Plight of modern day noble red men.The
This reminds me of the scene in Life of Brian where one of the Jews asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?” followed by a long litany of education, language, aquaducts, public health, public order and civilization, city planning, agriculture, wine etc.
Infant mortality in Indian tribes was over 90% before reaching adulthood before European culture brought in medicine and hygiene. Indian tribes regularly starved to death because they hunted areas to devastation, then moved on (one of the huge myths is that Indians “didn’t waste buffaloes like the decadent white man” – they drove entire herds off cliffs and left most to rot in the belief that there were huge “underground lakes” of buffaloes to replenish the supply), which brings us to education.
If the whites were truly as savage and cruel as the red men, they would have hunted them to extinction instead of educating and enlightening them, as Indian tribes regularly did to each other. I come from Tuscarawas Co. in Ohio. There used to be a Tuscarawas tribe, but long ago the Iroquois warred upon them, finally driving the survivors into the woods to die of hunger and exposure, to the last man, woman or child. This was a regular occurrence and practice: complete genocide of tribes by enemy tribes.
Only American Indians get this “you stole our land” hypocrisy. Virtually every inhabited piece of ground on Earth has been “stolen” by another tribe or race or ethnicity from another. What about the poor Goths, or Huns, or Celts, or the people displaced by the Franks, the Normans, the Romans, the Persians etc? Only the American Indian continues this “our land was stolen” whinge, when in fact those same tribes stole the land themselves from a previous tribe.
Western civilization has not always been fair or enlightened in every respect, but the final result is Indians are a lot better off now than the idealized “noble Red Man” trope where they lived in peace and harmony with nature and were much better off. They led a grim, short, brutal life hard-scrabbling for every morsel of food while engaging almost constant war against all their neighbors, battling extinction.
They hadn’t discovered the wheel and had no written language. They had no knowledge of metal-working. They were basically living a stone-age existence, and only our present-day ignorance would imagine that was anything but a miserable, desperate way to live and probably unsustainable in the long run. They Indians would have eventually gone the way of the Neanderthals.
To hear present-day Indians complaining is even richer. Tear down your casinos and go back to living in wigwams if that life was so idyllic. Reject all the white man’s devilry, including using computers and the internet (I get a kick of out anti-capitalist anti-corporate lefties who do the same thing while sitting in Starbucks typing away at their Apple products).