Posted on 03/17/2025 6:04:11 PM PDT by Jonty30
My question is why many of the children, when rescued didn't want to go back to their families or rejoin society? They would sometimes commit suicide if they could not return to the tribes that stole them.
Olive Oatman was treated as a daughter by the Mojave tribe and she basically submitted to them because of that.
Some accounts say she hated them, but her family descendants who talked to her said it wasn’t true.
Everyone knows about the Stockholm syndrome. Captors always provide some sort of rationale for their behavior, and people - especially young people - buy it.
It has been a topic of interest for years. I just could never find an answer. Most articles acknowledged this as a real thing, but they never usually delved into the why.
Wayne’s best film.
This I find believable. The Indians didn’t just simply go to the general store to buy daily necessities. They had to work, and work hard to get whatever was needed just to survive.
Few people today could compete with the Indians of that bygone era. Imagine being given a knife, bow & arrow, club and minimal clothing and sent out into the cold wilderness with the bears, cougar, wolves and having to hunt just to live.
So I can see where captured anybody would be great slaves. White or from another tribe.
Post 4 covers most of it, but to get back to Indians.
Not only were the parents and others in the kids lives usually dead and their world burned and destroyed and the kids knew it, but the kids themselves were hand selected, most were killed with the rest of the family and the ones chosen to live would be further culled during the trip back to the village or shortly after, if they looked like trouble or too rebellious they were killed and often in brutal or torture deaths.
The boys who grew up with Indians were far more likely to be happy with it, they had status and were living a boys fantasy, in adult hood they could move back and forth as they chose and live as indian or white, while the females usually lived unpleasant slave lives or even nightmarish lives, at least until they finally got pulled out of the rape loop or out of the sex slave trading and selling and reached a stable life and maybe bore kids, some of them simply were made a wife of someone, which was a level of slavery but more tolerable, many were disfigured in the face to squelch their desire to escape and return to civilization where the knowledge of their rapy lives tainted them.
Many women went insane from what they endured with indians.
Yep, it even has a young Ken Curtis in it who would later play Festus on Gunsmoke a few years later.
“Kidnap a child into your tribe and you don’t have to risk losing a mother in childbirth, or having the baby stillborn or dead soon after birth as was typical in that era.”
The more fertile females you can kidnap or capture in wars. The more warriors will be produced, so that your tribe can dominate other tribes. Win wars against other tribes. Islam has the same strategy.
I know the old squaws were especially brutal to girls if they were pretty.
Go to archive.org and search for the book titled incidents in the early history of New England and the author’s name is Reverend Henry white, I think it’s henry. It is a detailed account of many different stories.
There is also a book and story you need to look up on the Deerfield Massacre and I just forgot the author’s name, but the entire book is included in Henry White’s book.
Many children were kidnapped by the Indians in New England and Upstate New York and other states in that area and they were captured and sold as slaves to the French Canadians including French Canadian priests.
The name of the book written by the pastor in Deerfield was titled the redeemed captive returning to zion. The youngest daughter that he had was kept and captivity long enough that she did not speak English anymore and when they went back a second time to find her that she felt really uncomfortable with the family but after being back with the family for a while and having other people speak to her I guess she accepted her old life once again. Some of the children were very young and they had no real memories of their original mother and father and some of their original parents were just murdered outright by the indians.
I’m on the phone so I can’t give you a bunch of links but there’s a lot of stories about things like that and how because of the French and Indian War and the alliances that the British had with different tribes and the alliances that the French had with different tribes, that many Indian tribes would kidnap the children and the parents and sell them as slaves to the French Canadian priests and some citizens and they would be held there until their freedom was purchased or that the frenchman, both priest and layman, would eventually release their captives.
bttt
“”””Few people today could compete with the Indians of that bygone era. Imagine being given a knife, bow & arrow, club and minimal clothing and sent out into the cold wilderness with the bears, cougar, wolves and having to hunt just to live.””””
If you are born into a tribe then you learn what your tribe teaches you, race has nothing to do with it.
There was a lot of starvation in the indian world because they wouldn’t learn about food, and they didn’t adapt well to changes in their food supply and food types, and in the ways they procured food.
The same reason children switched at birth prefer their “adopted” family to their blood family.
They love and become attached to the families that raise them, as well as their society. It is what they know.
Exactly. Humans are very adaptable, especially the ‘little kid’ kind.
I assume you mean Native Americans?
You have to understand that the kidnapped child was not a slave but was adopted into the tribe. They built a life there. Being taken back to the settler culture was not where they wanted to be. They did not understand it and often were not treated very well.
In the tribe they had status and a place.
The ones that were older when they were taken were more likely to remember more of their own culture and would adjust better but think of a five year old child who was taken and then rescued when he or she was fifteen. Two thirds of their life was spent being one thing and they are abruptly thrown into a new culture and expected to fit in.
It worked the other way around as well. Indian children who were raised by settlers from an early age often did not want to return to their tribe either.
It happened to Patty Hearst.
The Stockholm Syndrome.
“Trauma Bonding” sounds like what happens to many boys who are sodomized by men. They identify with their attacker and become queer, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence.
You are correct.
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