11 thoughts on “Nasty, Brutish And Short”

  1. They don’t want to admit that we (the USA, EU, Japan, etc.) live in the most peaceful and humane time at any point in human history. Perfect? No. But better.

  2. Let me be the first to call for reparations from today’s Hopi and Zuni to any and all who can file claim to have Southeastern native American ancestory. Perhaps an affirmative action program wherein a percentage of Hopi or Zuni job vacancies get allocated to other victimized tribes.

  4. The Pueblo incidents may only be the most recent.

    Some of the earliest victims of the native American genocide may have been settlers from Europe that predated the current native Americans.

    From the Smithsonian.

    http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_si/nmnh/origin.htm

    [[[So far scientists have found no technological affinities to relate Clovis to the Asian Paleolithic. However, Europe may have possible lithic precursors to Clovis. The Solutrean culture of western Europe, dating between 24,000 and 16,500 years ago, shows a similar lithic technology to that used to produce Clovis tools. The two cultures also share bone-shaping techniques, pebble-decorating artistry, the unusual tradition of burying stone tools in caches filled with red ocher, and other traits. ]]]

    Keep in mind that there is evidence of a continuous shelf of sea ice from Europe to North America during the height of the ice age and the Solutrean culture did hunt seals and likely travel out on to the ice shelf to hunt.

    [[[Whether individual skeletons or specific early groups were directly related to later peoples is unknown. Early migrants may have been replaced through competition or changed through gene flow by later arrivals. At this time, scientists are not ruling out the possibility of a migration from Europe. ]]]

    [[[Recently, however, a fifth mtDNA lineage named “X” has turned up in living American Indians and in prehistoric remains for which there does not appear to be an Asian origin. The first variant of X was found in Europeans and may have originated in Eurasia. ]]]

    Yes, the story gets more and more interesting. Perhaps in future textbooks the story of Spanish settlement in the New World will not be discussed so much as a conquest, but as the reconquest 🙂

  5. Having just returned from L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, I learned that Inuit people have an oral history of destroying the Norse settlement on Greenland; only one European settler escaped according to their account. Nordic trans-Atlantic contact with this Greenland settlement ceased for 200 years. When they returned, not a single Norsemen remained.

  6. The myth of peaceful native coexistence is just good PR by the winners. The losers are dead and can only tell their story through archeology. When I was a kid of about 20 a SD rancher showed me a dead indian village in northern SD. I forget the name of the tribe but the Sioux killed their entire race and apparently not theirs alone.

    Sioux is the name the other tribes gave them and they hate it. They call themselves the revealing racist name ‘the people’ or Lakota after which the two states are named. It doesn’t surprise me that this is a story repeated in place after place. Man’s inhumanity to man is a constant in history and I just assume to be the norm. Truly peaceful people generally didn’t survive their neighbors.

  7. “One of the many annoying things about political correctness is its whitewashing of the brutality of many aboriginal American cultures, and false history of their supposed environmental sensitivity.”

    FTFY, Rand.

  9. I think we’re jumping to some pretty drastic conclusions, here. After all, the majority of Pueblo were people just like you and me, wanting to feed and shelter a family, and live a peaceful life. They were the moderate Pueblo.

    This thread is showing an emergence of an ugly Pueblophobia…

  10. I’ve been reading about the early colonial history of North America. One of the first things the Native Americans did when they met Europeans was to trade for guns to destroy their traditional enemies.

  11. I’ve always laughed at the notion of the “peaceful indian”. They were ruthless to their rivals. They (many tribes) were also exceedingly creative when it came to dreaming up ways to torture captured enemies to death.

    The fact is that too many academics try to view them through rose-colored glasses. I see no reason to condemn the Indians for what they were (it was a brutal time) but this re-writing of history to make them peaceful is preposterous.

    There is, however, hope… I’ve seen old textbooks that dismiss as absurd fable the notion that the Greenland Vikings could have crossed the Davis Strait and set foot in North America 500 years before Columbus. To do so, these “Historians” rather willfully ignored the fact that the Vikings had managed to reach Greenland after even more-difficult and longer sea voyages.

    The discovery of the Las Aux Meadows Viking settlement in Newfoundland ended that line of thought. However, they still ingnore other aspects, such as the fact that Columbus, long before his 1492 voyage, visited Iceland, where the tales of North America were considered established fact, and so detailed in the Sagas.

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