Mayor of Kingstowns Miriam History Lessons Explained Are They True

Mayor of Kingstown’s Miriam History Lessons Explained: Are They True?

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Miriam in the Paramount+ series Mayor of Kingstown teaches history to female prisoners, but how much of her lessons are based on true events?

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Mayor of Kingstowns Miriam History Lessons Explained Are They True

The McLusky brothers’ mother, Miriam, teaches history to incarcerated women in Mayor of Kingstown, and her lessons are fascinating — but are they true? The Paramount+ series is co-created by Taylor Sheridan, a writer known for deftly addressing issues in his movies like the housing crisis in Hell or High Water, the war on drugs in Sicario, and the gentrification of the American West in his current Paramount+ hit series, Yellowstone. Mayor of Kingstown continues Sheridan’s pattern, delving into the shortcomings of America’s prison system along with Miriam’s lessons, which offer an elegant, yet devastating, look into systemic racism.

Mayor of Kingstown is set in a town with seven prisons within a 10-mile radius where the McLusky brothers make it their business to blur the line between the criminals and law enforcement. When the eldest brother, Mitch (played by Bloodline’s Kyle Chandler), is suddenly murdered, middle brother Mike (played by Jeremy Renner) steps into the role of “mayor,” a role that means everything from lobbing drug-filled tennis balls over prison walls to saving prison guards from gang violence. Just like their father before them, the surviving McLusky brothers participate and facilitate a low level of crime in order to coexist.

The family matriarch, Miriam, however, seems displeased with the McLusky brothers’ roles in Kingstown. Miriam contrasts her son’s roles in Mayor of Kingstown and is a particularly poignant character on the show because she believes not in facilitating the broken system as they do, but in bettering the system through rehabilitation and education. Throughout the first three episodes, Miriam teaches three lessons, each with poignant attention that is hard to ignore. Here’s a look at the lessons Miriam has taught so far (and how accurate they really are).

Lesson 1 – The Civil War, the Oppressors and the Oppressed

Mayor of Kingstowns Miriam History Lessons Explained Are They True

In Mayor of Kingstown episode 1, Miriam discusses the Civil War. The book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (brought to screen in the 2007 film by the same name starring True Blood’s Anna Paquin) is seen on the student’s desks. She tells her students that the Civil War is “the only time in history, the oppressors fought each other over the rights of the oppressed” and goes on to say that a decade after the Union victory, “a new union army made up of mostly imprisoned confederate soldiers and immigrants reignited the genocide begun by Columbus some 400 years earlier.”

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As the Civil War ended in 1865, Miriam is likely talking about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which happened in 1876 when George Custer’s 7th Cavalry clashed with over 10,000 Native Americans gathered at the Little Bighorn River to stand in defiance of their people’s confinement to reservations. The battle resulted in the death of Custer and his men and fueled the continuation of the American-Indian Wars (a controversial time in American history well-depicted in the iconic film, Dances with Wolves, by Yellowstone’s Kevin Costner).

A student approaches Miriam and says that she grew up on Pine Ridge. The student is referring to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota where the battle of Wounded Knee took place in 1890. Many believe the massacre at Wounded Knee was revenge for the lives lost at Little Bighorn, which ties the student’s statement into Miriam’s lesson as well as the book the class is studying.

Lesson 2 – The Cherokee Moving West

Mayor of Kingstowns Miriam History Lessons Explained Are They True

In Miriam’s second lesson, she talks about the Cherokee being moved further west to Oklahoma. She tells a heart-wrenching story of how the Cherokee were forced to abandon their dogs — who they see not as pets but as guides with the souls of their ancestors — when made to cross the Mississippi River. Miriam (played by Dianne Wiest who acts alongside Zoe Lister-Jones in Life in Pieces) continues as several of the students are seen crying, telling them that the dogs howled and leaped into the river, and drowned while trying to reach their families.

This story comes from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (via TOTA) and is a first-person account of the tragic story; however, Tocqueville’s story involves the Choctaws instead of the Cherokee. Tocqueville writes, “The Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and, plunging all together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after the boat.”

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Miriam’s story in Mayor of Kingstown episode 1 has added details about the Cherokee (Choctaw) peoples begging for the captains to turn back but there is no mention of it in the text. Furthermore, Tocqueville claims that before boarding the boat, “No cry, no sob was heard among the assembled crowd: all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable.” There is also no mention of a stronger dog fighting harder than the rest, nor of the Native Americans cheering the dog on. Although Mayor of Kingstown has editorialized the story slightly, these details do not affect the authenticity of the story. On the contrary, they add to Miriam’s character development as a teacher employing storytelling tactics to engage her students.

Lesson 3 – The Origins of Slavery and The African King

Miriam teaches a class on the origin of slavery in Mayor of Kingstown episode 3 that is drawn from the historical account of Pope Nicolas V from Crónica dos feitos da Guiné by Gomes Eanes de Zurara (which is available through College of Charleston’s Lowcountry Digital History Initiative online exhibit “African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World.”) Eanes de Zurara tells the story of the young Portuguese ship captain, Antam Goncalvez, who kidnapped a small group of Berbers with the help of his crew and another. When the Berbers reached Portugal they negotiated their freedom with the promise of 10 slaves upon their safe return to Africa. The Berbers were returned and 10 sub-Saharan African slaves were taken in exchange.

In Mayor of Kingstown, however, Miriam’s story is that of an African king who is abducted by Portuguese explorers and negotiates his freedom by offering to collect 10 more slaves for the explorer when he returns the next year and 100 the year after that. Miriam concludes her lesson by asking, “would slavery have existed without this bargain? Perhaps the better question should be ‘would the bargain have existed without the desire for a slave?” While a provocative question, this question is largely off-base since slavery’s origins can be traced back to Mesopotamia in 6800 B.C. as is pointed out by Free the Slaves (via freetheslaves.net). Miriam’s point and purpose in Mayor of Kingstown are clear, however, as she strives to educate the incarcerated women in hopes of rehabilitation contrasting her sons’ associations with the prison system that facilitate more crime.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/mayor-kingstown-miriam-cherokee-history-lessons-true-story/

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