I Have Scant Sympathy for American Indian Tribes

I used this quote at the beginning of my last article: “Every state begins with violence, and (if it becomes secure) mellows into liberty.” It was from Will Durant’s The Lessons of History.

It’s pretty much a trope these days about how “we took the Indians’ land.” To which I respond, “So what? It’s the history of the world. If you can’t defend it, someone will take it from you.”

When I was about 16 I ran across the novel Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger. I thoroughly enjoyed it and read it many times.

I remember thinking, “It’s just a novel, but I wonder how much of the history is true?”

It was about some of the Western Indian tribes, and it turned out Berger did his homework.

One scene I remember in particular is Berger writing about how such Indians would catch an enemy and “unwind his guts.” Indians did things like that. Years later I read an article about how they caught one man, unwound his guts, nailed them to a tree, and made him walk around the tree until his guts unwound completely and he died.

Indians were notorious for things like that, which is why the Declaration of Independence refers to them as "the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

They did such things as take the babies of other tribes and bash their brains out on rocks. Swinging them by their feet.

By the way, all tribes of whatever race did such things, so saying things about what Europeans did is meaningless. I’m well aware of what primitive and savage European tribes did, such as roasting fat babies for food or raping dying women. Savages are called savages for a reason – and I’m glad they’re gone.

I’ve pointed out before when Europeans came to North America they found a mostly empty, incredibly rich land sparely populated by about a million Indians.

I’ve had people tell me there were 20 million Indians here, which is ridiculous. Primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, some of which occasionally grew some corn, can’t support 20 million people, even with a continent this size.

I was raised near Cahokia Mounds in Illinois (I've walked up those stairs on Monks Mound more than once), which had been the largest Indian village in North America – and when Americans discovered it is was already completely empty. All that’s left is a bunch of burial mounds, some of them huge. No one’s quite sure why they deserted the place. And the whole area is still as fertile as can be.

Most of the Indians died from European diseases to which they had no immunity. Smallpox wiped out entire villages. Only a few thousand on each side were killed in combat. And Americans didn’t so much want to wipe them out as turn them into white Christians, which didn’t work. Changing other people’s cultures never works.

As for Mexico, the Aztecs engaged in human sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people from the tribes they had conquered, and those subjugated tribes supported Cortez when he destroyed the Aztecs. Apparently they were quite tired of having their hearts ripped out while they were still alive.

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is very accurate about that, and about how it stopped completely when Europeans landed, bringing Christianity with them.

I don’t exactly understand why some people idealize savages, since they weren’t Rousseau’s Noble Savages. All such primitive tribes are horrors more than anything else. You should read the Old Testament sometime, about how those primitive savage tribes left no one alive, not even the children and animals.

When countries become rich and powerful and safe, suddenly certain people long for a more primitive life. They ignore the loss of dentistry and anesthesia and surgery.

The history of the world has been that when one tribe runs into another, the result historically has been genocide. Which is why it’s obvious there is no such thing as “multiculturalism,” and the more Third World savages we import the more they are going to rape and steal and murder us, until we return the favor and deport or kill them.

And that has been the history of the world.