Episode 23 - The Last of the Mohicans with Jonathan Bayer

Off-Campus History

On today's episode, we’re discussing 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans. This epic adventure film stars Daniel Day-Lewis and was adapted from an 1826 novel by James Fenimore Cooper.

The film is set during the Seven Years War—sometimes known in the United States as the French and Indian War. The story centres on Hawkeye, the adopted son of a Mohican chief, who seeks to protect two daughters of a British military officer from an Wendat warrior who wants them killed. Both the film and the novel on which it’s based have been very popular.

Today we dig into the history behind The Last of the Mohicans, discussing how it depicts Indigenous people, relations between various Indigenous nations and European empires, and the Seven Years War in North America.

To discuss this with me, I’m joined by Jonathan Bayer. Jonathan is a PhD candidate in history at Western University who studies eighteenth and early nineteenth century North America. His research focuses on American media portrayals of Canadians during this period.

For those of you interested in reading an overview of the Seven Years’ War in North America, check out William M. Fowler, Jr.’s Empires at War: The Seven Years’ War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763 (Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 2005). For those who’d like to learn more about media portrayals of Indigenous people, have a look at Robert J. Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979). (Note that both of these books use dated terminology in reference to Indigenous people.)

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