Posted on 01/23/2005 2:26:53 PM PST by wagglebee
That was back when America still had Indians and Columbus Day was about discovering America, not "genocide."
For those of us not about to shell out $65, can you tell us the basic synopsis of the book? Ya know, just a few sentences to give us a hint?
Well . . yes . . . in a way.
That's funny. I didn't get that all from Dances With Wolves. I remember watching a band of Indians brutally slaughter a homesteading family in that family. I remember some white men seriously mistreat Indians, but it was made clear that they were the absolute dregs of society, who were sent to the western frontier to get rid of them.
Although they'll deny it, the Lakota Sioux's folklore even supports the notion that they were originally from the finger lakes region of New York. As white men moved into North America, the Lakota fell back to territories which were made habitable only with the introduction of the rifle and the horse. Utopian? Hardly, but they were fairly passive among the Indian tribes which were not readily assimilated.
(Contrary to PC, most Indian tribes disappeared more because they assimilated then because they were slaughtered. I know I've got Indian ancestors; most people whose families are pre-Revolution Americans do.)
The movie presented one tribe which it allowed was exceptional in its passivity, and showed an unfortunate struggle against Americans who it did allow were exceptional among Americans in their abusiveness. It showed damn good reason why settlers were in general less than angelic around Indians.
Savages NEVER were "noble"! That was just one more of Rousseau's idiocies.
Pyro, sometimes you can be downright likable. :^)
They were healing a man by squeezing apple juice onto his belly wound. What does that have to do with human sacrifice? [/idiot lefty]
Yes --- people like to think the Indians were one big happy family --- but the Indians of Mexico were eager to help the Spaniards replace the Aztecs. The Aztecs weren't into self-sacrifice after all --- it was the Indians they captured from other groups that got the honor.
They had one of those in Cholula too --- lots of very small skulls----the children who were sacrificed.
Well, thank you. That's how it goes with the truth. You're either lauded for telling it, or dispised (more often than not, the second). But I'm not the one who made the point originally, nor the One who gave that grace, so give credit where credit is due. ;-)
Thanks for sharing your learning (post #60). It seems that the more brutal facts about previously-blessed cultures emerge the more desperate those who have a stake in white-washing them become. False-agenda liars need to be outed for the sake of factual history!
Aztec sacrifice bump.
Actually, we "savages" were, and are, just like other humans. We were, and are, bth noble AND "savages". Just like whites, asians, blacks, etc...
But, you know everything, so....
Some people are "noble" and some people aren't...no matter what their race,religion,sex,or origins are.And it is beyond ridiculous to brand such disparate peoples (and they were...all of them),as ALL North American Indians and ALL blacks in Africa as one.Being "less civilized" than the far more "civilized" European aristocracy,in no way made them "noble";but that's exactly what Rousseau implied.That was the point of my reply.
Early condescension and PCism from Rousseau and racist to boot.My statement,OTOH,was none of that.
Editorial Reviews (from link in 44)
Public library does for me.
Amazon.com
"The primal command," writes anthropologist Christy Turner, "is, do not eat people." Historically, cultures across the world have violated this prime directive, some regularly and without apparent afterthought, some only under harshest duress. Turner has uncovered what he considers to be incontrovertible evidence of human sacrifice and cannibalism in a part of the world once thought to have been free of such horrors: the American Southwest. There, Turner maintains, thousands of burned and broken human bones, sometimes buried en masse, have been uncovered, most in sites ranging from a thousand to a few hundred years old. In one such site, the Arizona village of Awatovi, dozens of suspected witches were massacred by their fellow Hopis; in another, the great mountaintop city of Mesa Verde, Colorado, several pits containing the remains of cannibalized murder victims have been excavated. Turner suggests that the great Anasazi city of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, may have been a center of violent ritual and cannibalism, which helps explain why modern Indian residents of the region shun it as a place of bad medicine.
Turner and his coauthor, the late Jacqueline Turner, are careful not to conjecture too widely on the whys of prehistoric Southwestern cannibalism, perhaps having guessed that the whats and hows would be controversial enough--and their book, challenging received wisdom as it does, is sure to generate significant controversy among archaeologists working in the region. --Gregory McNamee
Product Description:
Until quite recently Southwest prehistory studies have largely missed or ignored evidence of violent competition. Christy and Jacqueline Turner's study of prehistoric violence, homicide, and cannibalism explodes the myth that the Anasazi and other Southwest Indians were simple, peaceful farmers. Using detailed osteological analyses and other lines of evidence the Turners show that warfare, violence, and their concomitant horrors were as common in the ancient Southwest as anywhere else in the world.
The special feature of this massively documented study is its multi-regional assessment of episodic human bone assemblages (scattered floor deposits or charnel pits) by taphonomic analysis, which considers what happens to bones from the time of death to the time of recovery. During the past thirty years, the authors and other analysts have identified a minimal perimortem taphonomic signature of burning, pot polishing, anvil abrasions, bone breakage, cut marks, and missing vertebrae that closely matches the signature of animal butchering and is frequently associated with additional evidence of violence. More than seventy-five archaeological sites containing several hundred individuals are carefully examined for the cannibalism signature. Because this signature has not been reported for any sites north of Mexico, other than those in the Southwest, the authors also present detailed comparisons with Mesoamerican skeletal collections where human sacrifice and cannibalism were known to have been practiced.
The authors review several hypotheses for Southwest cannibalism: starvation, social pathology, and institutionalized violence and cannibalism. In the latter case, they present evidence for a potential Mexican connection and demonstrate that most of the known cannibalized series are located temporally and spatially "near" Chaco great houses.
See all Editorial Reviews
Mari Sandoz, perhaps the best writer to come out of Nebraska (and out of my part of the state) wrote much about the life of Indians, back during the 1940s and 1950s, and while she was generally sympathetic to that the Indians had been pillaged, robbed, and plundered (actually, believe it or not, a common attitude among settlers in western Nebraska), she also gave glimpses into their own brutalities.
Her stories were based upon first-hand acquaintance with Indians in western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, when she was a child during the 1870s; her father was a popular man in this scantily-settled area, and the Indians were not shy about sharing their confidences with him.
Also, there was her lengthy and complicated research to document things; some of her books took decades to write, because she wished to be thorough and unchallengeable.
So what generally emerges from her books is that the Indians, the so-called "noble savages" as DUmmies like to think them, while sure, yes, were cheated and plundered, were humans as if the rest of us.....when the tables were turned, they were the same way. And they tended to be even more genocidal against their own, and against other Indians, than against the white men.
Any notion that the American Indians were "peaceful" people before the coming of the white man, was disproven long before, and long since, Mari Sandoz, but she provides some of the most-balanced and best-documented accounts.....accounts which clearly demonstrate the white men were not as "bad" as they are thought to have been, nor were the Indians as "good" and innocent as they are thought to have been.
Actually, it is supposed to end in 2012, I think.
Prescott believed that the sacrifices that an Aztec King provided for the gods on his coronation was also the feast.
Oh, there's bias, all right. But it's on the part of the "many researchers". Read Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilization for a good overview of just how biased they can be.
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