Mohawk Girls (2010)

I will watch pretty much anything that is created by native Americans, and have seen a large number of native American films. Once I heard of this TV show I had to watch it. This taught me more about modern native culture than any other film I have watched, though I am not sure how accurate it is. It was interesteing in the way the series was presented, as a kind of fish out of water tale, with Anna going to the resevation, to join the culture of her father. As she meets the other people on the resevaration, they highly critical of her, starting with her appearance, and also being that she doesn't follow their ways, which seems to mostly be catering to the men, getting in physical fights and drinking. She is introduced to the culture by her friends, and others who live on the reservation, though the others are quite hostile with her at times. But, in general, she being exposed to traditoinal Mohawk culture, but to the modern way the people live on the rez, which in my opinion is far from the tradtional Mohawk culture. Even worse, the people on the reservation often reject attempting to experience a larger world, rejecting traveling to other countires, learning foriegn languages and studying, especially in college. Bailey is shown having a job making cigarettes, which first must be an extremely mind numbing job and second is working in a dying industry which is selling a product that is determental to it's users health. I would think that anyone would be bored with that life and want to seek out challenges. They brought up the concept of the Blood Quatnum System which is shocking if it is still in use. First, and formost, it is appaling racist, to the level that Hilter working towards with his Arian Race. Also, it is appalingly ineffective and outdated, both culturally and scientifically. If they were to switch to a system of DNA (which I assume to be much more accurate test of actual Mohawk ancestry), they would find that a large percentage of the people on the reseveration are under the 50% quantum level that was set as a requirement for living on the reservation. While I know the actors in this show are all of native decent, looking at them, 98% of them appear to be white (two of the main stars of the show, Anna and Caitlin) look like native Americans to me, though a few others show some native American characteristics). While this may be an accurate depection of the physical appearance of people who live on resevations, it does make me wonder if they were to give those people a DNA test if they would really have as high a level of native ancenstors as they are lead to beleive from the blood quantum system. It's funny, cause at this show is native American produced,those people who do have native ancestors, but don't appear physiclaly as native Americans, were able to get acting roles. Of course, in Hollywood, only people who's physical appearance looks native were able to get native American roles, even though some of them had no native American ancestors at all. For example. in the Keep America Beautiful ads back in the 70s, an actor with the stage name Iron Eyes Cody protrayed a native American but was actually of Italian decent (though born in America) The other thing is that if there main requirement is to be 50% or greater Mohawk, it is a very odd requirement, as I belive that native tribes internmixed, having members of other tribes join their tribe (I belive through adoption), so that the phyical make up of a person was not any sort of requirement to be part of the tribe. Also, I don't know the history, but I belive the piece of land they live on, the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, was not originally set as a Mohawk territory, with set bounderies, so that they didn't make it a practice restrict those who lived on the land to only Mohawks. It's very odd that the physical make up of the people is the standard by which they judge how Mohawk people are, though I understand it is obvioulsy easier to quanity phystical make up rather than something such as knowledge of culture. But that could lead to a future where the make up of the people would be of those who had a very high Blood Quantum level, but no knowledge of there culture. While I understand their language is dying out, language is a essental part of cutlure, and it should be something that they are working to preseve and hopefully bring it back to being an active part of daily Mohawk life. One other things is they do show a hatred of white people, which is very odd. While on the surface it makes sense, as you can blame white people for taking their land, the root of the problem is the white people who are alive today did not take part in taking away their land, and nothing those people have done in their lives had any impact on those events. Also, the term itself "white people" is a huge generalization. Caucasion is a giantic group of people, which diverse roots in European countries, and many of those groups were not present in North America nor were they participants in taking away of native lands. For example, Irish had their land colnized by England for around 850 years, predating Europeans coming to the Americas by 300 years. It's also odd (though perhpas accurate) that the families of the girls are so against them having non-native boyfriends. They men on the reservation are extremely immature, selfish and toxic, and I would think that any family would have their daughter's happiness as their highest priority. While I know that such racisim exists in every culutre, I wonder how prevenelnt in really is on reservations. Also, the people on the reservation acted like very toxic high school students, excpetionally jugdgemental, lacking any ambition and it seemed to be living only to party / drink. Even worse, all the men on the reservation were toxic and selfish. Being that they could treat women there so badly they would use them for sex, and never support them in their own interests. Unrelated to these cultural issues, the character Jack, who was Bailey's boyfriend in the first season, broke up with her through a friend at the beinging of the second season. I was wondering if the actor who played Jack didn't wish to return to the series, and he was written out for that reason, as it is very odd that the character didn't having an in person break up and was never seen again. Stranger still, Bailey goes on to have another white boyfriend in season for, so her story realy just took a detour for two seasons. The best thing about this series is that at the end the girls are able see clearly they need to not give in to the pressures to conform to limitations imposed on them by the other memmeber of the reservation, which includes their family members. One last thing is that I found out there is a network APTN, which is a native American network, which even has a streaming channel. Unfortunately, the streaming service is restricted to Canada, which seems really unnecessary. I would really love to watch the content they have on the channel (some of which is in native American languages), but as it is the restrictions prevent me from doing so.