The traditional story is that American Indians possessed a profound spiritual kinship with nature and were unusually solicitous of environmental welfare. If we are to avert environmental catastrophe, the not-so-subtle lesson goes, we need to recapture this lost Indian wisdom. As usual, the real story is more complicated, less cartoonish, and a lot more interesting. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/6868/were-american-indians-really-environmentalists/
Were American Indians Really Environmentalists?
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As always, excellent work by Thomas Woods. Having grown up in Seattle and been nearly drowned in fairy tales of environmentalist natives in every history class (especially Washington State History), it is nice to hear the “other” side (meaning the “factual” side) of this story. I’m just waiting for my copy of Woods’ latest book to arrive in the mail…
Good post, Thomas.
For those interested, I would note that Terry Anderson, Don Leal, John Baden and the other free market environmentalists at PERC in Bozeman have done much of the work over the past few decades in researching and documenting more fully the fact that Indians were environmnetal exploiters as well but in many cases developed quite sophisticated property rights systems that worked quite well – right up to the point that Indian societies were chewed up by Western diseases, guns and more efficient industry and agriculture, and pushed by governmental actions onto collective land tenure and property rights systems that dampened private initiative, raised the cost of capital and created other obstacles to efficient economic organization. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the Indians themselves do not understand this history, but there is indeed a tough row to hoe to move away from the burden of collectivist institutions.
http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=802
http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=804
While I agree with the gist of your post, I would point out that it is undeniable that Indian societies, because they were industrially and technologically less advanced, had a much lighter environmental footprint than the modern industrial societies. It is our own alienation from nature and our elimination of public open spaces/the frontier through intense carving up of common space that lead us to romanticize the not-so-distant Indian past.
Regards,
TT
Great points! As a member of the Choctaw Nation, the third largest Indian tribe in the US, I agree completely. By the way, few trible members in Oklahoma like to be called Native Americans because they don’t want to be named after an Italian map maker. Very few Indians use the term Indian, but almost no one uses “native American”. Usually, tribal members use their tribal names to refer to themselves. So I would rarely say I’m Indian, but that I’m Choctaw. But if I talk about all tribes, I’ll always call them Indians and never Native Americans.
Indians used to set the forests and prairies on fire every Spring. Burning the forests would get rid of brush and dead or sick trees and allow the grass to grow which would attract wild life for hunting. Burning the prairie would allow new grass to grow and attract the buffalo.
Most tribes didn’t practice ownership of land within the tribe, but everything else was owned, including horses, houses, etc. However, farming tribes, such as the Choctaw, allowed leases of land for very long periods of time, often as long as the farmer wanted to use it. While he was using the land, no one else could use it or take his produce; it was private property. The farmer couldn’t pass the land on to his sons, though.
Between tribes, land was owned. Each tribe held specific territory which other tribes crossed at their peril.
Tribes didn’t cause a great deal of environmental damage, other than the burning and the slash/burn farming which ruined the soil, because their populations were so small. They kept their numbers small by constantly fighting each other. Disease also took a big toll. Had their number been greater, who knows what damage they would have done.
We heard these arguments back in 1999 when Shepard Krech III published The Ecological Indian. We rebutted these arguments then and the rebuttals still stand. See http://www.bluecorncomics.com/prager.htm for one such rebuttal.
The short answer to Woods’s question is that yes, the Indian record was mixed. But it’s far superior to the Euro-American record, which has been atrocious.
Nice article, and to TT’s and RogerM’s posts there are a couple of good books and articles that cover Indian attitudes towards private property and environmental stewardship, which you may have already read. The book 1491 is a good introduction to all of the Americas, and provides an introduction to the work of William Denevan, who wrote an article several years back (1992, Annals of the AAG – an article on the Columbian Exchange) titled “The Pristine Myth,” indicating that tribal customs and practices were varied, burning for grassland and forest management was commonplace (if I remember correctly, several scientists have concluded that large sections of the Great Plains were burned over about every 3 years), and populations were very large and quite dense, especially on the East Coast. Disease brought by European traders and fishermen devastated and depopulated the eastern coastal tribes, leaving the land effectively abandoned and therefore in colonial imaginations “pristine” and populated with caricatured natives. Another good book is Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, which gives various views of American expansion into the tribal territories of the West from different authors who are members of tribes visited by L&C on their expedition. Of real interest to me were the articles by the Crow and Shoshone authors which support the notion of private property and family/clan land ownership/stewardship.
Another interesting tidbit – those tribes known for their entrepreneurialism/individualism were often subjected to horrible consequences as a result of US laws regarding tribes. A good example is the Coeur d’Alene tribe here in Idaho; around the turn of the century quite a few of the tribal members were very large farmers in Idaho in the Idaho Palouse country, several sporting farms of about 1,000 acres in size and employing white farm labor. Unfortunately, under the Dawes Act, these individual owners had their land confiscated and then reallocated down to substantially smaller allotments. The remaining land was then deemed to be “excess” and sold off to white farmers who now are the largest landholders on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. Now there is only a 6,000 acre tribal farm as an echo of the situation 100+ years ago.
A good article by Dr Woods and some interesting comments.
As for Rob Schmidt’s comment – it is the record of the American government that has been bad.
Not just in the land the government now owns, but also in handing out land (land the government had no right to) to homesteaders in land that was sometimes not suitable for such use.
Sometimes the “cattle barons” had it right.
Exactly which “entire animal populations” did the Arapahoes and Shoshone “recently” wipe out? I have no doubt that the tribes are as poor at wildlife management as us palefaces, but that claim is new to me, a 35 year resident of Wyoming with a strong knowledge of wildlife in the state. Does the book document this claim?
The sad story of the Nez Perce tribe of Washington state provides a good example of the destruction of Indian property rights and budding private enterprise by the US government. As I recall, the Nez Perce summered their large herds of appaloosa horses and beef cattle in a particular beautiful valley in Oregon, well defined by rock rims on both sides. The tribe returned to this valley every spring over the course of quite a few decades. Each tribesman owned his own herd of horses and beef, and many engaged in trading with advancing wagon trains, acquiring exhausted and thin horses and oxen, for which they exchanged fresh stock often acquired from previous wagon trains. Some Nez Perce grew prosperous, building herds of hundreds of animals. In the late fall, the tribe would trail its great herds into the desert of Washington, which featured scant snow cover and reliable winter grazing.
Over time, these enterprising Indian livestock breeders and traders would no doubt have gravitated toward private ownership of their grazing lands, as land became more scarce. But the US military put an end to such unauthorized enterprising, by commanding the Nez Perce to give up their traditional summer rangeland and move to the reservation assigned to them, on the desert of course.
The famous flight of Chief Joseph and his beleagered people, hotly pursued by half the US army, occurred because the Nez Perce refused to obey orders. Joseph led his tribespeople though the mountains of Montana, eluding the vastly larger US army and outsmarting its more renowed strategists. He was overtaken by the bluecoats on the northern slopes of the Bearspaw Mountains, just a few miles south of Canada, a destination Joseph thought he had already reached.
People often naively assume that the Indians created minimal “damage” to the environment, because they were worshippers of nature. But that’s really not the case. They were largely primitive people who lived as hunters in the west, and as hunters and farmers in the Mid West and I assume the East.
Because they were primitive, many tribal cultures emphasized martial values, an emphasis that obviously would have varied from tribe to tribe. Before the arrival of Europeans, Indian population across the country was low, numbering as I recall about 1 (or possibly 2) million. The limited carrying capacity of the land to support hunting was the primary limitation on Indian population growth. The frequent raids and battles among tribes were an outgrowth of this martial culture, as each tribe sought to maintain its territory, and to plunder, murder, and enslave their rivals.
In light of this primitivism, it shouldn’t be surprising that Stone Age tribes would leave a tiny footprint on their surroundings. But why would a reasonable person quake at the prospect of altering and exploiting nature for his own benefit?
An interesting article. If you enjoyed reading it I highly recommend Charles
C. Mann’s 2005 book:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
(Pub. in N.A. by Knopf and in Europe by Granta Books)
He too shows how the native peoples of the Americas were active users of the
land who employed vast agricultural techniques (including fire, land
reclamation and water diversion) and often had property rights in land and
more abstract things. Indeed, he shows that at the time of Columbus the
largest cites in the world were in the Americas, cities that literally
dwarfed London and Paris. And the population of North and South America was
well into the 100′s of millions.
These folks were not the primitive barbarians of Hollywood. They were clean
(their hygiene was astonishing to the Europeans) and healthy. In general
they towered over the diminutive Europeans. In what is now the Eastern US,
the child rearing (and community life in general) of the natives was
remarkably libertarian. It so impressed many whites that they chose to
abandon their own cultural ties in favor of living among the “heathen.”
Moreover, the natives had a vast system of commerce and trade that stretched
the length and breadth of both continents…all without draft animals and
money as we think of it.
Oops … ” the population of North and South America was well into the 100′s of millions” should read “10s of millions”
Many of Mr. Woods comments and observations are true. However, isn’t it interesting that he tries to explain the fallible nature of those that did not write the history. But with white guilt and a sense of Anglo-responsibility he tries to correct perceptions that are typically non-indian.
Being part of the dominant culture he still has the innate need to couche his arguments in posessive, monetary terms.
Private Property? dig deeper Mr. Woods
Sincerely,
Billy Collins
Mark Hum.: Your points about the destruction of Indian property rights and private enterprise by the US government are right on point. I would add Jackson’s illegal ouster of the modernized Cherokee and others from the South as a more prominent and tragic example.
However, your comments about “primitivism” and martial values are off. Tribal cultures did not emphasize martial values because they were primitive, just as American primitivism does not explain the aggressively martial approach that the US took towards the Indians whenever it suited our purposes. Indians were martial because they needed to be to defend themselves from each other, and their institutions were largely sufficient to create sophisticated and stable socieites that lasted millenia. However, their internal structures of property rights and defense proved unsufficient for the guns, germs and steel of the Europeans, who took aggressive advantage of every weaqkness and opportunity.
Inn other words, it’s the same old enduring saga – property rights, whether private or group, are only as good as one’s ability to defend them. Man’s martial nature runs deep, and we face constant battles, as one man’s “private property” is another’s “commons” to be exploited whenever possible and advantageous.
Regards,
TT
Tom, I’m glad we can agree: President Jackson’s murderous assault on the Creeks and Cherokees, together with his theft of their cultivated farms, is an excellent example of the violation of natural rights of Indian people by the federal government.
I am no expert on American Indian culture and history. I’ve read a lot of Montana history, so I do know that tribes in the northern Great Plains were frequently primitive and barbaric.
Of course, values varied among tribes. While the Blackfeet and Arikara’s were notoriously war-prone and blood-thirsty, other tribes like the Crow and Flatheads were less infatuated with murdering and maiming their enemies, although they enthusiastically and routinely engaged in horse stealing raids. Still other tribes, such as the Mandans of western North Dakota, sought to avoid contact with the war-prone Crees and Blackfeet; prefering agricultural cultivation, hunting, and trade with white Americans.
My reference to primitivism and martial values among Indian people is meant to apply primarily to the more war-like tribes. Rather than seek out opportunities in trade and production, as some Mandans, Nez Perce, and others did, the war tribes sought to impose bloody hegemony where ever they ranged. Because the values of the war tribes revolved around hunting and making war, they inculcated the virtue of bravery (counting coup on an enemy), of stoic endurance of pain (the Sun Dance) of murder (collecting and displaying scalps), and of cruelty (beating slaves from other tribes mercilessly, slowly torturing captured enemies with the enthusiastic participation of the squaws.) Clearly, these were primitive, often cruel people.
But my claim that virtually all Indians were primitives is true in a broader sense, as well. They had no written language; their understanding of the natural world, or of mathematics, or history, was extremely limited; they had virtually no grasp of philosophy, or economics. While some examples of Indian knowlege–of astronomy or architecture or child rearing or herbal remedies–no doubt exist, compared to the Europeans, Indians were primitive.
Some trade among tribes from different regions did, of course, take place: among the primitive or the civilized, incentives reward trading. But still, the Indian tribes bore no resemblence to merchant societies, like the city states of Italy during the Renaissance. Indian people were much closer to living, literally, in the stone age when Europeans arrived. The used stone axes; drove buffalo over cliffs to harvest meat; fished with bone hooks; lived in skin tents and houses built from sticks and brush. They were subsistance hunters and farmers. When drought arrived or hard winters settled in from the North, starvation lurked through their camps. My impression is that many plains tribes would drive elderly parents into the snows of winter to freeze, or starve.
The killing and cruelty were offshoots of this primitivism, because only among rational people–those who consciously seek coherent understanding in the challenges they encounter–do universal moral standards emerge. True, Indians applied ethical standards in their dealings with one another within a tribe, but those norms were non-universal; they didn’t apply to relations between people of different tribes. This is why the tribes were primitive in their basic outlook.
Whether tribes were primitive or not has nothing to do with their right to their lands. Europeans understood property right very well, so why would they think it all right to steal tribal land just because tribes didn’t have exactly the same property laws?
My tribe, the Choctaws, fought along side Andrew Jackson in the war of 1812. How did he reward us? By stealing our land in Louisiana and Alabama and shipping us to Oklahoma. Our trip wasn’t as disastrous as that of the Cherokee’s, but many people died. And by that time, the Choctaw and Cherokee had adopted forms of government copied after that of the US. And we had adopted Christianity as our main religion. The Choctaw built schools and the first women’s college in the area in their new home. For most of the 19th century, Choctaws were better educated than Texans. But that didn’t stop the Dawes Commission from dissolving the sovereign Choctaw Nation in the late 1890′s.
If anyone cares about the sorry treatment of tribal nations, you should read Angie Debo’s classic “And Still the Waters Run”. Debo documents the fact that the US government made hundreds of treaties with sovereign Indian nations and broke every single one of them, stole Indian land and property on a massive scale, and allowed whites to murder Indians with impunity.
The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes regained their sovereign nation status during the 1930′s when the Federal government reversed its 200 year history of persecution. In Oklahoma during the 1920′s, wealthy whites bribed judges and used the courts to steal millions of acres of land privately owned by Indians. The Federal government began indicting people, mostly on charges of murdering Indians and stealing their land. Many whites in Oklahoma’s state legistlature, congressional delegation, governor’s office and many leaders of the city of Tulsa were indicted. The Feds had just gotten warmed up and they had filed 30,000 indictments in federal court. So the white leadership of the state negotiated with Congress and got the Feds to drop the charges in exchange for allowing the tribes to reorganize their nations and have sovereignty equal to the states.
Mark Humphrey:
Your comments baffle me. Surly you are not referring to all new world native peoples. If you refer to the plains nations only then you should state such. Some may well have been as barbaric and “primitive” as you say (as were many horse culture/nomadic peoples of the world, Genghis Khan et. al.). The plains nations, however, represented only a tiny fraction of the native population of North America. You didn’t have to travel very far (south to Mexico and East to the Mississippi Valley and East Coast) to find extraordinary civilizations that were every bit as advanced in agriculture and animal husbandry as any European country.
What you seem to forget is that Europeans began to encounter the plains nations a good two hundred years after first contact …an enormous amount had changed all over the continent by that time (introduction of the horse culture for one).
Once you move from Mexico city south on into Central and South America the cultures that existed at the time of first contact had written language and highly developed concepts in both mathematics and astronomy. They had astonish architectural skills that did rival any city in the world (in fact, at the time they were the largest cities in the world, except for perhaps those in China). Their system of commerce and trade was highly developed (with trade routs as far North as today’s New England) although they did lack a consistent medium of exchange.
It is true that some of these peopled did practice ritualized murder. However, one only has to consider the state of “criminal justice” in Europe in the 15th century to see that barbarism was not limited to the new world. Any study of the so-called death penalty in Europe and for what it was meted out will dispel all notions that Europe was somehow superior on this count.
Dear Mr. Hughes:
Look up “primitive” in a dictionary and you’ll read approximately the following: “of or existing in the beginning or earliest times and ages; ancient; original; crude, simple, rough, uncivilized; not derivative, primary, basic.”
It may be that Mayan, Aztec, and Incan societies produced impressive works of architecture, interesting astronomical insights, employed some crude written language (hieroglyphics?), and even launched rare trading-and-adventure excursions to the northeastern US seaboard. I’m not here to slander anyone or to denigrate their achievements, including the Indians of North and South America. But I think such achievements, while noteworthy, do not elevate those societies beyond the primitive.
Most fundamentally, a primitive society is one whose people lack the ability to think rigorously; for rigorous thinking is essential to discovering every kind of knowlege. Without the power of conceptual understanding, which stands on abstraction and logical integration, knowlege about anything more remote than the end of one’s nose simply isn’t possible. Because primitive people have not mastered the skill–and the virtue–of clear, systematic, and independent thinking, they are tragically hamstrung in their attempts to master the world in which they struggle to live. This is true in all times and all places.
This lack of intellectual competance reinforces superstition and rule by blood-soaked autocrats. If one is mystified by most aspects of his world, and if one retains the conviction that his world is beyond understanding, then superstition provides guidelines for action. Dictators, who always claim special insight through mystical revelation, offer the safety of inclusion and relief from the anxiety of uncertainty.
This is why primitive cultures do not develope into merchantile civilizations, essential to progress and prosperity for the masses. Economic decision making requires conceptual understanding: the ability to grasp what is essential about a temporary opportunity and to project that condition to another place or a future time.
The appalling lack of respect for individual moral sovereignty and rights in primitive societies is another inescapable consequence of the curse of primitive non-thinking. Primitives emphasize the alleged efficacy of physical force to get things done; they recoil from the frightening responsibility of struggling to make sense of the world, from the seemingly insurmountable challenge of escaping intellectual blind allies, of working through logical integration. But thinking is strictly an individual process. If thinking is a vice, then threatening individuals who reach conclusions that differ from those approved by the tribe–and the tribe’s political leadership–must be slapped down or exterminated.
This lack of individual rights further hobbles individual creativity (excuse the redundancy), thereby choking off progress in entrepreneuership and production, in science and philosophy, and in every other branch of human knowlege.
Thus primitive societies tend to be inward-looking cultures deeply entrenched in ignorance, slavery, blood-letting, and impoverishment. The Spanish, for all their glaring cruelties and oppressive hegemony, were vastly more powerful, more efficacious, more capable of conceptual understanding than the primitive tribesmen who tried desperately to repell their advance. In North America, one can read of many martial encounters between Euro-Americans and Indians, in which the Americans repelled Indians who were well armed and held lopsidded numerical advantage. Individual Indian fighters often lacked the ability to think for themselves, so they couldn’t strategize, and grew fainthearted when their fellows began to leave the scene of battle.
We’re the beneficiaries of two thousand or more years of advancing civilization, and advancing intellectual competence. That’s the profound value and blessing of much-maligned Western Civilization. Don’t denigrate it for the sake of romanticized and gauzy notions of the Noble Savage.
What? Anyone who doesn’t understand the magic of (Western?) Libertarianism is actually a primitive or at least lower down on the intellectual or evolutionary ladder? Talk about every hen thinks she has laid the best egg.
Humphrey:
To suggest that human beings advanced enough to develop agriculture, pseudo-democratic political structures and complicated political confederations between tribes are primitives who “lack the ability to think rigorously” is simply laughable.
One tiny example will suffice. While Europeans were still blundering over the arithmetical meaning of 1-1 i.e., the use of the numeral zero (0) for something other than a place holder, New World mathematicians used it and understood it completely. Now if that is not an example of rigours and critical thinking then I simply do not know what is.
Your crack implying I have a “romanticized and gauzy notions of the Noble Savage” is a precise example of your own lack of critical thinking on the topic. At no time in my correspondence did I allude to such a ludicrous an offensive notion. New World Indians were and remain human beings graced with all the faculties human beings need the act to achieve ends.
Finally, it has been my long experience that attempting a reasonable dialog with someone who is an Ayn Rand wannabe (I mean no offence to Any Rand … you do that nicely) is a pointless endeavour. I shall end my part of this discussion by encouraging you to do even the slightest amount of research on the topic of pre-Columbian Indians. Most of what you have written is refuted by the evidence in Tom Wood’s original article.
Mark Humphrey: Sorry, but I can’t accept our sweeping denigration of other societies and would encourage a little more reading.
Human nature certainly hasn’t changed much, even in our Western “civilized” world, where we kill millions of innocents in wars without a blink of the eye, even in these advanced days, where “rigorous thinking” brought us the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, all manner of disturbed individuals, rising fundamentalism and intolerance, illiteracy, etc. Our own tribal instincts are still very much in evidence.
I would recommend Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” as an excellent analysis on the big picture of the rise of civilization, and why some socities crumbled. Some matters were fortuitous (geography relating to agrciuculture and animal husbandry) and/or deadly, like germs, while others are very much a matter of the degreee of organization, ability to innovate and to both defend and capture resources. Indian societies in the Western Hemisphere were devastated by germs, beginning with Columbus. Slavery was introduced because the Caribs were in advertently eradicated, and whites had difficulties with malaria. Diseases introduced by DeSoto and other explorers and later waves of settlers caused continuous waves of death, probably in the 50-100 million range. Indians melted away from many parts of the Eastern seaboard, but in any case what was left simply could not adapt in time to defend themselves from the better organized and largely ruthless newcomers. Even as the condition of many Indians was literally degenerate as a result, history still tells a tale of very civilized, educated, humane and non-primitive Indian societies throughout the Americas (as RogerM and other spoint out) – although, make no doubt, many were extremely warlike and some, especially in the fringes like Patagonia, lived close to stone-age existences.
Aztec and Mayan writings were deliberately destroyed by misionaries (though remnants have been puzzled through), and Incan quipu recording systems hthat supported a millenium-long civilization have yet to be deciphered.
By the way, one can still find evidence of cannibalism, both literal and metaphorical, in Western societies, if one cares to look.
Yes, native peoples of north and south americas were primitive, otherwise they would come to europe and colonize instead of the other way around.
This doesn’t mean they were less than human, or didn’t posses human rights.
Is this really an issue?
It is only an “issue”–actually a ruse–employed by Post Moderns who deeply resent the truth that some civilizations have much higher moral standing, vastly greater achievements, and are far better civilizations, than others. Perhaps they believe that moral values are subordinate to one’s culture; and that moral criticism of a culture is “discrimmination”.
Plains tribes are getting a bad rap here. They were far more sophisticated than most anthropologists think. I can’t remember the author, but you should try to find a copy of “The Indian How Book”. In spite of its hokey title, an ivy league anthropologist, who was also a member of an eastern tribe, spent years with plains tribes in the 1930′s (paid by the WPA) studying their lifestyles and researching their past.
Plains tribes had complex social arrangements and a great deal of sophistication in warfare. Plains Indians didn’t sleep on skins on the ground. They made beds with pole frames with rope stretched across. The space between each bed and the tipi covering was the private space of the family member who slept there and the place where he/she kept his private possessions. The wife maintained a small fire for cooking in the center. Protocols for entering tipis and passing between the fire and other members/guests were complex. Strategies for hunting buffalo were complex, too, and division of labor in the process was extensive and rigid. Tribes had inequality of wealth, too, with some families owning large herds of horses. Rich families were easily identified by the detailed and colorful paintings on the outside of their tipis and the lining inside which hid the poles.
If tribes didn’t develop labor-saving technology as Europeans had, it may have been due to the abundance of food. Tribes could live very well with little effort hunting for meat and raising small gardens. This suggests a relatively small population of tribal people, otherwise the wild game would have been depleted as it had been in most of Europe early on.
American Indians have gained a small amount of revenge on whites for their theft and murder of the past: we gave the world tobacco. Imagine the numbers of European Americans and Europeans smoking has caused.
RogerM, as a Choctaw, how do you feel about grand larceny (a billion or so seems to qualify as “grandâ€)?
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1222&issue_id=112
Philemon,
That’s a good article. Thanks for the link. Choctaws and other Indian Nations have been fighting BIA theft (called mismanagement by the media) for over a century. It’s an old, sad story. Seems the Federal government never gets tired of stealing from Indians, but at least they’re not murdering us any more like they used to.
ktibuk, if at any given time you are calling “primitive” those cultures that lose to other societies that have better organization, technology and killer germs, then by all means call American Indian societies primitive.
Mark Humphrey:
Fevered discusion of strawmen “Post Moderns” – who “deeply resent the truth that some civilizations have much higher moral standing, vastly greater achievements, and are far better civilizations, than others” – is a poor substitute for actually responding directly to those who have addressed you.
Of course it is fair to make moral criticisms of other cultures, but it behooves us to make sure our criticisms are informed by a comprehension of the failings of one’s own culture.
I think there was plenty of criminality and tragedy on both sides.
The trade in Buffalo skins was quite large at Bent’s fort in SE Colorado during the 1840s. Virtually all of it came from indians. This was before the real slaughter began 30 years later.
And how about the buffalo leaps? I don’t see those as being all that respect of life.
One of the Sioux chiefs told Gen. Crook that the Black Hills belonged to his people. Crook asked him where they got it and the chief replied, we took it from the Arapahoe.
I’m not trying to make a case for either side just trying to point out that there is plenty of blame to go around.
RogerM: “American Indians have gained a small amount of revenge on whites for their theft and murder of the past: we gave the world tobacco. Imagine the numbers of European Americans and Europeans smoking has caused.”
Shhh. Next tribes will be getting slapped with lung-cancer suits.
i have lived around injuns and worked with them and for them. i live in wa. state. filthy dirty thieving injuns. anywhere where you see piles of trash and junk around a “home” only an injun lives there in that filth. no matter how much money they have from their tribes or they make off us…they live like pigs! no insult to pigs intended.
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