Sunday, September 15th, 2024
I’m tired of the weird angelization of indigenous people. Let me share a few truths.
My mother was a victim of constant domestic violence during her childhood. It was normal back in the 1950’s and 60’s. She had several friends in the neighborhood who also grew up being abused, along with their siblings and mothers. The whole neighborhood would just shut their windows when the screaming began.
My mother’s primary abuser was her mother, and she was Native American.
When my grandmother died, I wasn’t sad. For my mother, who was sad, I was sad. But, I’d grown up hearing the stories of my mother being smacked in the head with a frying pan — without any notice — and her knees being whipped until they bled. She became a concert pianist, but this included being smacked around by her teachers if she hit a note wrong or they thought she hadn’t practiced hard enough that week. She got up every morning and practiced for three hours before going to school, and if her teachers complained to her mother? Well, she’d get a beating at home, too. Her step-father was also abusive, up until the day he left her, her mother, and her little sister in abject poverty.
To the day she died, if there was a sudden, loud sound, my mother would let out a shriek and whirl around, eyes wide, face bleached white, breathless.
My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression, as did all of my grandparents. She was born on the reservation in Oklahoma, born to Cherokee/Cheyenne parents who’s parents had survived the Trail of Tears in their infancy.
Life was not kind on the Reservation, nor was it kind in the Democratic Party Controlled South. During the Great Depression, my grandmother’s family was slowly starving on a diet of potato skins, while watching farmers plough their crops into the dirt — a government policy aimed at controlling food prices by reducing supply.
As a result, my full-blooded Native American grandmother HATED the Democratic Party with a passion. She fled the reservation at her earliest opportunity (I think she was seventeen), and she was a card-carrying Republican her entire life.
In 1975, when the Cherokees adopted a new constitution that superseded the 1839 Cherokee Nation Constitution, they established a registry for the inclusion of any Cherokee for membership purposes in the Cherokee Nation. My grandmother told her sisters (who still lived on the reservation) that she was completely uninterested. She even saved her dollars and traveled to England, where she met and returned home with her third husband, completing her transition from indigenous to “as white as they get.”
You may be tempted to say, “Well, that’s because her people had been broken by then, their lands taken, their society destroyed, their culture denied, their children forbidden to speak their language so they couldn’t learn from their elders, and so on and so forth.”
I won’t argue that point, but I will say this:
Before Europeans arrived, human beings who lived on this side of the planet were violent. Dangerously so. Consistently so. Dramatically so. You can’t blame Europeans for that.
I could cite hundreds of examples, from the Florida tribes that required a boy to commit murder to become a man, to the Aztecs who sacrificed tens of thousands (more?) to their Sun God, to the never-ending back and forth battles between tribes inhabiting the Salish Sea, including Chief Sealth’s double attack on a neighboring tribe, resulting in the enslavement of some women and children and the genocidal destruction of the tribe overall.
But, instead of going into all of that, I’ll let this young man (pictured here with his friends) speak for himself:
I was born four miles below where Rapid City now is, in 1852, about full moon in March. "My father was Black Fox and my mother's name was Iron Cedarwoman. My father was a chief. In a fight with the Crows he was shot below the right eye with an arrow; it was so deep that it could not be pulled out, but had to be pushed through to the ear. My tribe was the Ogalalla clan. Our family roamed on hunts for game and enemies all about through the country and to Canada. My father died when he was eighty years old. He had two wives and they were sisters. My mother was the youngest and had five children. The other wife had eight children, making thirteen in all. Kicking Bear was my full brother, and Chief Black Fox was my half brother and was named for our father. When ten years old I was in my first battle on the Tongue River—Montana now. It was an Overland Train of covered wagons who had soldiers with them. The way it was started, the soldiers fired on the Indians, our tribe, only a few of us. We went to our friends and told them we had been fired on by the soldiers, and they surrounded the train and we had a fight with them. I do not know how many we killed of the soldiers, but they killed four of us. After that we had a good many battles, but I did not take any scalps for a good while. I cannot tell how many I killed when a young man. When I was twenty years old we went to the Crows and stole a lot of horses. The Crows discovered us and followed us all night. When daylight came we saw them behind us. I was the leader. We turned back to fight the Crows. I killed one and took his scalp and a field glass and a Crow necklace from him. We chased the others back a long way and then caught up with our own men again and went on. It was a very cold winter. There were twenty of us and each had four horses. We got them home all right and it was a good trip that time. We had a scalp dance when we got back. We soon moved camp. One night the Piegans came and killed one of our people…
Humans are capable of great brutality. All humans.
Including those viewed through the rosy and mistaken lens of “they’re victims of other people’s cruelty, so they must themselves be innocent and virtuous.” What utter nonsense.
I’m thinking about this today, because I find “white saviourism” and “white guilt” and the glorification of “indigenous people as saints” to be truly disappointing and generally pathetic. And land acknowledgements! I’ve got a whole substack coming soon that will delve into that new and deeply irritating trend.
Of course, none of this would matter much, if I weren’t surrounding by people behaving in these ways on the daily. And it’s getting on my last nerve.
Are people that emotionally incapable of accepting reality?
Can we not see plainly that the humans inhabiting the North and South American continents were NO BETTER than the European humans expanding outward across the globe? I’m not saying Europeans were better, but they weren’t worse. The Europeans defeated the “New World” almost entirely by luck, really.
It’s time to stop with the lies we tell ourselves about the supposed moral superiority or innocent gentleness or sweet virtuousness or “victims only because the Europeans were monsters” narratives.
It’s time we treat the descendants of strong, powerful, violently territorial and devastatingly aggressive peoples of the past with the respect they deserve. When two male lions, stallions, or wolf packs come into conflict, they’re all strong — but there will still be a winner and a loser. There can be any number of reasons why one wins out this time around. If fact, when prides, herds, packs, or TRIBES rub up against each other repetitively, the role of winner inevitably shifts back and forth, depending on the circumstances of the moment.
The Indigenous Peoples of the North and South American Continents simply lost, more often than not, in conflicts with the newly arrived peoples of the European Continent. That’s what happened, and there’s a reason. BUT — it’s NOT that Europeans were evil colonizers, and Indigenous Peoples were insipid, gentle victims of our oddly aggressive culture.
The reason has more to do with luck and happenstance.
If human civilization had originated in Central America, spreading out across the globe, over the Bering Strait during the most recent Ice Age, and if Asia and Europe had therefore been peopled later, resulting in North and South America possessing more advanced technology — who knows how history might have played out?
As it is, lady luck played her hand, and so, our European ancestors simply had better weapons, more advanced technology, generally worse diseases, and our Europeans ancestors also had the advantage of surprise.
If we want to live together in harmony, why don’t we just start doing it?
The “tit for tat” tracking of past wrongs, is exactly what kept the Hillbilly culture of the Appalachian region and Ozarks at war with one another for centuries. Or the clans of Scotland. The old families of Italy. The Gangs of New York. The Crips and the Bloods. It’s a revenge mindset. Do we really want to repeat that pattern?
I’ll end with one interesting piece of history that many Americans aren’t taught in government schools. It’s fascinating, really, and the effects were truly appalling. While doing research for my novel series, The Ghost Lords, I had the good fortune to read the book, Catherine de Medici, by Leonie Frieda. It’s an absolutely fascinating, almost day by day account, of this woman’s life, and there are several accounts of young married couples within the Italian aristocracy who died quickly of syphilis. Measles, Malaria and Small Pox may have been worse for the indigenous peoples of the American Continents, but Syphilis (which I imagine may have played a role in the bloodthirsty Sun God rituals of the Aztecs, given that the final stage of Syphilis includes madness) — is no picnic.
Much Ado About Diseases
With the “discovery” of the New World, diseases were swapped in both directions, with Syphilis exploding onto the European scene thanks to a timely war in Italy around 1492, fought primarily with mercenary armies. The disease spread quickly from those newly returned from the Americas to those hired for the war, through prostitutes brought in to entertain the mercenaries. It was then carried to every other country in Europe as the men returned to their homes, bringing the unknown but soon to be dreaded disease to local prostitutes, wives and future children.
When one looks at paintings and wood carvings such as these, we are reminded that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease itself. And, as I consider the tsunami of damaged and chronically ill people (not to mention deaths) attributable to the Covid Injections? It seems we are not so very different from the people depicted above.