Ever since Rousseau blithered his pious nonsense, a great many Western thinkers have nursed the most extraordinary delusions about tribal societies. The myth of the “noble savage” is almost universal amongst certain segments of society.
Few more than amongst the descendants of the tribal societies colonised from the 15th to 19th centuries. Understandably, perhaps, these descendants romanticise their forebear cultures (no less than we romanticise, say, the ANZACs). But there’s romanticism and then there’s delusion – not to say outright lying.
Aboriginal activists in Australia flatly deny that violence against women was ever a feature of traditional life. Which completely contradicts not just even sympathetic historical accounts, but forensic archaeology.
In the Americas, the British and Spanish are condemned for their wars with the Native Americans. Starry-eyed romantics try and depict Native American culture as somehow peaceful and idyllic. This idea which would have been regarded as practically insulting by the warriors of the Dakotas, Sioux and Comanche. For them, violence and brutality were simply a way of life. Being depicted as helpless underdogs would have been outraged these courageous and cruel warrior peoples.
They espoused an ethos exemplified by their warrior braves who wasted no pity on their enemies and expected none in return. In S C Gwynne’s book Empire of the Summer Moon, he notes that during Comanche raids all “the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.” Comanche brutality was not total; young boys and girls were captured and enslaved during these raids, but could eventually be adopted into the tribe if they survived a trial by fire: showing courage and toughness even in the face of ill-treatment as slaves.
As Gavin McInnes, who married into a Native American family, argues, in regard to the woke push to rename football teams like the Redskins, Indians and Braves: those names were bestowed precisely because of the warrior ethos they embodied. “It took 400 years to defeat them,” he says. “We respect that.”
These tribes were warlike because the mobilization of cadres of violent young men was instrumental to the organization of their societies […] The religion of these warriors was victory, and they stoically accepted that defeat meant death.
Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Not a quick death, either. The victors in the tribal wars exacted a penalty of incredible cruelty on their defeated victims. Few were more brutal than the Comanche.
The very name “Comanche” means enemy. Like a motorcycle gang, the Comanche let it be known that they were the enemy of everyone. Mercy was weakness. Brutality was power. The more sadistically creative the treatment of their enemies, the more power the Comanche wielded through sheer terror.
What sort of terror?
People buried alive up to the chin with their eyelids cut away, and left to die of exposure, thirst or starvation. Or men might be staked to the ground, their genitals cut off and forced into the victim’s mouth. The lips would then be sewn shut.
Feet were hacked off, and the victim forced to walk over flaming coals on his or stubs. Tongues were pulled off to muffle their screams.
Genitalia and hands were hacked off and the open flesh set on fire. Once the nerves were dead, another portion was hacked off – and so it went. Another torture was flaying alive.
The Americas were soaked in blood, centuries before Columbus, Cortes or Pissaro.
That doesn’t justify the enormities of the European conquerors, of course. But it also doesn’t justify lying about the often horrifyingly violent pasts of indigenous peoples.
Nor do the brutalities of their ancestors cast any kind of ancestral sins on people alive today – whether their ancestors were European, Native American, or indeed, Polynesian or Aboriginal.
No one should be held hostage to the past.