In addition to
OMEGA FLIGHT #1-2, I was just rereading
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS #1--another Native-themed comic I covered in 2007. Again I found a mistake I hadn't noticed before.
In this adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's novel, Hawkeye is talking to his friend Chingachgook. "Your fathers came from the setting sun, Chingachgook, and took the land"--whoa. The Mohicans came from the West to live in New York? I don't think so.
According to Wikipedia, the
Mahicans or Mohicanswere living in and around the Hudson Valley at the time of their first contact with Europeans in 1609. Over the next hundred years, tensions between the Mahicans and the Mohawks as well as the Europeans caused the Mahicans to migrate eastward into western Massachusetts and Connecticut to the Hudson River.So the Mohicans were native to New York when the white man arrived. They didn't come from anywhere--not in the Euro-American era, anyway. And by Hawkeye's time, they lived mainly in Connecticut and Massachusetts. If Chingachgook's people returned to New York, it would've been from the east, not the west.
Apparently every version of
The Last of the Mohicans includes cultural mistakes. From the same Wikipedia page:
James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Last of the Mohicans is based on the Mahican tribe but includes some cultural aspects of the Mohegans, a different Algonquian tribe living in eastern Connecticut. The novel takes place in the Hudson Valley, Mahican land, but some characters' names, such as Uncas, are Mohegan.Mahicans, Mohicans, Mohegans...well, they all sound the same, so they must be the same thing. Or close enough that it doesn't matter.
Not.
A writer who was more concerned with getting Indians right than being faithful to the text would explain the matter of Uncas's name. For instance, the writer could say Chingachgook named his Mohican son Uncas to honor the Mohegan chief
Uncas. As far as I know, no version of the story has ever done that.
For more on the subject, see
Comic Books Featuring Indians.
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