of the sun
00:27:22called a black sun by the Shawnees,
00:27:25which is a sign of great things to come,
00:27:28a sign of great change.
00:27:31And at first, many Shawnees, many other Indians said,
00:27:34oh, this time I don't really think he's able to do it.
00:27:55Did I not speak the truth?
00:27:57See now, the sun is dark.
00:28:07And the eclipse was so complete that the farm animals, for example,
00:28:12went into the sheds, the birds roosted, et cetera.
00:28:15And the prophet's stock after this just rose like a skyrocket.
00:28:21William Henry Harrison could not have done anything that helps the prophet
00:28:27and propels the prophet in Tecumseh to a position of prominence
00:28:32more than issuing this challenge.
00:28:36As news of the miracle spread,
00:28:38the trickle of pilgrims coming into Greenville swelled to a flood.
00:28:42By July, Ojibwe villages on the shores of Lake Superior stood empty and deserted.
00:28:48To the south, Potawatomis left corn crops standing in the fields
00:28:52and came to hear the Shawnee holy man,
00:28:54whose words now, with each passing month,
00:28:57seemed to grow in stridency and power.
00:29:01My children,
00:29:03the Great Spirit bids me say to you thus,
00:29:07have very little to do with the Americans.
00:29:11They are unjust.
00:29:13They have taken away your lands which were not made for them.
00:29:19The whites I have placed on the other side of the Great Water
00:29:22to be another people separate from you.
00:29:26In time, I will overturn the land so that all the white people will be covered.
00:29:32And you alone shall inhabit the land.
00:29:38And the U.S. government panics.
00:29:42And the fear really proliferates.
00:29:48Because by 1807, certainly, I think most Americans just assumed an orderly process of dispossession and conquest,
00:29:59in which Native Americans would gradually recede from the picture or assimilate into American society.
00:30:07And when Tenskotawe has his vision, all of a sudden ten years of confidence erodes as Native people reconsider and
00:30:16attempt to reorganize themselves in an effective way against Jefferson's vision of land loss and dispossession.
00:30:29Now events began to accelerate.
00:30:32In the spring of 1807, the Indian agent at Fort Wayne, William Wells, alarmed by the upturn in Indians passing
00:30:40through his outpost,
00:30:41accused the prophet of keeping settlers in a continual state of uneasiness, he said, and demanded he leave Greenville.
00:30:49That June, convinced that English agents operating out of Canada were egging the Indians on to war,
00:30:55William Henry Harrison fired off a letter to the Secretary of War.
00:30:58I really fear, he wrote, that this said prophet is an engine set to work by the British for some
00:31:05bad purpose.
00:31:07In the fall of 1808, as the War of Words grew louder, the two brothers decided to move their center
00:31:13of operations to a new site,
00:31:15a hundred and fifty miles west, strategically located near the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers, deep in Indiana
00:31:22territory.
00:31:23Far away from prying white eyes, they hoped, and closer to the western tribes that had been most receptive to
00:31:29the prophet's message to begin with.
00:31:33The new village, called Prophetstown, would rise to become one of the greatest centers of Indian resistance on the North
00:31:39American continent.
00:31:41It would also become a major obstacle to the dreams of statehood nurtured by William Henry Harrison,
00:31:47who in 1809 redoubled his efforts to drive the Indians from Indiana,
00:31:51bribing local chiefs into signing away lands over which they had no authority,
00:31:55and pressing one land session after another through the territorial legislature,
00:32:00culminating in the notorious Treaty of Fort Wayne in the autumn of 1809.
00:32:07The Treaty of Fort Wayne really changes everything, and the politics comes to the fore.
00:32:17Here's three million acres of Indian land suddenly snatched away,
00:32:21and white settlements are moving closer than ever before to Prophetstown,
00:32:27and suddenly there is a need for a very urgent political action.
00:32:36For Tecumseh, it was the decisive moment.
00:32:40Convinced now that only the most radical and concerted efforts could save the Indian land base,
00:32:44he stepped out from behind his brother's shadow once and for all, and sprang into action.
00:32:51In the months and years to come, rallying warriors from half a continent to his cause,
00:32:56he would do everything he could to push back and redraw the still fluid boundaries of the new United States,
00:33:01and to create a permanent Indian homeland in the very heart of the country.
00:33:06Bounded by the Ohio River to the south and east, by the Great Lakes to the north,
00:33:11and by the Mississippi River to the west, a United Indian States of America within the United States.
00:33:21Tecumseh's vision is to establish, I think, what I would call cultural and physical space for Indian people.
00:33:30He understands that for Indian culture to survive, and for Indian independence to survive,
00:33:37there needs to be a land base.
00:33:39And that land base can only be preserved and protected by a united tribal resistance.
00:33:47This is no longer a fight that can be waged by just some Shawnees, just some Delawares, just some Wyandots.
00:33:56He's appealing to a larger pan-Indian future, in which the future of all Indian peoples will be affected by
00:34:07the stand that Indian peoples take now.
00:34:12They have driven us from the sea to the lakes, and we can go no farther.
00:34:20They have taken upon themselves to say, this tract of land belongs to the Miamis, and this to the Delaware,
00:34:26and so on.
00:34:30Our father tells us that we have no business on the Wabash, that the land belongs to other tribes.
00:34:39But the Great Spirit intended it to be the common property of all the tribes.
00:34:45Nor can it be sold without the consent of all.
00:34:52In 1809, Tecumseh set out with an entourage of warriors and interpreters, on the first of a series of epic
00:34:58tours.
00:35:00East to the Shawnees and Wyandots in Ohio.
00:35:03West to the Saxon Foxes and Ho-Chunks in Illinois.
00:35:07South to the Creeks and Choctaws in Alabama and Georgia.
00:35:10And north, as far away as Canada, to the home of the Senecas and the Iroquois, and the British.
00:35:16Determined to swell the ranks of the burgeoning Indian Confederacy any way he could.
00:35:21And to find supplies and reinforcements for the armed conflict he now knew was inevitable.
00:35:27He doesn't pluck this Confederacy out of nowhere.
00:35:30He just tries to revive the Confederacy he had known as a young man.
00:35:36He even uses the same terminology.
00:35:38The idea that the land is held in common by the Indians.
00:35:43No one tribe can cede it without the permission of the others.
00:35:47And therefore, it's in all our interests to defend it.
00:35:52Now, this was a job that was much more difficult than the job of the American founding fathers,
00:35:58who at least had some tradition of common origin and a similar language and similar thought patterns and mindsets.
00:36:07On top of those problems, though, Tecumseh was facing the fact that these weren't states.
00:36:13They were fragmented villages.
00:36:16So you couldn't just convince a few chiefs and hope that was going to do the business for you.
00:36:22Those chiefs might have almost no or little authority within their own communities.
00:36:30But this lack of authority in Indian communities both played against him and for him,
00:36:35because even if the chiefs were in opposition,
00:36:38he could pull the warriors from underneath them by appealing to them.
00:36:42And this is really one of his strategies.
00:36:51Listen, my people.
00:36:55The past speaks for itself.
00:37:01Where today are the Pequots?
00:37:05Where the Narragansett, the Powhatan,
00:37:08and many other once powerful tribes of our race?
00:37:15Look abroad over this once beautiful country,
00:37:19and what do you see?
00:37:23Nothing but the ravages of the pale-faced destroyers.
00:37:28And so it will be with you,
00:37:32Kreek, Chickasaws, and Choctaws.
00:37:36The annihilation of our race is at hand,
00:37:39unless we are united in one common cause
00:37:43against the common foe.
00:37:54I mean so many different groups come to this call for warriors.
00:38:00When you think about twenty different tribes,
00:38:02many in which the languages are so different, the politics are so different.
00:38:06He's dissolved tribal barriers, tribal differences, cultural differences as well,
00:38:11and he's got them to believe in one mind.
00:38:15For one person to get so many people to come with the same mind,
00:38:20yes indeed it's propaganda, yes indeed it's campaigning, yes indeed it's diplomacy,
00:38:25being an ambassador, a military strategist.
00:38:28And so in my mind, he's succeeded with this idea.
00:38:39By 1810, the impact of Tecumseh's diplomacy could be felt up and down the Wabash.
00:38:45By May, nearly a thousand people had streamed into Prophetstown,
00:38:49and all spring and summer, the numbers continued to build.
00:38:53Fearing imminent bloodshed, William Henry Harrison called for a contingent of federal troops
00:38:58to reinforce the territorial capital at Vincennes,
00:39:01then sent a messenger to Prophetstown itself,
00:39:04urging the Prophet to come to Vincennes to air grievances about the Treaty of Fort Wayne.
00:39:10In the end, it was Tecumseh himself who replied,
00:39:14telling the messenger that he personally would come to meet with Harrison
00:39:17to discuss Indian outrage over the newly ceded lands.
00:39:22On August 12th, 1810, a party of 75 warriors with Tecumseh in command
00:39:28arrived at Harrison's headquarters for the historic confrontation.
00:39:35There were some canonical stories about Tecumseh,
00:39:39which even if you knew nothing else, you could say,
00:39:42this is someone you have to reckon with.
00:39:45One of them is that confrontation with Harrison in 1810.
00:39:51That magnificent, really, confrontation where he knew a conflict was coming,
00:39:56and so did Harrison.
00:39:58And here you have two representatives of entirely different philosophies and points of view.
00:40:04And neither individual was afraid of the other.
00:40:09Harrison had no need to be. The resources were all behind him.
00:40:12But Tecumseh, there was no sense that being in a weak position should mitigate or reduce his point of view
00:40:23or the worthiness of his cause.
00:40:31How, my brother, can you blame me for placing little confidence in the promises of our fathers, the Americans?
00:40:38You have endeavored to make distinctions.
00:40:40You have taken tribes aside.
00:40:43You wish to prevent the Indians from uniting,
00:40:46and from considering their land the common property of the whole.
00:40:51I do not see how we can remain at peace with you if you continue to do so.
00:40:58Brother, this land that was sold,
00:41:00and the goods that were given for it,
00:41:04they were done only by the few.
00:41:07If you continue to purchase land from those who have no right to do so,
00:41:11I do not know what will be the consequence.
00:41:19I now wish you to listen to me, brother.
00:41:22I tell you so because I am authorized by all the tribes to do so.
00:41:27I am at the head of them all.
00:41:29I am a warrior,
00:41:31and all the warriors will meet in two or three moons from this.
00:41:35Then I will call those chiefs who have sold the land to you,
00:41:39and shall know what to do with them.
00:41:42Poor brother, we want to save this land.
00:41:45We do not wish you to take it.
00:41:48And if you take it,
00:41:49you shall be the cause of the trouble between us.
00:41:57The United States has not treated the Indians dishonestly nor unjustly.
00:42:04Indians are not one nation,
00:42:06nor do they own the land in common.
00:42:08Has not the great spirit given them separate tongues?
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00:43:17the talks continued, Tecumseh insisting the lands be returned, Harrison insisting they had been
00:43:23fairly acquired, refusing to return them. Before the deadlocked meetings adjourned, Harrison
00:43:29promised to pass Tecumseh's demands onto the president in Washington, adding, however, that
00:43:34he very much doubted the request would be granted. No one present ever forgot Tecumseh's reply.
00:43:44As the great chief in Washington is to determine the matter, I hope the great spirit will put
00:43:49some sense into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true he
00:43:58is
00:43:58so far off. He will not be injured by the war. He may still sit in his town and drink
00:44:09his
00:44:09wine, whilst you and I will have to fight it out.
00:44:37The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really
00:44:43astonishing. And more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses
00:44:51who spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.
00:45:01If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an
00:45:06empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.
00:45:15Now, Tecumseh did a remarkable thing. He said a remarkable thing in 1810 when he confronted Harrison and Vincennes.
00:45:22He said something I don't think any Native American had said before, and I don't think many had said afterwards.
00:45:30He stood up, defended Indian land, and said he represented every Indian on the continent.
00:45:39Now, what a preposterous assertion, even for someone whose life had been so far flung as his.
00:45:47But to make such a claim at that time, it was an absolutely preposterous thing to say.
00:45:54Yet what he was saying was that he understood that Native American peoples were in a particular historical predicament.
00:46:04And he was articulating that predicament. And he was doing it for all of them.
00:46:17Well, I think by the 1811, Tecumseh can see that war is imminent between the Americans and the British.
00:46:22And I think he hopes to use this war to help defend Native American homelands in the old Northwest.
00:46:29The problem for Tecumseh is always going to be one of logistics.
00:46:33It's one of bringing in large numbers of warriors and supplying them and feeding them
00:46:37and providing them with adequate arms and ammunition.
00:46:41My sense of Tecumseh is that he was keenly aware of moments of opportunity, moments to strike, moments to act.
00:46:51And 1811 was not one of those moments.
00:46:59The dog days of summer, 1811, were just reaching their peak when Tecumseh embarked on one last grueling tour.
00:47:06Heading south this time to what the Shawnees called the Midday, determined to bring the Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks into
00:47:13the Confederacy
00:47:13and to shore up British support for the movement.
00:47:19Before leaving Prophetstown, Tecumseh urged his younger brother to do everything he could to keep from being drawn into a
00:47:25fight with Harrison prematurely.
00:47:27Then made one last stop at Vincennes to see Harrison himself before continuing south, hoping to convince him not to
00:47:34initiate hostilities.
00:47:37Well, I think it was crucial to hold off for several reasons.
00:47:40The first is that Tecumseh was the only person equipped to lead.
00:47:45The second being that British support was crucial and whatever they did, it had to be coordinated with the British.
00:47:53And third, I think Tecumseh was really confident that his southeastern tour would result in a great many adherents.
00:48:05August 6th, 1811.
00:48:09The day before he set out, he paid me a visit and labored hard to convince me that he had
00:48:15no other intention by his journey to the south
00:48:17than to prevail on all the tribes to unite in the bonds of peace.
00:48:24August 7th.
00:48:27He is now upon the last round to put a finishing stroke to his work.
00:48:33I hope, however, before his return, that that part of the fabric, which he considered complete, would be demolished,
00:48:46and even its foundations rooted up.
00:48:56In late August, writing that Tecumseh's great talents alone were holding together the heterogeneous mass of warriors on the Wabash,
00:49:03Harrison received permission to march on Prophetstown.
00:49:06And one month later, on September 26th, 1811, at the head of a force of nearly 1,000 men,
00:49:13headed north towards the Indian stronghold, 180 miles away.
00:49:19As reports came into Prophetstown of Harrison's approaching army, hundreds of warriors converged on the Indian village to defend it.
00:49:28As Ten Square Tower watches the American army advance, he is faced with the question of what to do.
00:49:37You sit and wait to see if the American intentions are peaceful, or should you strike against it.
00:49:43When Ten Square Tower hears of the American army advancing, he interprets this as an act of aggression.
00:49:52Around 2 o'clock on the afternoon of November 6th, Harrison's thousand man force clambered up a steep ravine on
00:49:58the eastern side of a narrow stream called Burnett's Creek,
00:50:00and went into camp on a narrow bench of high ground planted with high oak trees.
00:50:07One mile to the east lay Prophetstown, stretching south along the Wabash from the mouth of the Tippecanoe.
00:50:14As the light began to fail, two officers and an interpreter rode out under a white flag to convey Harrison's
00:50:20orders that the Indian camp disperse.
00:50:24In Tippecanoe, there's a crucial moment on November 6th, when Harrison arrives.
00:50:32He arrives with more than a thousand men, and Harrison and Ten Square Tower agree to meet the next day
00:50:39to discuss how they might reach some kind of compromise.
00:50:44But on the night of November 6th, Tensquataue is besieged by his western Algonquian allies, and they tell him,
00:50:54Look, you know, we have to fight. We have to surprise them. They think we're going to have a discussion,
00:51:00but let's wage a pre-emptive strike.
00:51:03To come all that way, and to do nothing but wait for Tecumseh, made little sense to them.
00:51:19And so Tensquataue goes against his brother's wishes for him. You know, he caves to pressure.
00:51:26And not only that, but he tells his allies that they'll be safe from American bullets,
00:51:34that his power as a medicine man is such that no one will be harmed.
00:51:46Some time in the night, a long column of warriors began to file silently out of the village, heading in
00:51:51a long arc for the northwest corner of the American encampment.
00:51:58It was a very wet morning.
00:52:04Sentries are posted and everything, and possibly Winnebago warriors, but certainly warriors try to penetrate the camp, crawling in to
00:52:15the camp, and they even make it past the sentries.
00:52:19Around four in the morning, a picket, stationed a few yards out beyond the left flank of the camp, thought
00:52:25he saw something moving in the trees.
00:52:29Whipping his musket to his shoulder, he fired blindly into the building, mortally wounding a Kickapoo warrior as he attempted
00:52:36to steal into the camp.
00:52:40Harrison himself was in his tent when the first shot rang out, followed by a series of blood-curdling war
00:52:46cries and a tremendous crash of muskets as the war party rushed in.
00:52:52The battle of Tippecanoe had begun.
00:52:57It was a classic Indian attack.
00:53:00If you don't have the numbers on your side, you make a sudden attack and try to overwhelm and demoralize
00:53:08the enemy quickly.
00:53:11And it was carried through at Tippecanoe with great determination, considering how few warriors there were, and they didn't have
00:53:21much ammunition.
00:53:23The Indians were a very mobile force.
00:53:26They were almost like water.
00:53:28They gave way to things and they strengthened around weak points in a very flexible way.
00:53:33They didn't have to wait for orders from chiefs.
00:53:37They fought very much individually.
00:53:41So, if they perceived a force getting out of its depth, moving forward and getting split up from the main
00:53:48force,
00:53:49they could easily rally round and start surrounding it and cutting it to pieces.
00:53:55I mean, if there had been more Indians on the ground, the Indians might have been capable of inflicting great
00:54:02damage.
00:54:06The Indian warriors attack Harrison's army in camp at dawn.
00:54:12For a moment, it looks as if the Indians have infiltrated the lines, there's confusion.
00:54:18But as the light increases, it becomes clear to the Americans that the Indians lack the numbers,
00:54:25that they lack the ammunition to carry this assault home.
00:54:29And eventually, the Indians are driven from the field.
00:54:36In reality, the Americans suffered probably more casualties than the Indians.
00:54:43The American force was superior.
00:54:45The American force was better armed.
00:54:47The American force had more ammunition.
00:54:50But I do think that it represents a blow to the Confederacy.
00:55:01On the night of November 8th, two days after the battle,
00:55:05Harrison's soldiers edged warily into Prophetstown for the first time.
00:55:09Only to find that the Confederated forces had dispersed into the surrounding countryside.
00:55:16Ordering his men to plunder the village, setting fire to the lodges and destroying all the Indians' food supplies,
00:55:22Harrison headed back down the Wabash towards Vincennes,
00:55:26declaring in dispatches his mission had been accomplished.
00:55:41Following the defeat at Prophetstown, one would think that all of this was over.
00:55:46And it was not.
00:55:47It was just the beginning, in fact.
00:55:50It was an impossible task of the largest scale for Tecumseh to rebuild his army, and he did,
00:55:56making twice the efforts, twice the stamina.
00:56:01When Tecumseh comes home, he's reputed to have grabbed the Prophet by the hair and shaken him,
00:56:09and reprimanded him, scolded him for this foolish action.
00:56:16Tecumseh, we know, was very angry with his brother after this battle.
00:56:20And I think the Prophet spends the rest of his life trying to get back into a position of promise.
00:56:31Tecumseh has a choice.
00:56:33Do you discard the Prophet, or do you reunite with him in this kind of campaign effort?
00:56:41And he realizes that he has to embrace him again.
00:56:44And he forgives his brother, and so now we're in the next chapter of rebuilding this huge army.
00:56:51And this time, no mistake about it, Tecumseh is going to be there.
00:56:58Though Harrison had destroyed the Indian food supplies and scattered the Indian warriors,
00:57:02he had not destroyed the Confederacy itself, and he had not destroyed Tecumseh.
00:57:07And in the end, only succeeded in emboldening the great Shawnee warrior,
00:57:11who, on returning to the Wabash in January 1812,
00:57:15immediately set out to reassemble the scattered alliance.
00:57:19Convinced, despite all appearances to the contrary,
00:57:22that the moment of opportunity for the Indian Confederacy was rapidly approaching.
00:57:27I think, in a way, Harrison creates a huge problem for all Americans living in the Northwest Territories,
00:57:36because he disperses those who are antagonistic to the United States everywhere across the Midwest.
00:57:45They have not given up. They're not putting their weapons down.
00:57:52All through the winter and spring of 1812, as long festering tensions between the United States and Great Britain spiraled
00:57:59upward,
00:58:00Tecumseh labored tirelessly to rebuild the Confederacy and to shore up British support,
00:58:05before a renewed offensive could be launched against Prophetstown.
00:58:09By May, more than 800 warriors had streamed back into the village,
00:58:13while across the Northwest, more than 4,000 warriors were on the move,
00:58:18the largest Indian Confederacy ever mustered on the North American continent.
00:58:23By the third week of June, Tecumseh himself was on his way north towards a British fort on the Canadian
00:58:29side of the Detroit River,
00:58:31hoping to secure supplies and ammunition,
00:58:33when a messenger arrived, bearing news he had long been waiting for.
00:58:39Three days earlier, on June 18th, the United States had officially declared war on Britain,
00:58:44over the fate of the long-contested Northwestern frontier.
00:58:48The war of 1812 had begun, bringing with it the last best hope of a permanent Indian homeland,
00:58:55east of the Mississippi.
00:58:58And, of course, the British were at a crisis point themselves there.
00:59:02They needed American Indian allies.
00:59:05They were fighting a war in which the odds were against them.
00:59:08They wanted to defend the Canadian line.
00:59:11And, of course, they needed manpower.
00:59:13Only the Indians could fill that void for them.
00:59:17So it was an inevitable alliance at that point.
00:59:21Tecumseh needed them, and they needed him.
00:59:25And, certainly, Tecumseh's war aims, he was still, incredibly, I have to say,
00:59:30in 1812, looking at some possible way to regain the Ohio boundary
00:59:36as a boundary between the white settlements and the Indians.
00:59:40And he sold that goal to the British.
00:59:46The British.
00:59:49The British.
00:59:53The British.
01:00:05Do the process –
01:00:06this would be leading a tax course of Prism but producing Alec.
01:00:06Is it sill the Russian commander and playing in Japan?
01:00:18To this and for the Germans?
01:00:20a mere few weeks, but he wrote back to the British Prime Minister and he says
01:00:25that I've talked to the Indian chiefs and there are some extraordinary characters amongst them,
01:00:31but here's Tecumseh, he says, a more gallant or sagacious warrior does not exist.
01:00:40Tecumseh's brilliance on the field of battle in the summer of 1812
01:00:43would cement his reputation among the British High Command
01:00:46as one of the greatest military leaders of all time.
01:00:50In little more than three weeks, the small but highly mobile force under his command
01:00:55completely unnerved the American army led by William Hull,
01:00:59forcing him to retreat back across the Detroit River to the American side
01:01:03and effectively bringing the invasion of Canada to an end.
01:01:07On August 4th, at the Battle of Brownstown south of Detroit,
01:01:11with only 24 warriors at his command,
01:01:14Tecumseh attacked and routed an American force six times as large,
01:01:17killing 19, wounding 12, while himself losing only a single warrior.
01:01:24Tecumseh's finest hour is probably Detroit in 1812,
01:01:28when Tecumseh teams up with Isaac Brock,
01:01:32who finally seems to be the person who's going to deliver on the promises
01:01:38that the British have been making so long.
01:01:42Tecumseh and Brock together mastermind the capture of Detroit.
01:01:48On August 16th, at the Battle of Detroit,
01:01:51Tecumseh convinced the American defenders inside the fort
01:01:54that they were facing an army many times greater than their own,
01:01:58parading his small host of warriors again and again through a clearing in the forest.
01:02:04Before the British and Indian attack had even begun,
01:02:07a white flag appeared above the ramparts of the fort,
01:02:10and the American army marched out and surrendered their weapons.
01:02:15It was one of the most humiliating defeats ever suffered by an American army.
01:02:21Fort Detroit falls, Fort Mishlamackinaw falls.
01:02:25Tecumseh and Brock, who are very close, are able to take Fort Detroit.
01:02:30They're able to generally gain the upper hand here on the Detroit frontier.
01:02:35And it seems as if the vision of an independent Indian Confederacy,
01:02:42an independent Indian state, if you like, supported by British allies,
01:02:47but independence of the United States, is on the brink of becoming a reality.
01:02:56And then unfortunately for Tecumseh, and unfortunately for tribal people,
01:03:00General Isaac Brock is killed fighting the Americans over by Niagara.
01:03:05And the new British commander is named Proctor,
01:03:08and he's much less aggressive and much more interested in just defending Canada
01:03:14and in not really helping tribal people retake part of Ohio from the Americans.
01:03:20Tecumseh has to continually goad Proctor to march against the Americans.
01:03:25They invade Ohio twice, attempting to take Fort Migs,
01:03:30which was an American fort near modern Toledo, and are unsuccessful.
01:03:36In the fall of 1813, the British fleet was defeated not far from Detroit
01:03:41at the Battle of Lake Erie, ceding control of the Great Lakes to the Americans.
01:03:46By then, Laloetheka and a ragged band of followers had appeared in his brother's camp
01:03:51along the Detroit River in Ontario, driven from Indiana by their old nemesis,
01:03:56William Henry Harrison, who even now was moving north
01:04:00at the head of a vastly reinforced American army.
01:04:04The Americans invade Canada, and particularly after Perry's victory on Lake Erie,
01:04:10the British want to abandon the Detroit frontier and flee to what is now Toronto,
01:04:15and Tecumseh makes them stand and fight.
01:04:19The British Indian Army turns to make a stand at Moravian Town
01:04:23on the Thames River in Ontario in 1813.
01:04:27The outcome of the battle seems really to have been a foregone conclusion.
01:04:31By the time the British General Proctor actually stops to turn to fight,
01:04:37he's lost the confidence not only of his Indian allies but of his own men.
01:04:42When the fighting breaks out, the British resistance is minimal.
01:04:47What resistance is mounted is mounted by Tecumseh and the Indian warriors.
01:04:55The final British betrayal would come on the cold, misty morning of October 5th, 1813,
01:05:01when as Harrison's vastly superior American forces began their attack,
01:05:05the British simply abandoned their Indian allies entirely
01:05:08and left them to fend for themselves on the field of battle.
01:05:13In one of the more remarkable speeches given throughout American history,
01:05:18Tecumseh says to the British,
01:05:20look, you have somewhere to go, but we are standing here
01:05:23and we are fighting for our homeland.
01:05:25If you want to run, you run, but leave us the guns and ammunition
01:05:29because we will stand and fight.
01:05:35Listen, Father!
01:05:36We are much astonished to see you tying up and preparing to run the other way.
01:05:41You always told us to remain here and take care of our lands,
01:05:46and it made our hearts glad to hear that was your wish.
01:05:50But now we see you drawing back like a fat animal,
01:05:56running off with its tail between its legs.
01:06:00Listen, Father!
01:06:02The Americans have not yet defeated us by land.
01:06:05We therefore wish to remain and face our enemies.
01:06:09Should they make their appearance,
01:06:11if you have an idea of going away,
01:06:14leave us the guns and ammunition,
01:06:17and you may go and welcome for us.
01:06:22Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit.
01:06:26We are determined to defend our lands,
01:06:29and if it is his will,
01:06:32we shall leave our bones upon them.
01:06:34Salvatore!
01:06:37Salvatore!
01:06:39Salvatore!
01:06:40Salvatore!
01:06:46Salvatore!
01:06:48And then finally, at the end,
01:06:50you often tell great leaders in the way they react in adversity,
01:06:55rather than victory.
01:06:58He knew that the British had given way before they engaged themselves.
01:07:04And yet, there is no question of him retreating.
01:07:09There is no question of him doing the sensible thing,
01:07:12which is to fight another day.
01:07:15He has committed himself to this act.
01:07:19He has said he's going to defend this land,
01:07:22and if necessary, he's going to die for this land.
01:07:24And that's what he does.
01:07:44He's going to die.
01:08:06You couldn't think, in some ways, of a more fitting way for Tecumseh to die.
01:08:11He dies in the final battle here for the control of the Great Lakes,
01:08:16and he dies surrounded by his comrades.
01:08:19He dies killed by the Americans.
01:08:23And in the aftermath, his body is mutilated so badly by Harrison's Kentucky militia that the Americans who know him
01:08:33can't really identify him.
01:08:41And with Tecumseh dies, of course, the person who has held together the Indian Confederacy,
01:08:48the person who has represented the best hope for Indian independence in North America.
01:09:00The death of Tecumseh puts, in a sense, finality on the American conquest of that area.
01:09:07That what we know now is that what we know now is that there's an American heartland is going to
01:09:11be American.
01:09:12There will be no place in there for Indian people.
01:09:34I think Tecumseh is, in a sense, saved by his death.
01:09:55One of the great things in icons is to bow out at the right time.
01:10:02And one of the things Tecumseh does is he never let you down.
01:10:09He was there articulating his position, uncompromisingly pro-Native American position.
01:10:17He never signs the treaties.
01:10:19He never reneges on those basic principles of the sacrosanct, Aboriginal holding of this territory.
01:10:29He bows out at the peak of this great movement he is leading.
01:10:34He's there right at the end, whatever the odds are, fighting for it into the dying moments.
01:10:43I think one of the things that is so important about Tecumseh is that he is a person who, by
01:10:52his vision and by his personality and the way he conducts himself,
01:10:57gives us glimpses of humanity at its best.
01:11:00That in the most difficult of situations, in the most hopeless of situations, perhaps, people can have the courage to
01:11:08stand up and fight for what they believe in.
01:11:11Courage in the face of adversity.
01:11:15Tecumseh personifies it.
01:11:19Hope.
01:11:21Hope and freedom.
01:11:25That's what I thought he was doing.
01:11:28It is his vision that he had, you know, the way he looked into the future and tried to stop
01:11:35progress for the red people.
01:11:41For some people, they may have called him a troublemaker, and I think that's because, in the end, he lost.
01:11:48Had he won, he'd been, you know, a hero.
01:11:53But I think, to a degree, he still has to be recognized as a hero for what he attempted to
01:11:59do.
01:12:01If he had, you know, a little more help, maybe he would have got a little farther down the line.
01:12:06If the British would have backed him up like they were supposed to have, you know, maybe the United States
01:12:15is only half as big as it is today.
01:12:18Next time on American Experience, they change their way of life.
01:12:23The Cherokees were one of the civilized tribes.
01:12:26But the law of the land would not protect them.
01:12:28Andrew Jackson, the only president to openly defy a Supreme Court order.
01:12:32Even those we call friends say we can't resist anymore.
01:12:37They couldn't comprehend a handful of people signing a piece of paper would be enough to remove them from their
01:12:43homelands.
01:12:44Trail of Tears, when We Shall Remain continues.
01:12:48Watch and learn more about Native Americans past and present at pbs.org.
01:12:55The complete five-part series of We Shall Remain is available on DVD.
01:13:00To order, visit shoppbs.org or call us at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
01:13:07We Shall Remain is available on DVD.
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