When I first heard of plans by the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan Indians to seek approval to jointly operate a new Connecticut casino, I couldn't help but remember a grisly scene from a movie that plays at the Mashantucket museum.

In it, the character playing Mohegan Sachem Uncas, his face covered in war paint, meets with English Capt. John Mason and throws down on Mason's desk a clutch of Pequot skulls.

The meeting occurred around the start of the Pequot War in 1637, a war that culminated with the massacre of Pequots at the hands of the English — with the help of Mohegan and Narragansett Indians — at the Pequot fort in Mystic.

I know it happened a long time ago, but still, it's understandably put a chill on Mohegan and Pequot relations over the centuries.

The Pequots did finally let the Mohegans in on their casino compact deal with Connecticut, the Indian casino monopoly that the Pequots once solely controlled, but even then, officials of the two tribes showed little public enthusiasm for each other.

But I guess the prospect of two big Vegas casino operators sucking a big share of their business to Massachusetts is enough to make the tribes reconsider old grudges.

After all, who needs to think about a 375-year-old holocaust, the murder and burning of men, women and children, when your business is about to slide off a cliff. They are in this one together.

Since the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center re-opened this month, after a winter shutdown and retooling, I decided to pay a call and revisit a time when the Pequots and Mohegans were not getting along so well.

The movie about the Pequot War is called "The Witness," and it does try to rehabilitate Uncas in the end, when his character allows a fleeing young Pequot, the person who becomes the witness to the history, to make it safely past the English marauders.

I also came to realize during my visit this week that the museum itself has become a part of the long and interesting history of the tribe.

It is hard to call it a white elephant because it is beautiful, carefully and expensively rendered. It cost more than $190 million to build.

No doubt that is $190 million the tribe now wishes it hadn't spent. There is probably a lot of regret, too, about the $67 million spent on the Route 2 highway overpass, which makes it easier for people to drive right on by the tribe's Foxwoods Resort Casino.

But the museum tells the tribe's story, including what will probably turn out to be its golden age, when tribal leaders ran the only casino in the northeast and dreamed large, building a museum bigger than the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Unlike the Mashantucket museum, the other big dreams — monorails, magnetic levitation trains, indoor beaches, a ski mountain — never got built before the air started coming out of the balloon.

The museum is at its best in telling the story of New England's indigenous people. It is at its worst when it becomes a showcase for historical grievances, against the Dutch, the English, the other Natives and finally the Connecticut overseers who tried to take away what was left of the reservation.

Of course, history is often told by the winners, who get to give the story their own spin.

The Pequots were certainly winners when they commissioned their grand museum.

One might imagine a new exhibit, explaining how their casino business was finally ruined when Connecticut lawmakers refused to let them go into partnership with their old enemies and stop the flow of Connecticut casino dollars to Massachusetts.

I hope that doesn't happen.

Indeed, the third Indian casino may help keep open the doors to the museum, a great asset for the region, a surviving witness for a remarkable story.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct