The American Indian Lie and the Civilization Colonization Wrought
On "Indigenous People" and European Civilization
One of the most pervasive lies at the root of current year society is that of the American Indian. Namely, the idea that the spread of Western civilization was not only morally wrong, but accomplished by using evil means against innocent, peace-loving peoples. Tacked onto that concept is the false idea that evil Europeans used previously unheard-of violence against proto-hippies1 to effect a change for the worse in the New World.
It was once understood that the cowboys and Indians, Spaniards and Aztecs, or Jamestown settlers and local tribes were vicious and peaceable depending on the situation. Now, however, we are taught that the Indians were constantly peaceful proto-hippies and the Europeans bloodthirsty monsters. In fact, leftist academics and agitators press variations of the claim that the Indigenous groups the Europeans found upon arrival (hereafter: “Indians”) were sitting around living in peace until evil Westerners showed up and started wars of aggression, bringing it to them for the first time. For example, the Associated Press recently claimed that white colonists invented scalping to “eradicate Native Americans.”2
That is a facially absurd claim, as are all the others about the natives being the peace-loving good guys.3 War is the “father of us all,” as Heraclides put it, and there’s no truth in claiming that the Indians were any different from the Africans or Europeans in that respect. Brave fighters renowned the world over for their tracking and forest warfare skills, once discovered, they fought constant wars of aggression before and after the Europeans arrived. The only thing that changed was their increasing use of firearms alongside the hatchet instead of bows and arrows.
But, despite the whole idea being absurd on its face, it’s a claim that has stuck around and is used to denigrate European civilization. So, in this article, I will “deconstruct it,” as the leftist academics say of our myths. The Indians were not woodland hippies who loved peace, free love, and abusing plant-based drugs. They weren’t peaceful. They weren’t noble savages. They were bloodthirsty and highly capable warriors who fought tenaciously against European civilization for nearly half a millennium after fighting amongst each other for time immemorial.
Their martial nature is much to their credit, as being a culture of warriors is quite honorable and better than the pacifist alternative. However, it also demolishes the concept that they were hippies, and the Marxist attack on European civilization using the Indians that such a concept is used to reinforce.
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Peace Loving Natives?
The idea that the Indians, both in North and South America, were peaceful is quite obviously absurd and is rebutted by all the available evidence. While there were some generally peaceful tribes, such as the Hopi, the archeological and historical record tells a much more accurate version of Indian history. That is true both of the Indians of what became the United States of America and Canada (hereafter: “the North”) and the Indians of Mesoamerica and South America (hereafter: “the South)”.
While the patterns of violence were somewhat different in both regions, as will be discussed below, the same general fact is the same for both. The Indian societies in both the North and South across which Europeans came were incredibly violent, with massacre, conquest, and torture-filled human sacrifice being the norm rather than the exception.
Violence in the North
While Europeans and Americans are much blamed for their massacres of Indians, little attention is paid by the “Indians were hippies” contingent to the quite frequent massacres of each other the Indians carried out well before the Europeans arrived. For example, in North America, an artifact from well in the pre-Columbian period shows a Mississippian warrior decapitating his prisoner, the very sort of merciless savagery that Europeans are accused of introducing the Indians to.4 Similarly, in the Crow Creek massacre, which occurred in the 1300s, hundreds were slain.5 One of the main explanations for the massacre is that "overpopulation, land-use patterns, and an unstable climate caused the people to compete for available farmland," much as has occurred in Europe and everywhere else from time immemorial.6
Further, the Indian-European conflicts contained much of the same savagery present in inter-Indian warfare, a painful memory of the colonization process the European mind has long held onto. For example, a tapestry showing warfare in the 16th and 17th centuries, the early period of British attempts at colonization of the New World, shows savage fighting and the execution of prisoners.7 Though completed in 2000, it was begun in 1980, somewhat before the Marxist reinterpretation of history began, and shows what the British remember: unremitting, savage violence. That impression is one that the Founding Fathers shared and recorded forever by referring to the tribes as “merciless Indian savages, whose warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” in the Declaration of Independence. It was as well founded as it is now attacked and called one of America’s “original sins”.8 Such savagery remained a common feature of life on the frontier. Before the revolution, it was as true of massacres perpetrated by Indians in the French-Indian War9 as it had been during King Phillip’s War,10 an atrocity-filled conflict so bloody that it killed 30% of New Englanders. After the Revolution, it remained similarly true, and scalpings of Americans continued even as the Transcontinental Railroad was built,11 while massacres continued on both sides all the way until Wounded Knee.
Additionally, the Indians continued to be violent amongst themselves after the Europeans arrived. For example, data from the Blackfoot tribe shows that as late as 1805, 50% of the tribe’s deaths every year were caused by violence.12 They even tortured each other in sickening ways, treating war captives in ways that would make the worst Inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition blush.13
The colonists and Americans were, of course, violent as well and perpetrated all manner of massacres and atrocities up until the Indian Wars finally ended at Wounded Knee, itself such a massacre. But their Indian antagonists were cut from the same cloth and fought in the same mold, with both sides doing everything possible to try to win. They scalped the dead, murdered everyone in sight in bloody massacres,14 and even tortured women and children. In short, the Northern Indians were no more peaceful than their Southern cousins. As a U.S. Army colonel retorts in “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” when hectored about whites' violent treatment of the Indians, "You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent." Such was quite true, and remained true until the frontier closed.
The Blood-Soaked South
While the colonists of the North, from the Spaniards in Florida to the Puritans in New England and French in Canada, walked into a forested war zone, the Spaniards in the South walked into a horror movie. Columbus found cannibals,15 whom he fought, when he discovered the New World. In fact, it was the savage behavior of the cannibalistic Indians Columbus met in the New World that convinced the Spanish monarchy to take a more paternalistic colonial stance: while the “Spanish monarchy initially planned to treat indigenous groups with respect and pay them for their work,” that position quickly reversed when Columbus discovered that “the Caribs were flesh-eating heathens who refused to convert to Christianity.”16
It got worse as the exploration continued. When Columbus’ countrymen set sail from Cuba and landed in Mexico, what they found was gruesome and shocking in the extreme. In fact, when the Spaniards landed on the coast and marched into Mexico, they were essentially walking into a horror movie so disturbing that it would have been banned even a few years ago. For example, here’s how Fraser, in his book The Golden Bough, describes the festival of the Maize Goddess, Chicomecohuatl:17
(The) great festival… was preceded by a strict fast of seven days, (after which) they sanctified a young slave girl of twelve or thirteen years, the prettiest they could find, to represent the Maize Goddess Chicomecohuatl. They invested her with the ornaments of the goddess, putting a mitre on her head and maize-cobs round her neck and in her hands, and fastening a green feather upright on the crown of her head to imitate an ear of maize. This they did, we are told, in order to signify that the maize was almost ripe at the time of the festival, but because it was still tender they chose a girl of tender years to play the part of the Maize Goddess. The whole long day they led the poor child in all her finery, with the green plume nodding on her head, from house to house dancing merrily to cheer people after the dullness and privations of the fast.
…
The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, the walls of the chambers, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which covered the floor. After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn; they put the mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs about his neck, the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed they led him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do, incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin of the girl…
The practices of the Aztecs were so horrific, from the flaying of girls to the ripping of thousands of hearts out of beating chests,18 that their practices were horrifying to the Conquistadors. Those men, as a reminder, weren’t soft or squeamish. They themselves were hard men born of those who had fought for generations against Moorish invaders in some of Europe’s most brutal fighting and slaughtering. Still, despite that heritage and experience in warfare of the toughest sort, they were sickened by what they found to the extent that they thought the Aztecs to be worshipping Satan himself:19
This repeated discovery of… human sacrifice concentrated the minds of the conquistadors… The Castilians in Mexico now realized the danger in which they would be if they were so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the Mexica. This appreciation had a profoundly shocking effect, permanently souring relations with the Indians and causing the Castilians to adopt an unbending attitude in negotiations. Sacrifice was far from being merely a pretext for intervention. Aguilar (not the interpreter Aguilar), a member of the expedition, made this evident: “To my manner of thinking, there is no other kingdom on earth where such an offence and disservice has been rendered to Our Lord, nor where the devil has been so honoured.”
And the Aztecs didn’t just cut the skin off and rip hearts from living victims, though they did that by the thousands. They did the same thing to captured Spaniards, as recorded by Bernal Diaz, who served under Cortes, in The Conquest of New Spain:20
The dismal drum of Huichilobos sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue from which it came we saw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols, we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced, the papas laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts, which they offered to the idols before them… (The Conquest of New Spain, volume II, chapter 152).
I must say that when I saw my comrades dragged up each day to the altar, and their chests struck open and their palpitating hearts drawn out, and when I saw the arms and legs of these sixty-two men cut off and eaten, I feared that one day or another they would do the same to me. Twice already they had laid hands on me to drag me off, but it pleased God that I should escape from their clutches. When I remembered their hideous deaths, and the proverb that the little pitcher goes many times to the fountain, and so on, I came to fear death more than ever in the past. (The Conquest of New Spain, volume II, chapter 156).
Even Cortes, now described by so-called historians on the left as a ruthless freebooter and bloodthirsty murderer, was sickened and horrified by the chilling practices of the Aztecs. Commenting on them in a letter, he said:21
They have another custom, horrible, and abominable, and deserving punishment, and which we have never before seen in any other place, and it is this, that, as often as they have anything to ask of their idols, in order that their petition may be more acceptable, they take many boys or girls, and even grown men and women, and in the presence of those idols they open their breasts, while they are alive, and take out the hearts and entrails, and burn the said entrails and hearts before the idols, offering that smoke in sacrifice to them. Some of us who have seen this say that it is the most terrible and frightful thing to behold that has ever been seen. So frequently, and so often do these Indians do this, according to our information, and partly by what we have seen in the short time we are in this country, that no year passes in which they do not kill and sacrifice fifty souls in each mosque; and this is practiced, and held as customary, from the Isle of Cozumel to the country in which we are now settled. Your Majesties may rest assured that, according to the size of the land, which to us seems very considerable, and the many mosques which they have, there is no year, as far as we have until now discovered and seen, when they do not kill and sacrifice in this manner some three or four thousand souls. Now let Your Royal Highnesses consider if they ought not to prevent so great an evil and crime, and certainly God, Our Lord, will be well pleased, if, through the command of Your Royal Highnesses, these peoples should be initiated and instructed in our Very Holy Catholic Faith . . .
The Aztecs weren’t the sole Southern native group to practice human sacrifice. The Incas, the abominable rulers of much of South America, also murdered children by their thousands as a religious ritual,22 calling it capacocha.23
Though human sacrifice was common, it was far from the sole form of violence engaged in by the evil empires of the South. In addition to it, both the Incas and Aztecs fought wars of aggression as they expanded, much as the Europeans did. In fact, the conquest policies of the Aztecs were so disliked and severe that local tribes allied with the Cortes and his Spaniard conquistadors to fight against the Aztecs. Though it is the Europeans who are attacked and damned for building empires in the New World, it was the similarly expansive empires of the Aztecs and Incas that were drenched with the blood of human sacrifice victims in addition to defeated, subjugated tribes, something those historians refuse to note.
So, much as in the North, though in an even more gruesome way, the tribes of the South were violent. They waged war on each other, against Spain, and against innocent victims of religious policy, sacrificing children in a sort of demonic practice that had been wiped out in Europe dozens of centuries before.
Why It Matters
All that should be no surprise. "Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage," Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, "quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."24
Yet, to some, it remains difficult to contemplate, or at least admit, that the natives were violent when the Europeans showed up and that, in many cases, such as with the human sacrifice of the Aztecs and Incas, that violence was far worse than anything the Europeans did.
For example, Discover Magazine, in an article titled, “The Aztecs Sacrificed Humans to Repay Gods, and Other Reasons,” wrote, “The traditional accounts of Aztec sacrifice are almost too gory to be true. In them, Aztec priests cut beating hearts from the chests of sacrificial victims before throwing them down the steep steps of pyramids. ‘It is the most terrible and frightful thing,’ an account from 1519 stated, shortly after the Spanish arrival in Mesoamerica. But the Aztecs, or Mexica, whose empire controlled most of central Mexico in the 15th century, didn’t see sacrifice as quite so startling, nor as quite so simple. In fact, it wasn’t always what it was made out to be by the Spanish, who sensationalized sacrifice as an excuse for conquest, says Nawa Sugiyama, an archaeologist at the University of California Riverside.”25
Then there’s the infamous Howard Zinn, who, in Chapter 1 of his “A People’s History of the United States,” did much to frame the Indians as innocent, proto-hippie victims of a rapacious Spanish tyrant. Ignoring the cannibalism problem and focusing on “cruelty” and giving the impression through a quote of a 1960s version of free love amongst the Indians, for example, he wrote:26
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus's journal and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small, and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the orders of captains or kings.
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex relations:
Marriage laws are non-existent men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands.
So, why downplay and ignore the brutality of the natives while highlighting and dramatically overstating the cruelty of the Europeans? Because doing so is a way of pushing Marxism in the present and destroying the idea of Western greatness. Such is what Zinn admitted just a few paragraphs later, writing:27
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
It goes beyond just admitting what Zinn did there. Part of it is certainly about refusing “acceptance of conquest” and trying to get Americans to think not through the eyes of great men but rather those whom they trampled underfoot as some sort of exercise in thinking like slaves so as to teach them to despise great men.
But it’s also about “deconstructing,” as the Marxists say, the very idea of the West and what made it great.
As I have explained before, the West’s period of greatness and supremacy from roughly the Glorious Revolution to the Interwar Period came thanks to its internal hierarchy,28 the functioning of that hierarchy,29 and those at the top doing their utmost to serve the state.30 Importantly, it was very much not an egalitarian society; there was a hierarchy that was at least somewhat strict, and which was respected by most members of all the classes.
That died in August of 1914, and the tragedy and suffering of World War I led to decades of navel-gazing, self-hate, and churning anti-European sentiment amongst the Marxist contingent. On one hand, the resultant worldview means that they can’t accept that the natives, by whom they mean whoever was there last before the Europeans, were evil and violent, more akin to demons than hippies as they flayed little girls; to them, the Europeans must always be the evil ones. But it’s not just that. It’s also that now they’re convinced that any form of hierarchy is evil and must be dismantled, at least if it’s European at root; that’s the Cultural Marxism part of the equation speaking.
To them, then, the hierarchy of nations shown in Cortes showing up and easily defeating the Aztecs despite being vastly outnumbered and only having a small margin of technological superiority31 is utterly unacceptable rather than impressive. Further, the fact that it exists at all means that to them, Cortes isn’t a hero for stopping mass human sacrifice. He’s evil because his couple hundred men rallied native allies and defeated a vast native empire, as clear a sign as any of natural hierarchy and civilizational superiority.
Much the same thing plays out repeatedly, across the world. To the Zinn types, for example, Rhodesia wasn’t great because it carved civilization out of the veldt and brought previously unthinkable prosperity to the tribes there; rather, it was evil because it was a “white” state in black Africa and so it’s mere existence was racist. Similarly, to them, it matters not that the main goal of the Maori in New Zealand was to capture prisoners on raids to “chop them up and eat them and turn them into excrement,” or that mothers would kill their newborn daughters, which fathers would then eat before battle.32 What matters is that the British showed up and defeated them with relative ease while not eating each other, and so have to be damned for showing such a clear hierarchy amongst nations.
That, then, is what they hate and why they attempt to frame the Indians not as merciless savages who ate each other and flayed children alive to appease their demonic gods, but as pitiful hippies who were killed by rapacious desperadoes from abroad. It’s all about deconstruction of the great truths that serve as a bedrock for our civilization so that it can be destroyed and replaced with the horrors they instituted in Rhodesia33 and South Africa.34
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
The conflation of Indians and hippies has been “a thing” for some time now; in fact, since the hippies became a force. While few, even on the Red left, would insist if pressed on the matter that Indians were entirely peaceful, even before whites showed up, there is an odd and strong belief that the Indians were something like the hippies of the 60s and 70s in terms of free love, loving peace, and abusing psychoactive drugs. That framing is absurd, given how martial the Indians were, but is a recurrent belief in America, at least at a subconscious level.
See footnote 1 for what I mean by this
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I am endlessly amused by people who think land should be given “back” to the indigenous. Exactly what time in history is the benchmark? Because if we give the Black Hills “back” to the people there when the area was settled by Americans those people were predominantly Sioux. However if we give it back to the people who were there when Columbus arrived or when the Pilgrims settled Plymouth Rock then we should give it back to the Crow. The Crow and the Sioux were historically and still are enemies and violence between the two groups still happens on rare occasions. Not surprisingly I suspect the Sioux would prefer we use the 1870s benchmark and the Crow would prefer we use the 1620 benchmark.
History is complicated just as people are.
alan w. eckert did a wonderful historical novel series encompassing the seven years war through pontiac’s war. unvarnished. ritual cannibalism. massacres on both sides.