[RightWhale]

Each tribe was different. Some no doubt lived close to nature and understood nature's mysterious ways. Others ate their neighbors.

[liberallarry]

Your friend is an idiot - a trait hardly confined to liberals. Captian John Smith, writing in the 1620's, asked the same question. And, as he was in a position to answer it, he did.

[Fighting Falcons]

Try here

[Fintan]

"Tonto, it looks like we're surrounded by bloodthirsty savages!!!"

"What's this 'we' stuff, Kemosabe????"

[Portnoy]

They were savages...Didn't you ever watch them old westerns?

[Constitution Day]

Ping!

[Neanderthal]

There may have been some tree-huggers but I doubt it. Warfare was the normal state of the eastern indian tribes, and they loved to torture anyone they caught from an enemy tribe.

The Iroqois and Algonquins had a long running war. One of the highlights was when the Iroquois massacred the entire Erie tribe. Approximately 1,000 Eries were tied individually to trees and burned alive, all in one day, somewhere near the eastern shore of Lake Erie.

At one point the Iroquois were willing to travel hundreds of miles to the west to massacre a tribe in Illinois.

Ritual cannibalism was common among these tribes. Eating the heart of a brave enemy was believed to confer bravery on the diner. You don't want to know about the tortures they employed . . .

[Temple Drake]

Here is an address that links to the story of the torture and murder of Catholic missionary Isaac Jogues who died at the hands of the Iroquois tribe:

http://www.sfo.com/~denglish/wynaks/jogues.htm
And here is the torture part:

The trip to Quebec was made without mishap. On August 1st, Jogues' group, forty in number, laden with goods and supplies for the hard pressed mission, left on the return trip to Huronia. They did not get very far. On the following day they were ambushed by the waiting Iroquois. Most of the Hurons fled, a few were killed or captured, and Jogues and two donne's Rene' Goupil and Guillaume Couture were taken prisoner. Among the captured Hurons was Ahatsistari, the greatest of their warriors, and several other prominent Christians. What a blow to the Huron mission!

As soon as the engagement was over, the nightmare of torture began. The enemy fell upon their captives in a great rage, ripping out their finger nails, chewing their fingers and beating them with clubs. They then hustled off their victims to Mohawk country south of the St. Lawrence. En route the poor captives were "caressed" by 200 Iroquois setting out on the warpath. All, except a few small children, were savagely beaten and mutilated.

And yet there was still so much more to come.

On the 18th day, weak from lack of food, loss of blood and the agonizing pain of their bruised, broken and mutilated members, the prisoners arrived in the first Iroquois village. Here again the same ordeal had to be faced: running the gauntlet, beating, cutting, whip-ping, burning, scratching. It was an incredible experience to be under-gone again in two other villages. One wonders how the captives could survive such brutal and inhuman treatment.

Jogues seemed to be singled out for the refinement of this cruelty since the Iroquois considered him a kind of leader. They hacked off his left thumb; and yet he was grateful they had spared the right thumb so he could write to his brethren! He also received some terrible blows to his body, especially with a big lump of iron attached to a rope, and, as he said, "the only thing that kept me from fainting and that sustained my strength and courage was the fear that my tormentor would hit me with it a second time."

And even at night there was no respite for the poor victims. It was then the turn of the adolescents and children who delighted in throwing hot coals and burning cinders on their tortured flesh, in tearing open their wounds and in inflicting other senseless barbarities. And as Jogues himself remarked, "patience was our physician." <

[chance33_98]

I have actually discussed this with other liberals myself many times. One group of indians in Northern Ohio was totally wiped out by another tribe at one point - little remains of who they once were. Offhand I cannot give you a link on this but I came across it in my own studies of this question. Indians were for the most part just as agressive as the white man in taking territory (not all of course).
The point being is that just like the rest of the world there were 'good' and 'bad' tribes - but I will admit we did screw them over pretty bad in treaties and we should have approached the whole thing in a slightly more civilized manner. That said - our forefathers did the best they could with what they had and the indians are still here today: We could have finished them all off so perhaps we are more humane then some of them were...

[Freebird Forever]

You may want to study the accounts of Lewis and Clark's expedition. The were the first caucasion Americans to encounter several groups "America's First Immigrants"

[Cogadh na Sith]

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.

[Billthedrill]

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...

[Gumlegs]

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."

[constans]

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.

[Cleburne]

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.

[anton]

Native Americans were bloodthirsty savages in harmony with nothing but the carcasses of the enemies they cannibalized. The best and most advanced of them, the Anasazi, were recently added to the list of cannibals.

I'm OK with Native Americans killing each other, Europeans have done it every 20 years or so throughout time, but cannibals?

[breakem]

I believe it was late 1991 or 1992 that the National Geographic ran a series on Columbus. One of the stories covered the native tribes pre-columbus. Most of what has been said here is true. So many tribes many different situations: war, etc all the way to peace and developed forms of government. I suggest you check out NG,

[Mitzi]

When Columbus returned to Hispanola (Dominican Republic/Haiti) in 1493, Fort Navidad had been burned to the ground, and the 44 settlers he left behind were gone.

Who knows what happened . . . .

[ladyinred]

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.

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

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.