Incidentally, that isn’t difficult. At 6.3 murders per 100,000 people, it’s damned hard to get yourself killed in the Big Apple.
Stoning or strangling, usually. But what Tom Tildrum said. Most societies, especially early societies, used corporal punishment, confiscation of goods, humiliation, or capital punishment. Imprisonment is expensive.
Didn’t the English sometimes use drawing and quartering?
Slavery is a luxury that requires constant vigilance. That costs resources. Otherwise, the slave would murder his keeper in the night and run away. Or, it requires a settled civilization so that the slave understands that it’s not just a matter of disappearing into the local woods, the society is more than a day’s walk across, so running away would mean someone would find you and return you for punishment.
Not sure how accurate the storyline is in “A Man Called Horse”, but the usual habit there was that captives died when the weather turned cold. Of course, that’s an exception in that the captives would have to escape across the plains and outrun men on horseback; and the tribe was warlike enough that they would have nightly guards around anyway.
But, yes, there was a wide variety of societies in America; captives and slavery were as likely to be dealt with the same as any similar society across Asia or Africa, except they did not have metal chains - leather and rope would have to do.
The concept of imprisonment - AFAIK, except for important captives like alternate pretenders and uppity nobility being “warehoused” or kept out of commission, there was not an organized system of prisons in europe. Captives might be sent to the galleys (think “Les Miserables”) or put to work as slaves on farm estates, but the idea of just locking someone up as a punishment for anything except debt is fairly new. Hence, the reason why even theft of a loaf of bread was a hanging offense. Particularly heinous crimes called for a modicum of torture before death to reinforce the learning experience for the spectators.
It would be odd to take a grown man from another tribe as you’d expend more resources guarding him than you’d get out of him. (If they took a man, they’d probably torture and kill him.) A woman, possibly, and as an Englishman, he was considered more like a woman than a man. That is, he had no good way of fending for himself on his own. Not that Native American women were slouches, but they wouldn’t have much chance alone, other than being picked up by some other tribe and held captive by them.
There was a practice of holding captives, and then adopting them into the tribe, similar to the incidents in A Man Called Horse and Little Big Man. Danial Boone was captured and adopted by an Indian tribe. IIRC he left to warn settlers of an impending attack. Maintaining resisting captives would have been troublesome, so I assume the eventual choice would have been adoption or death.
[quote=“msmith537, post:7, topic:614391”]
“reliably” based on what? Because you heard this from a former cop who heard it from a dispatcher “off the record” in the 1970s. Did he call “honest injun” or something?
Well, I suppose I could ask a woman friend who was adopted into that tribe, into the particular clan involved, in fact, based in the village where it is alleged to have occurred. I don’t think she would tell me, however, for several obvious reasons.
“Reliably” because I’ve never known the man who told the story to tell lies and he was in a very serious frame of mind when he told it to me. In any anecdotal story there is always the possibility of a mistake in understanding. Your skepticism is admirable.
This is a tribe that didn’t possess tomahawks, incidentally–re your remark on the use of that weapon “upside the head.” They did, however, have wooden body armor very similar to that of Japanese Samurai in design. An anthropologist studied this and told me the knots used to tie the wooden slats together are almost identical to those used by the Japanese.
A more ancient form of punishment among this same tribe was to tie an offender to a tree and leave him until he died. That is pretty well documented and has been discussed in several books.
Where I live now (different tribe) there is a well-documented historical incident of a jealous wife who killed her husband’s young 2nd wife being left to starve to death alone, following a meeting of the tribe to decide the issue.
well, as an alaska native, i think we have a lower percentage of psycho/sociopaths in our populations because we weeded them out and killed that gene off haha… there are cases at least until 1994 that are documented or undocumented you deal with people who keep messing with others, the last famous one i remember hearing about growing up was in 1994, two kids robbed a pizza delivery guy and beat him so badly he was permanently deaf… the tribe banished the kids to an island with a small bag of survival tools, my dad said it was a knife, hatchet, rope and one box of matches… and they were refused assistance for a year… so they’ll either be alive or dead, they didn’t fuck up again after that. The tribe built the victim a new house 
it’s different than other systems, but a lot cleaner and much clearer to the offenders… it’s easy to die in alaska… but an honorable death is better than a dishonorable one.
Very interesting…what is the social response to the teens once they come home, are they treated as if they have “done their time” in mainstream society, or is there suspicion still? I could imagine a certain type of psycho who enjoys the challenge of survival not being dissuaded by that punishment…