Columbus Day Myths Revealed

Did you ever wonder why "Native" Americans put on war paint thousands of years before the "White man" arrived?
War, slavery and sex trade was central to the way of life of many First Nation cultures long before Christopher Columbus was born.

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Despite the myth that Aboriginals lived in happy harmony before the arrival of Europeans, war was central to the way of life of many First Nation cultures. Indeed, war was a persistent reality in all regions though, it waxed in intensity, frequency and decisiveness.
 The causes were complex and often interrelated, springing from both individual and collective motivations and needs. At a personal level, young males often had strong incentives to participate in military operations, as brave exploits were a source of great prestige in most Aboriginal cultures. According to one Jesuit account from the 18th Century, ‘The only way to attract respect and public veneration among the Illinois is, as among the other Savages, to acquire a reputation as a skilful hunter, and particularly as a good warrior … it is what they call being a true man.’ Among west coast societies, the material goods and slaves acquired through raiding were important avenues to build up sufficient wealth to host potlatches and other give-away ceremonies. At a community level, warfare played a multifaceted role, and was waged for different reasons. Some conflicts were waged for economic and political goals, such as gaining access to resources or territory, exacting tribute from another nation or controlling trade routes. Revenge was a consistent motivating factor across North America, a factor that could lead to recurrent cycles of violence, often low intensity, which could last generations. Among the Iroquoian nations in the northeast, ‘mourning wars’ were practiced. Such conflicts involved raiding with the intent to capture prisoners, who were then adopted by bereaved families to replace family members who had died prematurely due to illness or war.
Archaeological evidence confirms the prominent role of warfare in indigenous societies well before the arrival of permanent European settlers.
After 1609, most observers reported that Aboriginal people did ‘not know how to fight in open country,’ and accounts of Aboriginal warfare usually described hit and run military techniques, which the French called ‘la petite guerre.’ This was essentially a form of guerrilla warfare, the primary goal of which was to inflict casualties, capture prisoners and take scalps, while suffering as few losses as possible. To do so, the warriors generally moved in small groups and took pains to catch the enemy unawares or encircle it, while eluding the same tactics by the other side.

Olive Oatman was a fourteen-year-old girl whose family was killed in 1851 in present-day Arizona by "Native" Americans.

She and her younger sister were used as sex slaves until they were later traded to another tribe for weapons.

Called the girl with the Blue Tatoo, her face was tattooed with blue ink linking her to a particular Indian tribe.

Freed at last she became a circus side show curiosity.

 

 

 Aztecs: "More honest and upfront about it"

Aztecs weren’t all that different from any other regionally dominant culture. They lived parasitically off of their weaker neighbors, just as the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Persians and Mongols, and the Vikings and Normans did. They engaged in what we, in the modern West, think to be crude or morbid practices—largely because they were—but which, outside of culturally specific contexts, differ little from the brutalities of Christian crusaders or Hunnish hordes. All of human history has been an exercise in human savagery. You could say the Aztecs, with their vividly violent codices, were just more honest and upfront about it.

"Native Americans": Just normal cultures and normal people

Despite people commonly romanticizing the Native Americans, they were just normal cultures and normal people like you would find anywhere else on earth, with the same sorts of virtues and the same sorts of vices, and the same motivations as everyone else.

Amerindian tribes considered warfare as natural as breathing.
Each tribe pushed other tribes off the land it wanted and in turn was frequently forced out by other later more powerful tribes. Individual status in each tribal band was based on bravery in battle, coups and scalps taken, slaves and horses stolen, enemies tortured, “foreign” women raped and (last) the ability to persuade others. “Chiefs” were the noncombatant elders who administered camps; but they had no voice in war matters. War leaders (what Europeans thought were Chiefs) were simply prominent warriors who could inspire enough followers for a raiding party.

Far more Amerindians died at the hands of rival tribes than from US Army troops, who generally could never find them or catch them. Mind you, they fought differently, frequently fleeing as soon as one of their band was injured, because then they believed their leader lost his magic. Most tribal wars were short demonstrations with lots of coup-taking and show-boating, with few seriously injured because strong warriors were in short supply and life expectancies were short.

The Comanche, for example, were pushed South by other tribes before they stole horses from Spanish/Mexicans and became the dominant Plains horse warriors. While they controlled “Comancheria”, they blocked the Westward Expansion for about fifty years. Comanches drove the Apache out of the Southwest and virtually exterminated all but a few bands that hid in the mountains around the Mexican border. The Quakers
charged with pacifying them on their reservation became disgusted and horrified by the way they would ride off a few hundred miles to raid and kill, returning with fresh scalps and booty to the safety of the military-protected rez. The US Army was prohibited from entering the Amerindian reservation, but the natives could continue to “play at war.”

My favorite example of this is found in the Black Hills of South Dakota…sacred to the Lakotah people, site of many recent protests of land desecration by whitey.
While it’s absolutely true that the US Government broke treaties and stole the Black Hills from the Lakotah in the 1870’s, few people know that the Lakotah themselves took the land by force from the Cheyenne in the 1770’s… who themselves had taken the land by force from the Kiowa a few decades earlier.

Native Americans (a term that includes many linguistic, religious, tribal, and cultural groupings) engaged in wars for land, for resources, for slaves, for religious reasons, for cultural reasons, and for every other reason that other races and regions of the world go to war.

When the Europeans began colonization, many tribes demanded that the Europeans enter military alliances with them in exchange for trade. For example, just as the English and French hated one another, the Iroquois and Huron hated one another, so the English/Iroquois formed a centuries long alliance against the French/Huron. The Native Americans actually tended to be a bit more brutal than the Europeans, often engaging in casual warfare against civilians, torturing prisoners to death, and otherwise engaging in conduct that by European standards had started to fall out of favor by the later colonial period.