I don’t think this land has ever been violently taken from anybody.
The original Polynesian settlers of islands like Hawaii and New Zealand came to uninhabited islands, so they didn’t take them from anybody else. Of course, they split into smaller groups and fought among themselves when they got there. By the time the Europeans got there, the land had been violently taken from Polynesians by other Polynesians. It’s probably not much consolation, when someone takes your land, if they’re the same ethnicity as you.
When medieval European knights fought each other, they generally weren’t trying to kill their opponent. They were usually trying to capture him and hold him for ransom. Of course, at the same battle, other types of soldiers might be fighting and killing each other. Just because one type of soldier is not trying to kill enemies, doesn’t mean all of the types of soldiers on that side in that battle aren’t.
And just because a knight wouldn’t kill other knights, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t kill any other people. He might behave quite differently toward people of another social class.
I don’t think counting coup means that warfare in the Indian tribe(s) that practiced it was less violent, any more than the practice of ransoming enemy knights means that European warfare was.
Weren’t the Apache considered the most aggressive and violent of the tribes? Even before the whites came into the region.
I recall reading somewhere that the Apache were raiders and greatly feared by the other tribes. I do recall reading that the Buffalo herds were decreasing and that lead to tension between the southwest tribes. Later the whites made the situation much worse when they started killing off the buffalo.
I don’t have a cite (I’m sure I could google fu one) but I remember from a college class that the Navajo were once as aggressive as the Apaches, but it was actually their wars with the Apache that broke their strength and made them a more ‘pacifist’ tribe.
Somebody above mentioned the Cherokee fighting for land in the Carolinas. Some trivia I didn’t know until doing genealogical research was that one of the tribes they fought were…
the Sioux.
Sorta kinda. While most of the Siouan tribes left the Great Lakes area and went west onto the Plains after becoming horsemen, some branches went elsewhere and made little pockets of Siouan culture (very different from their Plains cousins) in the east. In what’s now North and South Carolina the Siouan tribes were known as the Saponi. They still exist in small numbers, but they’ve never been recognized as a tribe.
The Lipan Apaches had a pretty sweet setup in the hill country west of Austin, until the Comanches acquired horse and started raiding further south. This, along with the pressure from settlers from the U.S., pressured them into moving onto New Mexico and Arizona.
The early German settlers into that area made pretty decent arrangements with the few Lipans that were still there, but the flood of U.S. settlers didn’t feel so obligated to get Apache permission before settling.
An interesting movie to watch, if you can find it, is the Canadian movie “Black Robe”. It’s about teh Jesuits among the Huron and Algonquins in the 1600’s.
Basically, the French picked the losing side of the war against the Iroquois; their missionaries were tortured and eaten. (Eating ceremonially the heart of a brave foe was a gesture of respect) The premise of the movie is that while the “Christian” way is to show compassion (yeah right), the Indian culture was the opposite - showing compassion was taken as weakness and simply made your opponent more determined to kill you. Braveness was enduring torture without complaint. In the clash of cultures, teaching the Hurons Christianity simply got them killed.
I remember in the Sixties when politics promoted the liberalization of the school teachers. My Mom who had been teaching country school since she was sixteen, though well versed in history, needed to take a Human Relations class to bring her up to speed. Guess she caused quite a stir in the classroom one day when they had a Mdewakatan Indian speak.
At his statement that the US should give the land back to his people she asked, “And if we do, will you give it back to the Chippewa (Ojibwe) whom you took it from?”
Gee, Mom. You sure did know your history, but you didn’t understand how you were supposed to think about it!
I live in “Siouxland” and am surprised no one here has mentioned that many members of those tribes take offense at being called Sioux. This was a word given to them by the French traders and means snake.
I’m not sure which tribe was considered the most aggressive. I’m sure everyone thought their enemies were pretty bad. The Comanche have often been used in Western books and movies as the “bad guy” tribe, and historically they did often clash with both white settlers and neighboring tribes in the southwest.
The Comanche had previously lived farther north, and probably split off from the Shoshone tribe. I don’t know how they got along with other tribes in that region.
Maybe Ayn Rand should have written Westerns, and made her same point without being so damn turgid.
This conversation from the HBO movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee never happened, but it sums things up pretty well.
The Indians were happy to kill and enslave each other, but the Europeans accelerated the process. My grandmother’s tribe, the Fox, had allied with the English along with the Iroquois, but were too small and isolated from support, and the French-allied Chippewa nearly wiped them out.
But this is just as true of anywhere else in the world. People split into smaller groups and then those groups proceeded to take land from one another. The only thing that varies is the time and distance. Even the conquest of the Americas was an example of one splinter group of the African exodus taking land form another splinter group of the African exodus.
40, 000 years ago Apache and French were all part of the same tribe somewhere in Turkey. 5, 000 years ago the Aztecs and the Apache were all part of the same tribe somewhere in New York, 500 years ago the Chippewa and Iroquois were all part of the me tribe somewhere in Canada. All humans are just splinter groups of some older population.
Yeah sure, and the introduction of Eurasian crops and the influence of horses on warfare also had massive impacts that inevitably led to war. In fact if disease hadn’t taken such a huge toll the amount of suffering may well have been higher as the Indians fought massive, ongoing wars amongst themselves as they attempted to produce a new balance of power accommodating those changes.
But the thing is that the same was true of Eurasia and Africa, where all those dreadful warmongers came from. The Old World wasn’t in stasis socially or technologically either. So if the Indians are to be excused because they only fought wars because the balance of power had been disrupted, everybody else gets to be excused for the same reason.
While the Sioux migration to the Great Plains was to some degree attributable to displacement many, possibly most, moved voluntarily as the introduction of the horse made it easier to make a living upon the plains. And of course in so doing they stole the land from the people already living there.
So they had no spears, no clubs, no bows and no axes.:dubious:
You should have asked her how they hunted.
While some people have developed specific weapons of war, the vast majority of human cultures have only ever used hunting weapons when killing one another.
The Utes could be quite nasty; I suppose they had to be to survive in the Great Basin. I remember reading in Mormon history that once a Ute party came into a Mormon settlement and tried to sell some children from another tribe they had captured in a raid. When none of the Mormons would buy the first child one of the warriors held it while another killed the kid and mutilated the face. The rest of the children sold quite well. At the funeral of the Ute Chief Wakara (aka ‘Chief Walker’) two of his wives and 15 horses were killed and buried with him.
Interestingly (if only to me) Wakara was rich by the standards of white men. He had been generously paid what we would call protection in the form of horses, gold, and even ranches by villages and local governments and ranchers in Mexico, California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico in exchange for not raiding them. (He expected the same arrangement with the Mormons but after an initial “cheaper to pay him than fight him” period Brigham Young decided “enough’s by gum enough”.) He sometimes wintered at some of the haciendas he owned (he left wives and relatives and older tribe members there) but he was far too much a desert nomad to ever settle down for more than a few weeks.
The Ute! :smack: When I was writing my above post I was trying to remember the name of a Southwestern tribe that started with the letter “U” and were considered to be a pretty tough bunch.
I don’t know much about the Ute, but they came to mind because I once read a Western novel where the Comanche characters considered the Ute to be extremely violent and warlike. I don’t know how accurate that is, but Google tells me the Comanche and Ute were sometimes allies and sometimes at war with each other off and on for many years.
I think it was Jared Diamond that proposed the pre-Columbian societies were only 200-300 years behind their European counterparts. That’s what made me think about the voids created by smallpox and the arrival of horses at the same time. It turned the Sioux and Comanche into major powers in a very short time.
I would venture a guess that, in her world, they were vegans.
I caught a few minutes of a show about Little Big Horn on History International last night. That and this thread reminded me about the Steven Ambrose book that discussed the parellel lives of Crazy Horse and Custer. Crazy Horse was perceptive enough to start adapting strategey to fight the U.S. Army and he realized that he needed alliances with other northern plains tribes to do it. How do you think history would have changed if he (or someone else) had formed that conclusion 100 years earlier, assuming they had the political power to pull it off?
As noted above, 'kota (with the proper prefix for their group, or the specific band-group (Oglala, Yankton, Blackfeet) they belong to.
For the record, one of my three boys (informal foster sons who spent their later teens living with Barb and me) was half Native American Indian. His father was from West Virginia and was of full Native American Indian blood. Both were very explicit that they were of Siouan ancestry, from before the migration west, though the family had assimilated to “American” (European immigrant) culture generations back.
