Educational Media Reviews Online

The Danish Broadcasting Corporation has done an appalling disservice to all North American Indians, especially the Indians interviewed in this program. This is just another one of the many “lumps them together” because an Indian is an Indian is an Indian (just like in the movies). When are we ever going to stop this horribly discriminatory but unfortunately still politically viable practice?

The narrator, who is never named, never introduces the focus or subject for this video. We are left with a mish mash of meta-concepts such as racism and discrimination, mentoring Indian youth, health problems and careers, medicine men and Western health providers, racist murders on reservations, lobbying the federal government, and the economics of casinos. The results are snippets of what it is like to be an American Indian today and that unfortunately only contribute to a glossy almost new age surface embedded with confusion and inaccuracies.

The First People, The Last Word, purports to represent all North American Indian tribes. It actually only represents individual tribes, Apache, Lakota Sioux, Navajo, and Pequot. It is poorly focused and its content is badly organized. There are virtually no interviewees names, tribe names are misspelled, you have to listen “hard” to know what state you are in, music from one tribe used as backdrop for visuals from another tribe, and the list goes on. It is a mish-mash of capitalism and Marxism that doesn’t seem to know where to settle economically.

However, the American Indians interviewed in this video provide the viewer with passionate and excellent intellectual content. Racism is addressed throughout by the Indians, but is left adrift with narrator innuendo about suspected murder by racist sheriffs among others. The economics and social problems of casinos (spreading the money around tribes, states not getting any resources from casinos) are discussed intellectually by the Indians while the narrator adds in comments like (Indian casinos) are “…the most refined revenge for past sins is the way Indians suck money from the white man’s pockets.” Health and social issues are given short shrift. Art from the point of view of an Apache artist and another American Indian, whose tribe is not named, are given more time and continuity than any other subject, but the segment suffers from poor editing.

The speakers in the video, including the narrator at times, are speaking English but the voice over narration is in Danish with English subtitles. The cinematography is poor to good in quality.

Rent and review before buying for your collection. Select pieces of this video could and should be used in junior/senior level college or university courses in art, media, American studies, anthropology, health, and other disciplines if students had prerequisite global preparation about American Indians or the individual tribes.