Posted on 12/03/2001 11:18:01 AM PST by electron1
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.
Sometime around the mid to late 1700s, the Natchez tribe had a few leaders who decided they didn’t like the French settlers living near them any more (about 15 miles away), at place called Fort Rosalie, so the tribe suddenly attacked the Fort and killed about 400 French men, women, and children. There were a couple of French survivors, who gradually worked their way to New Orleans where they reported the massacre. A few months later, the French sent an ample number of troops to Natchez, and they dispatched all the Natchez Indians. That is why there aren’t any Natchez Indians in America today.
But there are still plenty of Choctaws, who now number well over 30,000. In fact, several years ago I worked for the Choctaw tribe, which is the largest employer in Nashoba County. Their new Casino and Resort Hotel is doing wonders for the local economy.
Out here in the Southwest where I live now, the Pueblo Indians were almost always peaceful, numbering more than 10,000-15,000 in the 1860s. They were farmer Indians, and when the US Army came out here in the 1860s to “tame” the Apaches and Navajos, all the different small Pueblo tribes were granted large “reservation” area which were off-limits to Eastern settlers. That pleased the Pueblo Indians very much.
On the other hand, the Apaches and Navajos were generally not farmers. For many generations they had “made their living” by raiding Pueblo Indians and white settlers.
After the Civil War, the Army finally subdued these two tribes, gave them very large reservations to live on, and supplied them with crop seed and livestock. Missionaries were assigned to teach them how to farm, but they never were very good at it. To this day, most of them don’t even understand how to raise a family garden. Over several generations, they were taught that they could no longer kill and rob people for a living. It took several generations, but they finally got the idea and became reasonably civilized.
Back East in the early settler days, there were “wild” hostile tribes, and there were non-hostile farmer Indians. The hostile tribes were the ones the early settlers, militias, and the US Army battled with. Many early white settlers intermarried with the less hostile tribes. Some Eastern tribes eventually disappeared because they became so “Europeanized” and they intermarried so much with Europeans, they gradually lost their tribal identity. Percentage-wise, I don’t know how many of the early Eastern Indians were “tame” and how many were “savage”.
Up until the late 1960s, Hollywood preferred to make movies about the hostile Indians. But in the late ‘60s, starting mainly with the film “Little Big Man”, Hollywood began making films that portrayed most Indians as “noble” and “wise”, with all white settlers and Army men being stupid and cruel. The truth is some sort of “average”, with some settlers being friendly toward Indians, and some being rather rude, and some of the Indian tribes were friendly, while others weren’t.
One of my great-great-grandmothers was an Eastern Cherokee, and there are still Cherokee reservations back East today, so I assume the Cherokees were not hostile.
Not neccessarily true. The 'Cahokia Indians' were not the most advanced tribe in North America... I think you have the tribal names confused with a tribe whose name we do not know, who built the mounds nnow known as Cahokia Mounds, across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. The area is an Illinois state park today. Cahokia Mounds wasn't named after the people who built the mounds... the site was named after a subgroup of the Illiniwek people that was known as the Cahokias, who lived at the site long after the original Indians who built it had abandoned the place, and who had absolutely no relation to the builders of the mounds.
The other error is that the moundbuilders did not die out from a disease introduced to the New World from the old... as a matter of fact, we don't know if the 'died out' at all, since there is nothing in the archeological record to indicate they experienced a catastrophic disease or even catastrophic warfare. It may be that their culture changed and they dispersed and merged into other peoples. If disease played a role, it wasn't likely from Columbus or later Europeans, since they were gone from their city long before Columbus. Their civilization had been in decline well before, the mound city of Cahokia itself was virtually abandoned by 1300 AD. We call this early culture the 'Mississippians,' not the Cahokias.
The tribe called Cahokias, as I said, were a much more recent tribe who didn't know who had built the mounds before they arrived in the area. The Cahokias were far less advanced than the moundbuilders were culturally; they lived in houses that were totally unlike those of the long-goone moundbuilders, their agricultural practices were not as advanced as the moundbuilders, their artifacts and religion were wholly dissimilar from those of the moundbuilders. the Cahokias were part of the Illiniwek, othoerwise known as the Illinois Nation, once a proud people, and after Pontiac's War the last of the Illinois were pursued and trapped on the Illinois bluffs known as Starved Rock by the Peoria Tribe, and there they were practically exterminated.
As far as mounbuilders go, (they were very advanced but no more so than the Anasazi, Hopi or Navajo) the great city of Cahokia's orignal inhabitants the Mississippians, dissappeared and their city grew over with trees, then was redicovered by later 'Indians' before the Europeans arrived... but a few tribes related to the moundbuilders were still extant farther south when early French and Spanish explorers arrived... the Natchez of Mississippi, the Choctaws, and the more distant Caddoan people, among a few others. They were not the same people who built Cahokia, but close in art, architecture, and religion to them. There wasn't a whole lot of moundbuilding going on by that time, though... the mound culture was already well past its prime.
But when Europeans came to the continent, the horse was unknown. What happened to the indigenous descendants of eohippus? Why were there no horses in the Americas, when they had actually evolved here? Take a guess.
Here's a clue. The Spaniards, who re-introduced the critter, didn't eat horses unless they had to.
With statements like this it is no wonder that the young, the impressionable and the ignorant succumb to "white guilt".
The statement may be incomplete but not wrong.
And in this context, it is perfectly reasonable to generalize: the wise noble savage was neither.
Subject to exceptions as in everything else.
There were more in Mexico and Central America, but not so many in the US or in Canada.
America’s current largest tribe, the Navajo, barely had 7,000 tribal members in the 1860s, which was an all-time historic high for that tribe, before the reservation system began. Now there are nearly half a million of them.
In your dreams.
National Geographic went touchie-feelie and made a sharp left turn in the seventies.
Nice propaganda but there are better neutral sources today.
Unless your interests happen to be environmental and political correctness.
That was a reaffirmation of the Spanish Crown’s policies towards the Indians from the beginning of the colonization of America. Queen Isabella had such an interest in the well being of the Indians that in "the codicil or appendix to her last will and testament, drawn shortly before her death, she earnestly asked her husband King Ferdinand, her daughter Juana and her son- in- law not to consent in, nor to permit that the Indians, residents of said Indies, whether already conquered or still to be conquered, be aggrieved at all, whether in their persons or their property, but rather that they be well and fairly treated and that, if wronged, you set right any such wrongs...”
Dr. Philip Wayne Powell, Emeritus Professor of history at the University of California, in his research on the "Black Legend" titled the “Tree of Hate”, (a book that every Hispanist should read) asserts that the study of 16th century Europe clearly reveals the universal pattern of cruelty, intolerance, and inhumanity which characterized the social, religious, and economic life throughout the continent...Examples of this were the reigns of Elizabeth I of England and her successor James I which were known for their most barbarous cruelty. However, Dr. Powell affirms "that the Spain of the conquest period was a deeply civilized nation by all discernible European standards of that day, ...In jurisprudence, diplomacy, monarchical, religious and imperial concepts, and total culture, Spain was a European leader throughout the sixteen century and in much of the next.”
The Mayans were 600 years gone before the white man arrived.
That's an inaccurate generalization on the same level as calling all Indians dirty savages. The ancient Romans were into bathing, and the Europeans all through history indulged in hot baths more often than is generally known. Many villages had bath houses--the Nordic people had their saunas. I don't think your average Native American bathed any more often in winter than your average European.
You're right about the generalization... but on 'average' the eastern and southeastern North American Indian did bathe more often, typically daily, and even in winter, and what is more, never peed in a stream or body of water, something which rather shocked them regarding white settlers. (Bear in mind most encountered the French more often than anyone) It was a religious thing, and prudent in a hunting culture. Bathing was considered healthful, even on cold days, and a sign of strength and vigor to others, not unlike Nordic culture. One southern chieftain, taken to France for the purposes of impressing him and his entourage for trade negotiations, was asked on his return to New Orleans what he thought of Paris, the buildings and the people. He responded to the journalist of the local Orleans paper something like this, "It was very impressive, but the women smelled like alligators."
Midwestern and southern Indians showed the settlers how to use soapweed (yucca) to wash hair and body... evidently they weren't to impressed with lye soap, which was quite caustic if the balance wasn't just right. Another reason whites were reluctant to bathe, as well as the English, German and Scottish settler's belief that bathing was unhealthful and caused illness. In a way they were right- settler's homes were cold, not cozy, and they could indeed get pneumonia. The natives' winter houses - they often had open air pavilions in summer- were smaller and better suited to the cold. Most settlers couldn't even swim, since they viewed water as unhealthy, perhaps a holdover from populous Europe where the wastes went into the water and it WAS unhealthy. Everyone, even children, drank cider, dairy or beer, rather than water, when given a choice.
As for this idyllic image of the earth revering eco-mystical innocent you apparently have swallowed, consider the way some Plains Indians harvested buffalo: set a prairie fire and force a whole herd of bison over a cliff or river bluff as they stampeded to escape the flames.
Then the innocent nature lovers went and took what little they could carry from the massive carnage, leaving the bulk to waste and rot in the sun.
What ever made you think "pollution" by paper and plastic comes anywhere near the despoliation caused by these primitive peoples?
Many other Indian tribes did not hold slaves. It is a complex picture.
We are probably all descendants of both slaves and slaveowners, if we go back in history far enough.
This is one of the most enjoyable threads I’ve read yet!
If you did not read the stories I was referring to, you would be advised to read this discussion quietly. If you did read the stories, I would be interested in your explanation of their inaccuracies.
The Navajo were in a vast area and were adept at hiding. There were probably a dozen slaving expeditions out at the time he was there. I think that he rounded up only about 25-35% of the Navajo. The rest took to the hills. It was enough to break the back of the Navajo as a cohesive force. There are still numerous stories on the reservation of people watching from hiding as their brethern were dragged off to the Long Walk. There were also thousands of Navajo being held as slaves up and down the Rio Grande Valley.
To this day the mention of the name Kit Carson will draw you stares of bitter hatred from the old people on the Reservation. In some cases it is the only English name they know.
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