Tuesday, February 08, 2005

On Indians, and assorted other crap

Over at Hog on Ice, Steve has been laying his own personal smackdown on that academic nitwit Churchill, in his own inimitable style. Inspired by his work, I shall therefore put down in words my own opinion on some related things.

I don't say Native American, I say Indian. 'Native American' covers anyone every born here, not simply the PC-approved tribal types. When I really want to be annoying, I refer to the earlier arrivals on these shores as the First Immigrants.

No I don't think there's anything particularly holy about the tribes that were here before the first Europeans set foot on these shores. They were human, and suffered from all the usual flaws and good points. As far as the 'worshipped their mother Earth' crap goes, it's exactly that. There was an amount of spirituality in their beliefs, no question: and like some people who go to church on Sunday and cheat someone selling used cars the next day, it was, to a certain extent, nonsense. Ever read about Lewis and Clark's travels? They spent timein places where they couldn't trade for food, because the local tribes had eaten everything that didn't run away fast enough, and they were starving, too. They moved through areas where there was no deer or elk or whatever to be seen, or a few at a distance, because they had been hunted out.

The horse was a native animal here. The Indians killed them off for food before the idea of using them for beasts of burden came up, so they didn't see them again, or think of riding them, until the Spanish came. Most of the big animals here after the last ice age were hunted to extinction by them. They've found bison kills, usually where they ran a herd off a cliff or riverbank, where they killed far more than they could do anything with before they rotted.

Respect for others? Slavery, murder, unlimited warfare, cannabilism, and torture- often just for the fun of it- were staples. There's one tribe/can't recall the name offhand/ that was known by the Pawnee word for 'slave'; so many of them had been taken for slaves over time that that's what the Pawnee called the whole tribe, and over time so did all the other tribes around.
I once did some reading on the Cheyenne, some of the fearsome warriors of the plains. Except they didn't go there voluntarily; their early tales say they lived in the woodlands to the east. Then a bigger tribe decided it wanted their hunting grounds and ran them off into the plains to live or die. Along the same lines, when the Sioux decided to move west, they simply killed, enslaved or ran off anyone who got in their way. And so forth.
In the book 'Our Oldest Enemy', it lists records of the various eastern tribes who fought with the French against British settlers; their big reasons for showing up were to kill and to give the younger warriors a taste of man-meat(sound like a bunch of orcs, don't they?)

There are some fine things that have come down to us from many of the tribes, and we would be the poorer without them. But I got sick of the worship a long time ago. It's kind of like the Beatles; you can't just say they made some good music, oh no, you've got to idolize them. Yeah, I'm sick of that crap, too.

True enough, most of the tribes were treated badly over time, some downright horribly. Which puts them in the same category as the Europeans and Asians and Africans who treated everyone outside their tribes as a resource to be mined, sometimes by converting them to fertilizer or barbeque.

I once read a story that touched on the idea of what would have happened if the eastern Indians had had the Norse or the Scots who touched down around long enough to learn the working of metal. There were- still are- huge deposits of iron and copper in the northeast. If some of the tribes there had learned to refine and work it, you'd have wound up with a bunch of barons and counts and kings just as nasty on their bad days as any in Europe or Asia or Africa. Even if they hadn't gotten to that level, the big trade goods the Europeans brought was iron and copper and steel implements, from knives to needles to cooking pots; if some tribes had learned to make those, so the early white settlers didn't have a monopoly on those items... That would make an interesting book.

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