'American Experience: We Shall Remain'

Of the many elephants occupying the room that is the history of the United States, none is larger than the official mistreatment of the Native American by the new neighbors from over the water. Like slavery, it is a subject at once much discussed and somehow fundamentally ignored, and because the story has been so sensationalized on the one hand and romanticized on the other, there is a continual desire to tell it right.

Truth being the elusive thing that it is, however, this amounts to an ongoing project rather than a completely achievable end.

The latest attempt is "We Shall Remain," an ambitious, largely gratifying series of five feature-length documentaries that begins airing weekly tonight on PBS as part of "American Experience." They do not attempt to encompass the whole of that history, a task for which many more documentaries than five would be needed, but pick signal stories, beginning with Thanksgiving 1621 and ending with the 1973 Indian takeover of a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Except for the last, which chronicles a moment and a movement, the series focuses on powerful individuals, telling the story of the many by way of an important few: Geronimo, the Apache raider; Tecumseh, who wanted to establish a kind of United States of Native America tucked up against the Great Lakes; Massasoit, who befriended the Pilgrims; Major Ridge, who helped modernize the Cherokee government but signed the treaty that led to their relocation.

What all their stories have in common is the White Man: The series is not an exploration of the way Indians lived among themselves but rather the way their way of life was put under stress by white interests and attendant, imported ideas about land, money, humanity and God -- and the various ways the natives accommodated or resisted new political realities and continually rewritten rules.

There is plenty of nuance to the telling: This is not a story of heroes and villains but of ordinary flawed humans, most of them doomed to failure.

The series gets better as it goes along. The first three installments -- set among the Wampanoag of colonial New England, the Shawnee of Ohio and the Cherokee of the Southeast -- lean heavily on dramatic re-creation, as they would have to to pad out a 90-minute film. But such scenes have neither the power of authentic images nor of fully blown drama. (We're also left to guess which words might have come from the actual record and which were invented by the screenwriter.)