2016’s Oscars Ceremony, to be held on Feb. 28, will certainly be interesting to watch. Between the unfortunate reoccurrence of an underrepresentation of minorities and this perhaps being Leonardo DiCaprio’s year when he finally wins his first Academy Award, the event has its fair share of storylines.
DiCaprio has been a star for decades now and he is always expected to lead a commanding role in any film in which he is involved. “The Revenant” teams up DiCaprio up with Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Oscar-winning director of last year’s “Birdman,” to create an intense story of revenge and loss set in the untamed wilderness.
In this film set in the 1820s, DiCaprio plays the role of Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who knows the land around the Mountain West and acts as guide to a group of fur traders. Glass has a son with a Pawnee woman, and a main part of the film deals with Glass’s mental split between his fellow white men and with his family’s Native American heritage.
Glass is attacked by a bear when alone in the woods and is soon betrayed by his fellow American, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). Glass watches Fitzgerald murder his son while he watches in agony, unable to move due to his injuries. Glass soon recovers enough to be able to walk and fend for himself in the wilderness, and he swears revenge against the man who killed his son.
The story of Hugh Glass’s fighting for survival is as much a tale about a human’s will to live as much as it is a story on how dramatically white settlers were impacted by Native Americans, and obviously vice versa. There are many scenes throughout the film depicting Native American life and how settlers came armed with guns and a will for capitalism that destroyed nature and lives. A central metaphor that recurs throughout the film is about a tree in a storm. During a storm, if one looks at the tree’s branches, it appears as though the tree will fall, but looking at the trunk shows the tree is strong and will not fall. This is reminiscent of the plights that Native Americans endured when white people destroyed their lives and lands.
The genocide of Native Americans is not some- thing commonly discussed in American society today. The governments and settlers of this country (mainly American settlers, but the French were shown in “The Revenant” as well) committed heinous atrocities when they emigrated from Europe and slaughtered the continent’s native populations. Settlers and frontiersmen not only killed Native Americans, they also wiped out huge populations of buffaloes and other wildlife that Native Americans depended on for survival, and chopped down forests in the name of white America.
DiCaprio’s character plays a role that many men of the era undoubtedly played, a father to a half-Native American child. Many white men of the time not only killed, spread diseases, and ruined the lives of natives, but they also left their genetic marks. Hugh Glass is enraged when the white Fitzgerald kills his son not just because he’s his father, but because it is a representation of the genocide of Native Americans.
It is unfortunate that most summaries of “The Revenant” describe the film as a story of survival, with the heroic DiCaprio and villainous Hardy bleeding wild blood and machismo, or simply mention that Leonardo DiCaprio deserves an Oscar for all that he went through when shooting the film. The true message of the movie should be that Americans need to have a serious discussion on what happened back then. The genocide of Native Americans should not, and cannot, be forgotten any longer.
Americans seem to have no problems discussing some disgusting parts of our collective past, such as slavery, segregation and the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. So why is it that the genocide of Native Americans is rarely discussed? “The Revenant” is an entertaining film, a wellmade depiction of what a human will do when weathering death’s storm. However, the film’s real message is that we destroyed Native Americans. America is not truly our country – these lands were never white until Europeans used deadly force and said they would be.
Leonardo DiCaprio is known for his involvement in social and environmental issues, and at the end of his acceptance speech for his Golden Globe for Best Actor in “The Revenant”, he said that “it is time that we heard [indigenous peoples’] voice(s) and protected this planet for future generations.” DiCaprio knows that the film’s message involves the indigenous plight, and it is now time for Americans to care.
We need to acknowledge that our ancestors were responsible for the genocide of this land’s natives, and the least we can do is actually talk about it. We need to hope for a future where all voices can be listened to – not just heard – and protected while developing a sustainable relationship with nature.
