How were the Native Indians when Columbus arrived?[Angels?, Savages?,etc]

I have a question. I was discussing Native Indians with a friend of mine, and she seems to believe that Indians were nature loving angels and our ancestors totally ruined their harmonious relationship with nature. Is this true?

This may very well be true, but since it fits perfectly into the liberal propaganda, I have my suspicions. Since liberals are known for supressing the truth to further their cause.

I have also seen posts on here where a person has briefly mentioned that the way we currently imagine the Indians of the time is not true to how they actually were.

Can anybody assist me in understanding the true character of the Indians at the time? I appreciate any input.

A couple things I learned about Indians. One - they were pratically stone age. The North American Indians did not have the wheel nor beasts of burden. Two essential items for a civilization to advance, the third being the plow which I do not think they had, either. The other thing they did not have was a written language. Stories and information was passed down from generation to generation from the oldest to the young. When the white man came and introduced certain deseases into the environment - two groups of people were quickly wiped out. The very young and the very old. This proved devastating as now not many existed to tell the stories. A written language would have solved that problem. I passed this information in an English class a couple semesters ago and the instructor stated that what I was saying was almost racist. Not that I was wrong, but only that it should not be said.

Also, liked someone said earlier - depended upon tribe to tribe. Some tribes were into enslaving others, war, and other nasty things only attributed to whites these days. What - the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans practiced baby and virgin killing in the form of sacrifices. Somehow, that all gets glossed over today. It is like the Indian woman who supposively helped Lewis and Clark on their expedition. I hear it was actually her French husband and she was just along for the ride.

Some of the ones that did did manage to destroy their local environment...the Maya deforested and overpopulated Central America, contributing to their own collapse, long before Europeans arrived.

A lot of Indian Tribes were peaceful. A lot of other Indian Tribes were vicious, aggressive killers.

White Americans shouldn't spend their entire lives living in guilt.

However, I do have a problem with people who don't have at least the SLIGHTEST tinge of embarassment or guilt over some of the things that were done by the U.S. Government regarding the Indians. The story of Chief Joseph and the eviction of the Nez Perce from their lands should at least engender some regret and sorrow, for example.

Dude, they never even invented the wheel!

They dragged their stuff around on two sticks or a sledge of some sort.

They were a stone-age culture until the Europeans showed up. They had gotten as far as making fire and quit.

You can cloth it in all the threadbare 'nature loving' arguments you want, but they never ever progressed beyond that of a stone-age culture until the Europeans dragged them into the 17th century.

They were about 12,000 years behind the times.

Bump for tribal differences - and let's not forget that there were also confederations of tribes, creating governments. Each tribe/confederation was different, with different rules and values, and those rules and values changed through the years.

To ask, "were the Indians angels or savages?" is about like asking "were the Americans angels or savages?". The question would have to be couched in terms of time, place, and culture. Texas is different than California; the Caddo were different than the Karankawa. To try to generalize any culture as only good or only bad is to oversimplify - and that in itself is wrong.

It ran the gamut, depending on location, between fairly sophisticated federations to small groups of hunter-gatherers at a truly stone-age level. In North America the Mississippi Valley civilization, for example, was very nearly a nation/state. All dead from European disease before the first white man ever got there...make a heckuva horror movie...

Of course, there were notable civilizations in Central and South America that really were nation/states, the Toltecs, Aztecs, Maya, etc, etc. These had literate cultures and advanced mathematics but curiously, not the wheel. They were anything but "children of nature," having as high a zest for killing their neighbors in an organized fashion as did their European counterparts. Pretty good at it, too...

As RightWhale pointed out, the tribes varied. One thing must be kept in mind, however, and that is that this "good stewards of the Earth" is a lot of rubbish. Indian tribes lived in an area until its resources -- or the ones useful to them -- were exhausted, and then they moved on.

They were usually at war with their neighbors, a fact usually glossed over by present-day romantic views of Native American life. In a sense, this constant warfare helped keep Indian populations in check, so you could say that the Indian's primary natural enemy was himself.

That they remained too few in number to reduce the continent to a waste-land before English settlers got here should not be confused with a modern sensibility regarding the "sanctity of the earth."

Well, there were lots of different tribes in the Americas, with various warring between the sets of them. However, Columbus himself only encountered the Carribean tribes. Columbus generally reports that the natives were very generous. What needs to be clear is that the spanish mission to the new world focused almost exclusively on acquiring gold for the kingdom of spain. In retrospect, the infighting among the indian tribes didn't look that brutal in comparison to the spanish lust for gold, thus allowing the native tribes to look much better in hindsight.

Columbus himself wrote that the Indians, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone."

An interesting set of quotations from source-texts on the matter is the first chapter of Howard Zinn's "people's history of the United States," which I thought everyone taught in American History, nowadays. Zinn seems to quote extensively from Batolome de las Cases, a young priest involved in the conquest of Cuba in his book "History of the Indies." I'd also delve into the original source texts of Columbus's writings.

That's akin to asking if it's true that Europeans are all either evil Stalins or freedom loving Chamberlands. Some Indians were very "close" to nature, living with almost no possesions, and what possesions they did have were owned communally. They survived on seasonal crops and wild game they managed to catch, wore no clothing, built no shelters, and in general had a rather miserable existence by our standards. On the other hand there were tribes that cleared large areas of forest for crops, built giant mounds, conquered or regularly warred with their neighbors, and lived a very settled life. These Indians also quickly adopted white man's ways, and not infrequently out-civilized their white pioneer neighbors. As far as warfare goes, again, their were many extremes. Some practised brutal raiding full of killing and burning, while others barely possesed weapons.

At any rate, with perhaps the exception of the large Central American tribes (who also destroyed vast areas of rainforest and other ecological sins) levels of mass violence were rather low in comparison to what whites would bring. It should be noted, however, that many of the millions whites killed were not killed intentionaly, but by the transimision of disease. Of course there were many masacres on both sides, but in the end it is fair to say the white man outdid the Indian in terms of death and destruction. Indians would massacre one white settlement and the whites would massacre a dozen-thus was the lopsided struggle.

In short, neither liberal "nature loving" legends or Western "bloody savage" legends are acurate. I would suggest you find the volume Cabaz de Vaca wrote on his experience with the many tribes of the Gulf coast. He gives an excellent, suprisingly unbiased, view of the very diverse tribes he encountered. His experience ranged from night time raids on his men to ocean rescues by tribes on Galveston Island to the hundreds of followers he amassed in New Mexico to his futile attempts to save the Southwestern Indians from slavery. His views on Indian treatment were excellent, far superior to those of his peers. He did not believe in forcing Christianity upon them, rather deciding they could only be won to Christ and civilized nature by love and compassion. Alas, few of his comrades shared his views-lands to conquer, slaves, and gold clouded their eyes, overshadowing any nobler ambitions for the Indian's well being and salvation.

I am sure that the Indians were nature worshipers, they still are, that is their religion. They think of the mountains, trees, etc. as gods.
The new history has them being peace loving, but I doubt they just rolled over and played nice when the White man came in and wanted to live on the land they considered their own.
The truth probably lies somewhere between the two histories, the one I learned, and the one learned now after the revisionists took over.
I don't buy the new one that Columbus was some murdering, raping savage!
Those that have rewritten history were not there, the ones who wrote it before had it passed down through diaries, records, and families etc.

There were good and bad among Native Americans as among all people. It is wrong to categorize them in simplistic terms. They were as complicated as human beings anywhere. Early Spanish explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca reported that they worked very hard. They had no dometicated animals to do the labor for them. Many of the cities in Central and South America are older than European cities.

It is true that Meso-Americans indulged in human sacrifice but were not the Europeans also putting to death witches and heretics to appease their God during the same period as well? I doubt Native villages were any more septic than most European cities of the time. Most Native Americans also bathed more often than Europeans of the time.

Many of the staple crops today such as maize, potatoes, chocolate, squash, tomatoes and pumpkins were first developed by Native Americans. Most societies in North America were egalatarian and practiced democracy. Chiefs rarely had dictatorial powers and women had great influence on who the leaders would be. Traditional Native Americans valued honesty and always telling the truth. Native societies worked for thousands of years. They were destroyed more by European diseases than by any military conquests. The first European explorer on tha Amazon described a high degree of culture along the Amazon River. He said it was teeming with bustling cities but today it is all gone, due to disease.

Native Americans should be accepted as people. "Savages" are unfortunately found in all races and groups as even this message board sometimes evince.

When Columbus arrived in the New World it was soon after a horrible pestilence that destroyed a large portion of the population in the New World. The Cahokia Indians, the most advanced tribe in North America, were dispersed and almost wiped out by it. The Indians that did survive had their culture pushed backwards into the "savages" that are stereotyped about, much like Europeans in the Dark Ages. Most tribes valued the warrior tradition and most relied upon nature for substinance. Many tribes had developed agrarian cultures, but it was fairly primative, and those agrarian tribes were the hardest hit by the pestilence. That left the nomadic tribes at the advantage and the nomadic lifestyle lends toward the warrior tradition more. So were the Indians more savage than the white man? No, more primative, less cultured, but no more savage. Were they less savage? No, many tribes were exceedingly brutal and horrific in dealing with their enemies, just like many Europeans. So both the blood thirsty savage image and the tree-hugging, pot-smoking, Gaia-worshipping, flower children image are just that, images.

The Aztecs and Mayans made Europeans look like savages, had the Europeans realized their existence. While Europe was locked in the Dark Age, the Central American tribes were developing advanced astronomical ideas, a very well done calander, had made many precise calculations relating to the earth's movement and seasons, had a workable petrglyph system, and built massive stone pyramids that would have dwarfed European accomplishments of the time. However, they conducted barbaric human sacrifices (we white folk just kill our enemies in war!), and frequent in fighting resulted in the demise of the Mayas, and the Aztecs and Incas would collapse with the coming of Spaniards and their rifles and diseases. They lacked sustanibility, and had a very wicked religion-their downfall coupled with Spaniards, in my opinion.

The truth is, the Indians were as different as Europeans. Some were good, some were bad, some were peaceful, some were bloodthirsty. In that respect, they weren't any different than anybody else. You might want to check out the following book. Cabeza de Vaca was one of the very first to encounter the Indians of what is now the Southern United States. If I'm not mistaken, he held a different view than Cortez on how to deal with the Indians. This is from Amazon.com.

Castaways : The Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
(Latin American Literature and Culture, No 10)
by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar N. Cabeza De Vaca,
Alvar Nuunez Cabeza De Vaca, Enrique Pupo-Walker (Editor)

Book Description
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernn Corts. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his compatriots. In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest in the cultures of the native peoples he encountered on his odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected. Cabeza de Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information, with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M. Lpez-Morillas's translation beautifully captures the sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's definitive critical edition, it promises to become the authoritative English translation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Here is the link to this book on Amazon

BTW, there's a foreign movie entitled "Cabeza de Vaca" which was pretty good.

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