Saturday, November 2, 2013

This is currently the two top comments for this video:

Honestly? Whenever I see a video like this showing Native American life before the white man came upon their shores, I think of shit like this:

Iroquois warriors conducted "mourning wars" in which they sought prisoners from their enemies. The chiefs distributed the prisoners to grieving matrilineages, whose elder women decided their fate: adoption or death. The matrons usually adopted women and children, who were more readily assimilated. Captive men more often faced death by torture, especially if they had received some crippling wound. Inflicting death as slowly and painfully as possible, the Iroquois tied their victim to a stake, and villagers of both genders and all ages took turns wielding knives, torches, and red-hot pokers systematically to torment and burn him to death. The ceremony was a contest between the skills of the torturers and the stoic endurance of the victim, who manifested his own power, and that of his people, by insulting his captors and boasting of his accomplishments in war. After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking pots, and served the stew to the entire village, so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captive's power.
—Alan Taylor, American Colonies, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Viking, 2001), 102-03.

Remember that other part in Pocahontas when they were putting on their war paint? It wasn't as if that day they had to invent that ritual because battle and conflict was a new thing to them. No, Native Americans already knew all too well how to murder a person. Europeans were horrified at scalping; that was in practice long before any white man touched their soil.

This is kinda like my Chrono Cross complaint a few days ago: I'm not going to defend what was done to the Native Americans, but I'm not about to pretend that everything was perfect and peaceful until the Europeans arrived to fuck everything up. They were fucking human too with human desires. They fought over resources and influence. That idea was not purely an Old World phenomenon.

Really, this just sums up my argument: the Aztecs. If shit was so fucking idyllic, fucking explain them. No matter what you want to say about Christianity and its sins, at least its fundamental theology isn't "rip out people's still-beating hearts frequently to assure the suns rises every morning."

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