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Product Placement wrote:They were the bad guys in American cowboy and Indian movies, which is what he was referencing.
Did… did you just insinuate that the Indians were the bad guys?
In the movies that I saw, the enemy was usually either some outlaws and we were supposed to root for the Sheriff or vice verse. The Indians were there but they were treated like a neutral but unpredictable party that you wouldn't want to mess with, or risk shake up a hornets nest. They had no love for the cowboys but as long as you stayed out of their way they'd leave you alone. Occasionally you would encounter them and it would result in either a battle or that they would help you out.
And when you look at it from their perspective, the white man was the invader. More and more of those technologically advanced jerks were pouring in from some unknown land, settling in the lands of their ancestors and handing them the short end of the stick. Why wouldn't they resist something like that?
Yeah, everyone is a hero from their own perspective and the baddies are whoever oppose them. Logically.
But what I find interesting is how people from outside perspectives view the situation.
And speaking of technological invaders into the Indian lands I remember reading about your ancestors doing that to them too in the northern climbs… Indians and the related people… like Eskimos, Aleuts, Inuits, whatever people were in Newfoundland…?
Vikings called them something like Skraelings I think.
On the same subject- any films in Australia we make of the old days of colonisation generally have the aboriginal people as victims and the Europeans as thoughtless or savage oppressors.
Films and books on the subject USED to show the native people as innocent, naive, and, barbaric and ignorant, and the Europeans as knowing, fatherly, caring, and strict.
Oh colonialism… T_T
ozoneocean wrote:
And speaking of technological invaders into the Indian lands I remember reading about your ancestors doing that to them too in the northern climbs… Indians and the related people… like Eskimos, Aleuts, Inuits, whatever people were in Newfoundland…?
Vikings called them something like Skraelings I think.
bravo1102 wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Did… did you just insinuate that the Indians were the bad guys?
There were no good guys in the Indian Wars both sides were equally nasty.
ozoneocean wrote:
And before you get ants in your fur-pants mister…
I have to agree with PP here. The number of native americans killed by Europeans is impossible to know for sure, but there are some crazy estimates. You make it sound as if the death ratio was 1:1.
I live in a city where around 10% of the population is aboriginal, mostly people who've come down from the reserves. Most are poor, many are homeless. Damaging an entire people so profoundly is pretty unforgivable, even if the other side did some awful things as well. Maybe there weren't any good guys, but there was a bad guy.
Product Placement wrote:
Argh!
I had promised myself that I wouldn't comment on this but I wasted almost two hours writing this so I might as well post it. Just consider this a rant and skip to the next posting and we can bury this topic like Iroquois would bury hatchets to end wars. What I meant and and what you read are three entirely different things.
What I meant was this: the Indians waged a guerilla war of terror and the whites waged genocide. The terror of the what Indians did in their attacks can be considered to be to have so terrorized whites that they felt they had to kill every Indian. (a study of 18th C. newspaper accounts upholds this theory as does the "white-captive" literature of the 19th C. as opposed to so many whites going native in the 17th C.) The Indians massacred hundreds, in fact entire areas of the West were un-settled at various times because various tribes were so good at killing whites. The whites ran away after hundreds were killed out of very small populations. Proportionally the killing was huge. The manner in which many tribes killed and tortured make the most graphic slasher film look tame. No one kept accurate track of settlers back then but whole thriving areas would just vanish.
Yet whites weren't very good at killing Indians. Indian warfare was mostly one-sided until the development of the rimfire cartridge which allowed quick reloading of revolving pistols and rifles in the mid 19th century. With muskets Europeans would point the weapon inthe direction of the enemy and let loose. Indians took great pride in their marksmanship. The Indians would slink away or if the opposing force small enough, kill or far worse capture and torture the whites.
In most indian wars whites would kill themselves if they could up to Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn (See Skulking Way of War among other works) In contrast the whites could only destroy the Indian way of life by burning villages, torching fields and driving animals to near extinction. As chiefs put it "We killed a handful of your people intruding onto land you pledged to us, where you destroyed our villages and starved our entire people." (It is a paraphrase because it was said by chief after chief on various occasions from the 1600s-1800s. I've seen it attributed to representatives of nations from the Iroquois to the Cherokee to the Sioux, Komanche and Apache)
If the whites had arrived 100 years in North America earlier before the great depopulation of the Indians following epidemic after epidemic of influenza and cholera they would never have stood a chance. It so happens that whites chanced into a world horrifically depopulated and caught the Indians after they had barely survived a complete demographic (and ecological) disaster. (see 1491 and Guns, Germs and Steel, The Jamestown Project, Of Plimouth Plantation, Lies my Teacher told me etc)
The blanket story has been exaggerated to near mythic proportions. It first happened with the British in the 1700's before germ theory when most on the frontier had very little concept of a connection between the blanket of someone who died from smallpox being able to give someone else smallpox. It was an unwanted dirty blanket. There is a good account in a recent biography of Robert Rodgers where the writer tracked down the original story. Everyone in the 18th century was just as succeptible to catching smallpox as everyone else. It killed usually 30% of Europeans who got it as opposed to 50-80% of Indians. Indians are also highly succeptible to influenza, and it killed as many as smallpox so a simple sneeze could wipe out a whole village and a lot better. No one wanted smallpox around and everyone was sneezing. This is back when the common cold could be a death sentence for anyone.
Kids wanting to be the Nazis or Indians when playing is the "coolness" factor. Indians have tomahawks and feathered headdresses and Nazi's have submachine guns and cool accents. So kids want to be them. You have to think like a kid, not someone aware of the Holocaust or the Fire Bombing of Dresden. I grew up on Combat and Hogan's Heroes.
All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.
But I find the last bit a little hard to swallow.
No kids I know, especially when I was a kid, thought Indians had bad-guy cool. Nothing about them in their Hollywood portrayal equates to bad-guy cool. They're shown as old fashioned Noble savages. That's not cool.
The cool, slick badguys in Hollywood cowboy TV shows and movies were the outlaws, especially the ones all in black with a black hat! They're shown as being smart, cool, dangerous.
In contrast Indians are shown as being ignorant, rough and crude. The best features they were given was good horsemanship, magical tracking abilities and naturist mysticism… None of that makes for badguy cool.
The most you get is "admirable opponent"
In childhood games, non-one wanted to be the Indians, so that was a role played by the youngest, or sisters because they had the right hairstyle.
None of that is a reflection on the real indigenous peoples, just the version of them put about by Hollywood. :)
I swear there must be something weird going on with the moon or something the last couple days. All the forums and spots online I visit are unusually snarly and argumentative, and people are being less than cooperative with each other in real life too, including myself.
ozoneocean wrote:
All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.
But I find the last bit a little hard to swallow.
ozoneocean wrote:One of the authors called the viewpoint "revisionist revisions of revisionism" in his introduction. This all would have been a lot nicer over a long lunch in a diner somewhere in New Jersey.
All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.
bravo1102 wrote:
What I meant was this: the Indians waged a guerilla war of terror and the whites waged genocide. The terror of the what Indians did in their attacks can be considered to be to have so terrorized whites that they felt they had to kill every Indian. (a study of 18th C. newspaper accounts upholds this theory as does the "white-captive" literature of the 19th C. as opposed to so many whites going native in the 17th C.) The Indians massacred hundreds, in fact entire areas of the West were un-settled at various times because various tribes were so good at killing whites. The whites ran away after hundreds were killed out of very small populations. Proportionally the killing was huge. The manner in which many tribes killed and tortured make the most graphic slasher film look tame. No one kept accurate track of settlers back then but whole thriving areas would just vanish.Where to start: First, there were major differences in the approach to warfare between tribes and over time and geography. The whole conflict actually takes place over 300 odd years and huge tracts of land, but everyone likes to focus on the 'classic West' period and locales of 1860-1880 (give or take a few years). However, by this time some tribes had been resettled and removed multiple times, and had changed in terms of population size and tactics. The 'guerilla' period of 'indian' warfare is a very small period, and only applies to a handful of tribes, and comes after tremendous unheavals and betrayals for many of the tribes concerned.
I can cite all kinds of examples to prove my points but it's worthless because I'm trying to point out that our conceptions of the Indian Wars are wrong in many fundamental ways and we're spouting a mantra made up by 19th and 20th Century reformers as opposed to being honest about what happened. Many of the my points hold up with specific examples from across the 400 years of European settlement in North America whether it's Creeks, Algonquin to Sioux and Komanche from Rodgers' Rangers to Texas Rangers.
Next you'll try to convince me that massing soldiers together in dense formations and volley fire wasn't an effective battlefield use of the smooth bore musket. Conventional wisdom is wrong. We don't remember history so much as every generation re-write it to suit the opinons and outlook of their own time. So therefore since we know weapons would one day be developed that would make massed formations of soldiers pure folly, it is also wrong for armies before the invention of those weapons even if it was the best use of the weapons available at the time it was employed.
ozoneocean wrote:Oh look, it's a Klingon!
Meet Big Tex Inuktut Running Bull Hafthorsson
lba wrote:
I swear there must be something weird going on with the moon or something the last couple days. All the forums and spots online I visit are unusually snarly and argumentative, and people are being less than cooperative with each other in real life too, including myself.
ozoneocean wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Argh!
ozoneocean wrote:
No kids I know, especially when I was a kid, thought Indians had bad-guy cool. Nothing about them in their Hollywood portrayal equates to bad-guy cool. They're shown as old fashioned Noble savages. That's not cool.
The cool, slick badguys in Hollywood cowboy TV shows and movies were the outlaws, especially the ones all in black with a black hat! They're shown as being smart, cool, dangerous.
In contrast Indians are shown as being ignorant, rough and crude. The best features they were given was good horsemanship, magical tracking abilities and naturist mysticism… None of that makes for badguy cool.
The most you get is "admirable opponent"
)ozoneocean wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Argh!
Ugh… it's raining. Thanks to a tropical storm that formed after it passed us. So if it's past us what's the problem? The thing leaves a trail of rainclouds and thunderstorms and it can last for weeks or more… oh, well… at least it's an opportunity to find all the leaks in my roof…
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