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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Yeah, the romanticisation of natives is incredibly blatant. I've seen people genuinely argue that the reason as to why Native Americans were conquered was not because Natives had less technology, it's not because their societies and social structures were less developed and less cohesive on a large scale, it was because they had no conception of kicking other people off their land unlike the evil Europeans!

The idea that the Europeans came in and "stole" land that belonged to any one tribe is ridiculous. Tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes, and the question of who "owned" the land was often in a constant state of flux. The Black Hills region is seen to have been taken unfairly from the Lakota by the US, but that region was actually taken by the Lakota from the Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne took that land from the Kiowa. And during all this conflict, it's likely that a lot of groups would've just disappeared and been outcompeted.

And of course, many atrocities were committed. The Iroquois tortured prisoners of war and famously practiced cannibalism. Not only is this documented multiple times in the historical record, there's also archaeological evidence showing evidence in favour of this. Mayans were thought to be peaceful up until it was found that they were routinely enslaving and subjugating their neighbours. In the central Mesa Verde of Southwest Colorado, "90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."

You have archeological sites like the Crow Creek site, wherein they found the remains of at least 486 people killed during a massacre during the mid-14th century AD between Native American groups. "Most of these remains showed signs of ritual mutilation, particularly scalping. Other examples were tongues being removed, teeth broken, beheading, hands and feet being cut off, and other forms of dismemberment."

In my opinion the very idea of "native" itself is very arbitrary and inaccurate, used primarily as a political bludgeon to try and imply that those groups designated as native have a moral right to the land that the "settlers" don't. It ignores that no group is really "native" to any patch of soil at this point and that pretty much every piece of land has likely been taken from someone else.