I used to, on some level, accept the
popular notion that Native Americans were more spiritual and in tune with
nature than European Americans, and that it was European Americans who brought
war, sexism, and environmental degradation to an otherwise innocent, peaceful and
Edenic Native America.
As a kid I bought slim paperbacks from
the Scholastic Book Club that taught me that Native Americans planted dead fish
in their agricultural fields in order to fertilize them. I learned that North
American Indians didn't have the wheel, bronze, iron, or steel, or writing.
They cooked acorns by dropping hot stones into holes dug in the ground and
filled with water. The acorns had to be soaked in advance in order to leech
them of toxins. I thought of how cumbersome and time-consuming that cooking
method would be, and how bland a meal a soaked acorn would provide.
In popular culture, Native Americans
were the spiritual and natural corrective to modern Americans, who were seen as
greedy and divorced from nature. On TV, Iron Eyes Cody witnessed American pollution
and a visible tear flowed down his creased and weathered cheek. Of course Iron
Eyes Cody was actually Sicilian but hey. The commercial meant well.
Chief Seattle was alleged to have given
an eloquent speech about protecting the environment. He compared the Native
American harmony with nature and the White Man's greed. Chief Seattle's environmental
speech is a hoax. The version most people know was written by a white,
Christian man from Texas.
My environmentalist and Politically
Correct friends were deeply offended by the "kill theory" of
megafauna extinction. How did wooly mammoths and saber toothed tigers
disappear? Native Americans probably wiped them out. That's one theory, the "kill"
theory. Other theories are the "chill" theory – cold weather killed
the megafauna, and the "ill" theory. They died from disease. The kill
theory depicted Native Americans as just like all other humans – not "in
harmony with nature" but eager to exploit nature and heedless of the long
term consequences of such exploitation.
Christy Turner is a forensic
anthropologist specializing in teeth. Native Americans have different teeth
than European Americans. Their teeth are shovel shaped.
Turner was working his way through a box
of bones in an Arizona museum in the 1970s when he said to himself "Holy
Smokes." He suddenly realized that these human bones were the remains of a
meal. These Native Americans had been butchered, cooked, and eaten. The bones
showed typical evidence like cutting at key points to remove meat from bone.
Diners had lopped off the tops of human skulls and placed them, face out,
around fires in order to cook up and gain access to tasty brains. Before eating
these peoples' brains, the diners had gazed at their agonized, slaughtered faces
staring out at them from the cook fire.
Turner dated this horror repast, this
cannibal cafeteria, between 900 AD and 1150 AD – three hundred years before
Columbus arrived in North America. He found seventy-two sites with cannibal
remains. Tons of human meat.
At one site, the cannibals slaughtered a
family, butchered them, cooked them, ate them, and then crapped their remains
out into the most sacred and beloved spot in a home – the family hearth – the
source of heat, light, sustenance, and companionship. A coprolite, or
fossilized feces, was found in the family hearth. It contained human remains,
proof positive of Turner's cannibalism theory.
Turner published his research. He called
the cannibals "thugs" and "Charles Manson types"
He was demonized. How dare you, you
nasty white man named "Christy" as in the evil Christian Church (yes
Turner's critics did say things like this), how dare you vilify Native
Americans? Turner is hated to this day.
I was shocked when I read Turner's research.
On some level I really believed that Native Americans were kinder and gentler
and more spiritual.
I went to the National Museum of the
American Indian run by the Smithsonian Institution. I learned there that
Pizarro was able to conquer the Inca Empire with fewer than two hundred Spanish
soldiers. Native American soldiers fought with him against the Inca. There must
have been some mighty hatred for the Inca on the part of their Native American neighbors.
The Aztecs bragged of sacrificing 80,000
victims at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487. A
review of a museum show of Aztec art called it "chilling" and "terrifying."
Writing in "The Guardian," journalist Laura Cumming called Aztec art
"the most alien of all art. There
are no images of moving animals, as in the caves of Lascaux. There are no
accounts of great deeds, or commemorations of great leaders as in the art of
the Pharaohs. Unlike just about every other culture in history, the Aztecs did
not represent women, or women with babies, or, indeed, children at all. Nor, to
be fair, did they ever depict men except as priests or warriors
half-skeletonised in the jaws of death.
If they had any interest in the human
spirit, in friendship, sex or emotion, then they certainly never showed it. The
last thing you would expect from them would be anything as human or intimate as
a portrait…As far as I can see, pretty much the entire purpose of Aztec art was
to scare the living daylights out of everyone who saw it…Even the flea is monumentalised
in stone because it lives by sucking blood.
It is impossible to look at all these
objects without seeing them as the emblems and tools of a vast, putrid
slaughterhouse. Nothing in Aztec art speaks of humanity or beauty. There is no
attempt to inspire the sacrificial victim with rewarding images of the
afterlife or to celebrate the gifts of the gods."
Obviously Ms. Cumming did not receive
the memo on Political Correctness or Cultural Relativism.
Some promote Native Americans as gender
heroes. The idea is that sexism is a modern invention, or that Christianity is
to blame, and the further one gets from civilization and Christianity, the
better things get for women and homosexuals, or "two spirit" people
or berdaches.
Others acknowledge that it's not that
simple. The Amazonian Yanomami is one of the most remote tribes on earth. They
are very violent, including towards women. Gang rape is a fact of life.
Husbands beat and burn their wives to establish dominance. According to David
Good, who was born of a Yanomami mother and an anthropologist father, the language
has no word for "love." When his anthropologist father left the
village, his mother was gang raped by over 20 men. She had no husband to
protect her.
I recently re-watched John Ford's classic
1956 western "The Searchers." The film is so rich whenever I watch it
I simultaneously google various features of the story. "The Searchers"
depicts settlers in 1860s Texas. Comanche warriors raid a homestead, murder
four family members and kidnap the youngest, Debbie, to raise as one of their
own and eventually marry her off to Scar, the chief. The plot is inspired by
the kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker who was the mother of Quanah Parker, the
last chief of the Comanche.
Every American knows how we are supposed
to react to "The Searchers" now. Back in 1956, when it was first
made, Americans were supposed unquestioningly to accept the film's depiction of
the Comanche as scary warriors who did horrible things to captives, especially
women captives.
Now we are supposed to doubt and mock
that official narrative. We are supposed to understand the Comanche as noble
warriors defending their homeland against white, Euro-American Christians, who
are supposed to be the real savages.
That's not what I found out through
Google. What I found out through Google was pretty nightmarish.
The Comanche were no more native to
Texas than the European Americans. They had started out in Wyoming. Europeans
brought horses to the Americans, horses that had previously been driven to
extinction in North America by kill, ill, or chill.
The Comanche adopted the horse and a
mentality of "total war." They made furious war on other Native
Americans, including the Apache, whom they "nearly exterminated"
according to S. C. Gwynne, author of "Empire of the Summer Moon."
In "The Searchers," John Ford
never shows or tells exactly what the Comanche did to their captives and their
slaves. One can find out, though, through a Google search. I read material that
utterly shocked me. The Comanche did things that even the Nazis, as far as I
know, did not do. I don't want to repeat the worst things. I'll just repeat one
death – they took a white slave captive's baby, tied a rope to him, and dragged
his infant body through cactus plants until he died.
One sixteen year old captive was repeatedly
burned over eighteen months until her face was roasted away and her body was
covered with bruises and burns.
One captive, Rachel Plummer, turned on
her tormenter and began beating the Comanche. Once the captive had the upper
hand, she nearly beat the Comanche to death. She reported that other Comanche
stood around and watched their fellow tribeswoman being beaten to death by a
white captive, and enjoyed it as an entertaining spectacle.
Once the captive had defeated the
Comanche woman and she lay prostrate, no other Comanche would help her. The
white captive did so, dragging her to a shelter and dressing her wounds.
Plummer reported that beating a Comanche nearly to death earned her status in
the tribe, and after that she was treated as an equal. S. C. Gwynne
characterizes the Comanche as possessed of a "demonic immorality."
Their enthusiastically sadistic rapes "border on criminal perversion if
not some very advanced form of evil."
After reading about the Comanche, I had
a taboo thought. "I'm glad the Comanche lost."
Mind. I'm not saying that the conquest
of the Americas was not a bloodbath initiated by Europeans on less developed
and often defenseless Native Americans. Of course I acknowledge the massive
human suffering and injustice. And most tribes were not the Comanche or the
Anasazi cannibals or Aztecs.
But in this one case, the case of
European settlers in Texas v the Comanche, I'm glad the Comanche lost. If their
way of life is accurately depicted in the accounts I read, a way of life in
which constant war, enslavement of non-Comanche, rape and torture were central
features, I'm glad that that culture was defeated.
This conclusion is totally at odds with
the Politically Correct worldview that insists that Europeans and Christians as
the source of problems like sexism, cruelty and war. It's totally at odds with
the centuries-old concept of the Noble Savage.
David Good, the son of an anthropologist
father and a Yanomami mother, reports an anecdote.
"I remember the wife of a very
prominent anthropologist — I was 12 or 13 at the time — asking me what I wanted
for Christmas. I said, 'A Nintendo 64 with Super Mario Bros.' She looked at me
in horror and said, 'Oh, my God. You're a typical American kid. I thought you'd
be different.'"
This piece appears at FrontPageMag here
My wife's great-great grandmother was Sally Scull a Texas Pioneer in the founding era.
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