Selling North American Indians short
Pathfinder is a soon-to-be-released movie based on an actual comic book. According to the movie’s trailer the plot is based on the idea that mounted Vikings raided North America about 900 A.D. (”600 years before Columbus” as the trailer has it) - more or less at will, it seems - and one of the raiding parties left behind some kid who then grew up to become a splendid warrior. That Viking-gone-native then slaughters a band of marauding vikings.
I like the idea of the alien who sides with the morally superior natives against his fellow folks, but otherwise the movie’s premise is pure garbage:
1) The garb worn by the vikings in the trailer isn’t just anachronistic but complete fantasy.
2) Vikings on horses in North America? What were they, amphibious Mongols?
3) Vikings didn’t reach North America until about 1000 A.D., less than 500 years before Columbus. They did not, in any meaningful sense, discover the continent. That feat belongs to 15th Century explorers. Nor did their goofball journey to North America leave a lasting impression, or any kind of impression, on either North American or European cultures.
4) There’s no way the few Vikings who made it to North America would have been able to raid villages. That they could have been defeated only by a left-behind Viking strikes me as insulting to North American Indians who as matter of historical record didn’t yield an inch to European settlers for more than a century after Columbus landed in the Caribbean.
In other words, it’s a pretty dumb story and an odd one, too, if the idea was to make money by glorifying North American Indians.
