Native Americans Weren’t Singing Kumbaya When White Settlers Arrived

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission. 

Modern historians often bewail the fact that the historical understandings of Native Americans have frequently been negative and one-sided, representing them as a mass of faceless and malignant enemies to white protagonists. They’re the extras who ride out to shoot at John Wayne.

But since the 1960s, another myth has supplanted that false picture—one just as misleading, recycling the myth of the “noble savage.”

The new lie almost every modern American schoolchild’s teacher has told him, her, or xir—at least since the late-1960s publication of Vine DeLoria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto and the 1972 drop of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West—is that Native Americans were peaceful Gaea-worshipping people, killed via intentional genocide by ruthless and land-hungry white settlers.

Reality proves to be considerably more complex.

Instead of the progressive Eden imagined by modern scholars, this was a society full of far harsher “power dynamics” than those we see today.

Take the Aztecs. Slavery was often a way to deal with prisoners of war. Another way would be human sacrifice. All of this was specifically done to intimidate or, as a modern leftist might put it, to show power. Aztec sacrificial victims were generally battle captives—like those brought back from the long-running series of wars “with their archenemy, the nearby republic of Tlaxcala”—or Hunger Games–style tributes extorted from previously defeated subject populations living within the Aztec Empire. The brutal killing of these individuals and subsequent display of their heads or skulls in public forums was among other things a way to keep the helots in line.

In addition to killing probably millions of people, the Aztecs also ate a ton of them, a practice sure to shock modern sensibilities. There is essentially universal agreement among scholars that many Mesoamerican peoples engaged in ritual and dietary cannibalism alongside regular human sacrifice. Older sources are close to unanimous in confirming this. In his The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, Spanish soldier and writer Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes of seeing caged war captives ready to be eaten in the Mexica city of Cholula, of noticing large cooking pots in the temples of Tenochtitlan where human meat was prepared for the meals of Aztec holy men and pilgrims, and even of being threatened with consumption himself during battle against Cholulan and Aztec warriors.

Even where cannibalism was uncommon, Native life prior to Western conquest was far from Edenic. In his excellent article “Predatory Warfare, Social Status, and the North Pacific Slave Trade,” Professor Donald Mitchell of the University of Victoria argues that a key feature of life for Haida tribal members and members of other Pacific Northwest tribes was continual “predatory warfare:” “warfare for the acquisition of slaves and the maintenance or enhancement of high social status.”

The complex war-for-four-hundred-years reality of white-versus-Native conflict has caused more than a few modern scholars to reevaluate the popular Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee claim that white settlers committed organized genocide against Native Americans. In a fairly typical recent article in History Is Now magazine, frankly enough titled “Did Settlers Commit Genocide in America?,” the authors take the general position that the answer is: “No.” Citing previous scholars and writers from Daniel L. Smith to Michael Medved, they contend that “the word genocide does not truly apply to the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American Settlers.”

It must also be noted that the settlement of the American continent was by no means accomplished entirely by Anglo-Saxon whites, who displaced “POC” Native Americans. Black Americans, or Mexicans and Mexican Americans of Castilian descent, are no more “from this continent” than Irishmen are, and authors like Sarah Laskow and Anna-Lisa Cox have recently begun to document the “homesteading” efforts of thousands of minority pioneers in the historical Northwest Territory—the massive area including most of modern Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Even farther West, Blacks and Hispanics were—if anything—overrepresented among cowboys and Indian fighters, in tough male professions where bravery and aggression usually counted for more than skin color did. William DeLong, author of the short piece “The Forgotten Black Cowboys of the Wild West” and much else, argues that Hollywood has “white-washed the West” and that, in reality, as many as 25 percent of all cowboys in the Western states during the 1870s and 1880s were of African descent. Often freed slaves, these Black ’pokes headed West for the same reason many broken, desperate, and searching white men did: “to find their fortunes among cattle ranches and rows of crops,” springing up where once dwelt the Red man.

Some such pioneers inspired legends that live on today: U.S. marshal Bass Reeves of Oklahoma served as a frontier lawman for twenty-seven years, arrested or killed around 3,000 accused criminals, rode with a Native American former warrior as a sidekick, and is believed to have provided the original character model for cinema’s Lone Ranger. For that matter, arguably the most legendary and brutal Indian-fighting regiments in the history of the U.S. military, the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, were virtually all Black.

Technically speaking, the Buffalo Soldiers were created by the 1866 passage of the Army Organization Act, which authorized the creation of six all-” Negro” units tasked with protecting settlers across the expanding Western front and—in particular—with “control[ling] the Native Americans of the Plains.”

The face of Manifest Destiny, then, was never as white as historians (and racists!) would have us believe. Importantly, the Buffalo Soldiers were neither angels nor devils, but men—capable of great heroism and more than occasionally guilty of atrocity. The exact same was true of their white and Hispanic military counterparts and of their Native American opponents. The original inhabitants of North America were not the bloodthirsty naked savages of traditional U.S. mythology—but nor were they the peaceful Eloi that the newer storytellers of today prefer to falsely describe. They were just people: warriors who fought among themselves from time immemorial and who fought our own ancestors hard and well for four hundred years. Honor to their dead, and living, and to our own.

Image available on Wikimedia Commons — “In this illustration from the Ramírez Codex, the three men in the background represent slaves who were sacrificed as part of the funeral rites for the Aztec Emperor Auitzotl”