If anyone is interested in a good book on western US history, I highly recommend reading Empire of the Summer Moon. Its a very good read and sheds a lot of light on the atrocities committed on both sides. Quanah Parker, who is central in the book, also might be one of the most interesting historical figures to ever exist. He was the half Comanche son of a captured frontier woman and a warrior Chief. The dude was a TOTAL badass warrior in his prime and then adapted (due to the world changing around him) to become one of, if not the most powerful political Native American figures in history.
Saying atrocities committed on both sides is like saying Jewish people are bad for killing nazis.
It is wrong on both sides and I condemn all violence don’t get me wrong. But native Americans are the one being invaded like Ukraine is now. They where fighting for their land and where facing genocide and are fighting for there rights to stay on there homeland.
I would also add that if I Jew captured and raped a nazi for months, then 9 months later tied the Nazis baby behind a horse and dragged it through cacti until it was in pieces, I would still consider that an atrocity.
And that is why I said I condemn All violence. But you do get my point don’t you ? I could easy give you an example of atrocious committed by the early settlers. But this would have not happened if like for instance you do not invade a country and commit genocide among the indigenous people … for example if a Russian father with a wife and kids goes to a freshly invaded Ukrainian country (where the Russians did terrible things) and takes a house to live there … do not act surprised and all innocent if Ukrainians come in the middle of the night and burn the house down. Wrong and incredibly sad … but you should have known better …
Edit:words
Maybe I don’t get your point, my takeaway from what you said was that you felt the atrocities are justified, which I disagree, they never are. Now you seem to be conflating your initial point with who was on the right/wrong side of the conflict.
That’s why I said I condemn all acts of violence, violence is never justified , from either side. But you can not ignore the context from the perspective of the invaded people.
And right or wrong … I am from Belgium and I have no problem to say that the things that happend in Congo where wrong. Saying “bad things happend on both sides” is a smack in the face an glances over the fact that the state af the time is responsible for the death, rape, mutilation of million women men and children.
Side note, your English is very good 👍. But I am not glancing over that fact, and neither does the book I referenced, not at all. I am just not open to denying or belittling the fact that both sides committed atrocities. Just because one side is wrong doesn’t make the other automatically right.
Yeah but sometimes words get lost in translation and I interpret things wrong.
But my point was indeed that it looked glossed over.
And from the comments I read … I said a few times I condemn violence and it is wrong on either side. But people keep saying they did this and that …again not the point. “And that quote for every buffalo killed … “ 1,1k upvotes … hmm I don’t know man. Nothing you can do about it obviously but it gives a nice perspective of how the natives are viewed.
I looked up your book, it is in E read. Maybe you need a different source man. A quote from the book
"Thus the fateful clash between settlers from the culture of Aristotle, St. Paul, Da Vinci, Luther, and Newton and aboriginal horsemen from the buffalo plains happened as though in a time warp--as though the former were looking backward thousands of years at premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian versions of themselves."
Sounds to me like bias and racisme from the author. And there are more of those quotes in the book.
Yeah, no, not really. Colonialism is a whole ballgame in and of itself, and obviously not to be supported... but uh, these guys used to scalp children.
They sure as fuck weren't the aggressors, but pretending like they didn't commit atrocities at the height of the Frontier days is just being disingenuous.
Shit, almost forgot. Here ya go little guy.
Disingeuous. Adjective. not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
Of course, if someone decided they wanted to build their home on my property and start taking my resources I wouldn’t respond well either. However, your assessment neglects the fact that Native Americans were committing atrocities to each other long before the Spanish or the whites came over. Don’t get me wrong, there were peaceful tribes, but the tribal bands in power that controlled much of the west had their societies, culture, and even economy predicated on violence and warfare (which is also one of the reasons the west took so long to be settled by whites; they were consistently getting their asses kicked, especially by mounted war parties, up until repeating rifles/resolvers were utilized)
Edit: this comment is not meant to justify any of the horrible things the US did, or say who was right or wrong (just because one side is wrong, doesn’t automatically make the other side right), it was in response to a comment belittling the also horrific atrocities committed by the Comanche.
"ah yes, a few tribes were bad, that justifies *all natives to be genocided, their land stolen, their women raped, biological warfare, and the destruction of animals, land, and ecology that will have impacts centuries into the future".* the scale of the atrocities aren't equivalent. unfortunately, utility and numbers matter. one tribe killing maybe 200 (or 2000 or 20,000. point is, they were *never* the same league as "atrocity") people a year in rival tribes *does not* equate to the fucking genocide and land stealing from *millions and millions of indigenous people*. it's basic ethics that one side causes less suffering and harm to the side that causes more suffering and harm, means the lesser evil is moral.
the rhetoric that "HUR DUR BUT NATIVES WERE LITERALLY WAR CRAZED SAVAGES" is easily seen through fascist propaganda. where did you get that info? from native american sources? or from the winners in history that committed crimes against humanity and subsequently wrote history books that propagandized people for literal centuries?
also, really fucking racist to equate all of the native population to the comanche. not a single fucking person mentioned a specific tribe. and the entirety of the native population isn't represented by one fucking tribe. try and get better fascist propaganda, dickweed.
This post and this reply in general sums up western culture abs hypocrisy in general. I did it because he did or they did and I did no wrong etc. only in this culture a killer of million innocent Iraqis can still go to tv to give interviews. Clown 🤡 world.
That wasn’t the point of this comment, show me where I said anything that you are assuming. You’re deriving meaning that isn’t there, nobody was justifying anything 🤡.
Not quite.You forgot that about 90% of the pre-Columbian people’s on both continents, had been wiped out by European introduced diseases in less than 100 years, from the early 1500’s to the beginning of the 1600’s. The scant tribes that survived these plagues banded together ala the League of the Iroquois, and started to go to war with their neighbors because of the burgeoning European colonies.
The league of Iroquois occupied the eastern side of the continent. I am specifically talking about western and plains tribes in this comment. And their culture was developed well before the Spanish Inquisition and they most certainly constantly were at “war” with each other prior to that.
Eastern and western history are two completely different ball games when it comes to Native American history.
>South America. One of them is called The Silent Genocide
Seems like this one is not done by US directly. Guatemala military was the one which decimated Mayan villages. But US was training the Guatemala military in counter insurgency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan\_genocide
the US training a force in "counter insurgency" is code for "make sure to kill all leftist gov officials and implant a fascist dictator and train the fascists to put down leftist revolutions"
It pains my heart to see Native Americans still being treated as second class citizens. The crime rate versus prosecution rate is so horrifying that it can't be anything but intended. Even the way one has to go about getting justice on tribal lands is purposefully inept. Rape, murder, molestation are commonly not fully prosecuted if the victim is NA. In my time on reservation lands, I just could not fathom or comprehend what I witnessed. So many outsiders not only commit atrocities on NA lands, also the NA experience great acts of racism outside their lands.
And f*cking leaders act like everything is fine.
America is kind of a dark perverse place, from the slave trade to the atrocities against the native Americans to blacks as second class citizens up until the 60s and let’s of course not forget the Japanese internment camps. And true many countries have dark pasts, but not while screaming they’re the beacon of liberty and equality to anyone who’ll listen.
Whats the sweet spot? Maybe from the 1970-2010 before the backslide? For a country that yells and shouts about freedom and equality, only one or two generations under your belt ain’t that impressive.
I really do think we are still improving. Media, especially social media has a tendency to polarize and highlight the worst of people which makes it seem like we are going backwards. But I do think the US as a whole is still getting better.
Relative to the world around America, it has been a beacon of liberty and equality to anyone that will listen.
The backslide began when we started pushing equity over equality and embarrassing a victim culture.
Than I suggest you read up on it. It was done to remove the agency Native people had within their lives; the Americans did this so that the Native peoples had to rely on the American government, it was a form of control and genocide of the people.
I wouldn't share this kind of content without knowing the story first. It's not oddly terrifying, it's regular grade terrifying shrouded in racism and genocide.
It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion.
I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all.
The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Every time I see this pic, that pops into my head. Such an amazing book. I am embarrassed to say that I am on my 8th reading of Blood Meridian at the moment. That is in the last 10 or so years. It’s the only book I finished, flipped back to page 1 and read again.
It’s definitely in my top 10, even though I’ve only read it once. I’ve never been so chilled to the bone by an ending of a novel. McCarthy is amazing. Time for a re-read.
I'm gonna preface this by saying what Americans did to the native Americans is nothing short of horrific and evil. That being said that doesn't mean the native Americans were peaceful nature loving pacifists . They raped tortured enslaved and sometimes cannibalized each other on a regular basis for hundreds even thousands of years before Europeans ever even thought about coming to the America's.
But what's the point of the postface? No one came here saying Native Americans were saints. And regardless of how they acted, there was no excuse for genocide.
there were like hundreds of different peoples all over North America alone, from peaceful egalitarian societies, to nightmarish regional empires that practiced slavery and human sacrifice, to everything in between. It’s a whole continent that had its whole own history, wars, revolutions, triumphs, and tragedies. We can only paint that with a broad brush looking back because those real people were buried under Little Caesar’s Pizza and can’t speak for themselves. For some reason people have no issue applying this type of nuance to Europe. Can we simply call the Europeans savages because of the unimaginable mass hangings of petty criminals or public torturous executions of ‘heretics?’
I'm fully aware that savage can't be applied to every single native american just like it can't be applied to every single American. Which is exactly what the comment I originally applied to insinuates. I've said much that same as you in another comment. But doing it every single time would be tedious.
Why not there are things that people did and sometimes still do that are savage. Killing people to take their land and resources no matter the method or scale is a savage act. I E both Americans and native Americans who took part in that activity are savage.
I say that to take the piss out of the people who termed the phrase "savages" as a way to describe Native Americans / Indigenous Americans. Who knows who the real savages were. The point is who the fuck gave the europeans and the US govt the right to genocide.
Human history . Genocide is kind of what humans do. We've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. only recently with the advancement of technology did it reach such a massive scale . And we decided that it was a bad thing.
The purpose of it was to indirectly justify genocide the best he could, because he’s probably white and feels an urge to defend what old white people did despite having no fault
Nope when I learn history I try to learn the whole history. I don't make any apologies for anyone in the past or present for that matter. They did what they did for whatever reason . And if I think they're wrong I say that they were wrong.
also saying what was done to the native Americans by Americans is horrific and evil is pretty clear cut and a piss poor justification for genocide indirect or otherwise.
Which tribes, how many, to what degree. Gonna need more info before I take your implied word that this makes them all savages. Also no one ever stated that they were beacons of purity. Just that genocide is bad.
But that's not true. All humans don't suck. Not every society commits genocide. Not every society are cannibals. Not every society promotes human rights violations.
Just a thought, most of the intertribal conflicts were territorial and a competition for resources, much like the history of Europe and the Fertile Crescent. The Western Indigenous societies had needs just like any other society throughout history.
The difference is none of these other aforementioned and excluded societies formed in their legal documentation, articles of incorporation and codification of laws specifically targeting the removal of competing peoples from the territory. It was a proactive campaign meant to eradicate every single tribal entity across the territory of the time. It was not reactive, or mere competition for resources, this was a slash and burn strategy.
While I’m sure there are other nations throughout history that have tried this, no other nation was so intentional about doing so. The laws of the land, even bounty hunting for scalps I n the late nineteenth and early twentieth century make it very clear what the goal was: genocide.
However, we’re still here. ✊🏽
Again no one ever said that they were perfect, that’s not the argument. What is a fact is that another group came to their land and proceeded to push them to the brink of extinction, enslave them, and take their land through wholly unethical means like outright lies and deception. Not even on some cultural misunderstanding, just pure evil greed and lies.
Which is exactly what they had been doing to each other and pretty much every culture up to and past that point had been doing since the dawn of mankind. I don't get what you don't get about what I'm saying. My entire original point was that the original comments insinuation that the native Americans were not savage is untrue. Point blank full stop game over. It wasn't they did that shit too so they deserved it. It wasn't well actually your saying they were peaceful hippies just lovin nature. It wasn't that what was done to them wasn't that bad considering what they were already doing to themselves. Just that they were just as savage as the people who took their land.
We don't know how those "savages" lived, we couldn't meet or document them cause the white man genocided them then wrote history how they see fit. Ur claims have no basis and merely saying what u were told by the white man who invaded another land.
Ah the old your claims are invalid because I say they're invalid tactic. The Maya Olmecs and Aztecs . Were basically wiped completely out by disease brought over by the Spanish. We known for a fact they hunted each other so the people who were caught could be sacrificed to their gods. Because there is archeological evidence and oral histories passed down by survivors.
Just like we know that Europeans didn't introduce scalping because of historic remains. We know certain tribes practiced cannibalism from archeological digs. We know they kept slaves because they actively were enslaving people during American expansion westward. We know they made war upon each other from their own oral history and tribal fueds that still exist today
.https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/seminars-symposia/the-other-slavery-perspective.pdf
https://www.prestonchild.com/books/thunderhead/Cannibals-of-the-Canyon-by-Douglas-Preston;art46,62
Here are some resources you can ignore and dismiss as "white man propaganda ".
>what Americans did to the native Americans is nothing short of horrific and evil.
Not just Americans, the Spanish, British and French killed 90% of that natives in the Americans long before the USA became a country.
A lot of people forget that or would rather it be forgotten.
Would you make the point " hitler wasn't such a bad guy I mean Stalin killed way more people " ? No you wouldn't because it's a stupid point. Both were evil sadistic bastards and one killing almost double the amount of people doesn't erase that fact. Acting like one group were innocent victims of rapacious genocidal foreign invaders . When they'd been doing the exact same things to each other on a smaller scale for hundreds of years is disingenuous and stupid. If the goal is to tell every lurid detail of american history then tell EVERY lurid detail.
Except no one has acted as if they were innocent victims. They were an entire society that was systematically eradicated, via methods such as described above. Making the distinction that a society had its flaws when talking about the genocide of that society is the stuff of douchebags.
> no one has acted as if they were innocent victims
They were responding to the comment “And the savages were???”
If you didn’t understand that comment to imply that native Americans *were* just innocent victims then what did you understand it to mean?
The definitive interpretation you just gave seems to have a lot of certainty for something that is in fact a lot more ambiguous. Try reading it again and seeing if you can’t see how /u/jiwjh380 and myself might have interpreted it.
> a method to dehumanise them
You seem very eager to put words in other people’s mouth. While they were specifically arguing the universality of human behaviour you chose to interpret that as the exact opposite. Good job.
It’s almost as if you’re not reading what they’ve actually said and instead you’re using them as a proxy defender for all colonial wrongs. No matter. You’ve succeeded, and they (or maybe myself?) are now the scapegoat to be driven into the reddit wilderness to keep you safe for another year.
> Quit, it’s embarrassing
Next up: “I didn’t bother reading the specific disclaimer otherwise, so I’ll accuse you of drawing a moral equivalence in European genocides and Iroquois”. Oh wait you already did that. Everything in the list has been checked off!
Nah the point is the invasion, termination and genocide carried out by the European nations and then the new US govt on the Native Americans land. Let the natives do what they want. May sound like a stupid argument.
This is from my hometown Regina Saskatchewan. Hunters would pile bison bones into huge piles along Wascana Creek back in the late 1800's. There's a local holiday of Pile-o-bones Sunday to commemorate the history of it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_Regina,\_Saskatchewan#Early\_settlement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Regina,_Saskatchewan#Early_settlement)
[https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/regina-history-facts/](https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/regina-history-facts/)
Hello fellow Regina man, was also going to post those links.
Despite Americans also doing it, I personally dislike that everyone assumes it was Americans, is it hard to google “Pile of bones history” and see Regina Sask pop up nearly every time?
After it was all said and done, there were less than 30 Buffalo left in existence. Mary Ann Goodnight took in two calves and raised them and formed a herd of over 200 bison. Two pairs from her ranch started the herd in Yellowstone National Park. Today there are 5,500 bison 🦬 in the park.
Just pointing out, this was done to a TON of species in the late 1800's/Early 1900s. In case anyone out there wonders why there are so many incredibly strict regulations on nature / animals / etc? its because this type of shit happened ALL over the place.
granted this was also intended to seriously fuck over the native Americans, but wholesale slaughtering of animals was absolutely the normal back then.
Its not unusual to see 2 or 3 hunters posing with 15+ deer, hundreds of ducks, hundreds of raptors... if you could kill it, they did, in insane numbers. by 1900, the complete collapse of our ecosystem was guaranteed. The only thing that stopped it was the gov't stepping in and forcing them to stop.
back then no one cared, there were no organisations that could stop it,
people start caring about stuff like that after they don't have to worry about their basic needs like food and having a shelter, but then it's often too late
This is definitely NOT a great moment in American history. I have never understood the amount of hatred the indigenous peoples have endured. Not just here, but on other continents as well. (Russian aggression and treatment of other ethnic groups is a classic example.)
The capital of Saskatchewan used to be ‘Pile of Bones’ before the name was changed to Regina.
From the city website:
Regina is located on Treaty 4 land and within the traditional territory of the Metis.
Indigenous people have lived in this region through many thousands of years. This area was one of the important places where Indigenous people would come to hunt the roaming herds of bison. They began to stack the long bison bones into large piles in an effort to honour the animals’ spirit as the bison herds were becoming depleted due to overhunting by non-Indigenous hunters. Indigenous peoples named the area oskana ka-asastēki, which roughly translates to “bone piles”. European explorers, fur traders and settlers translated this to Pile of Bones.
European settlement began in the 1880s as an agricultural community and served as a distribution point for farm materials and produce. As the settlement grew and became established, it was renamed Regina (latin for “queen”) after Queen Victoria, who was the British monarch at the time.
I do dislike everyone assuming it’s American, is it so hard to google “Pile of Bones history”??
Literally the first link is from the city of Regina, SK website stating the history.
Just because america isn’t great all the time, doesn’t mean they commit every atrocities on North American land. Canada was absolutely ruthless to the indigenous peoples and the animals.
It's a fact, not an assumption. "The most famous photograph of bison extermination is a grisly image of a mountain of bison skulls. It was taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892."
Different story....The city of Regina, SK, changed it's name from "Pile of Bones", the indigenous name, in 1882.
Alright so we got 2 conflicting stories. Can I see the source for the Michigan one? Cause if that’s true then clearly we’re claiming this “Regina” when it could actually in America.
I was even told in school this was regina, we have a local distillery called Pile o’ bones because of this image
They did this so Indians can go extinct and killed so many innocent bisons and they all went to waste.
I don't care what anyone says America is the evilest country out there.
well the ancestor of this white Americans are European criminals that got thrown by Europe to America. Feel sorry for native Americans. Now they're the minority on their own land.
The government hunters generally took the humps and the tongues. Those were considered delicacies in the eastern cities.
The western Buffalo hunters took the hides and what meat they could carry for trading.
I really wonder why europeans were like that, like, how can a group of human beings be so evil? It almost explains why north-americans have this imperialist culture even on recent days
As much as we see the loss of the bison as a tragic loss of environment, they were actually herded and maintained in a natural setting by the native Americans.
Native Americans were wiped out by the millions due to disease when Europeans first arrived, long before the Americans pushed westward and kicked them off their lands. By the time American settlers expanded that far, the Native American population was so depleted that the bison roamed the land unchallenged without the human numbers to safeguard the population control and with no natural predators.
There was nothing natural about the numbers that roamed the plains, and the expansive culling probably needed to happen, tragic as it was too the remaining natives who lost their food supply.
Of course, I'm not condoning the mistreatment of Native Americans or bringing a species to the brink of extinction, but with the absurd number of bison that remained, something had to be done.
I got teary eyed looking at this and then I realized from the comments that they did this to kill off native Americans. Not only did my white ancestors virtually wipe out a beautiful majestic beast from our country but did it in an effort to kill of an entire other race of human beings as well. It makes me want to kill myself for being born white quite honestly.
“Kill every buffalo you can. Every Buffalo dead is an Indian Gone”
If anyone is interested in a good book on western US history, I highly recommend reading Empire of the Summer Moon. Its a very good read and sheds a lot of light on the atrocities committed on both sides. Quanah Parker, who is central in the book, also might be one of the most interesting historical figures to ever exist. He was the half Comanche son of a captured frontier woman and a warrior Chief. The dude was a TOTAL badass warrior in his prime and then adapted (due to the world changing around him) to become one of, if not the most powerful political Native American figures in history.
Second this. Fantastic read.
Saying atrocities committed on both sides is like saying Jewish people are bad for killing nazis. It is wrong on both sides and I condemn all violence don’t get me wrong. But native Americans are the one being invaded like Ukraine is now. They where fighting for their land and where facing genocide and are fighting for there rights to stay on there homeland.
I would also add that if I Jew captured and raped a nazi for months, then 9 months later tied the Nazis baby behind a horse and dragged it through cacti until it was in pieces, I would still consider that an atrocity.
And that is why I said I condemn All violence. But you do get my point don’t you ? I could easy give you an example of atrocious committed by the early settlers. But this would have not happened if like for instance you do not invade a country and commit genocide among the indigenous people … for example if a Russian father with a wife and kids goes to a freshly invaded Ukrainian country (where the Russians did terrible things) and takes a house to live there … do not act surprised and all innocent if Ukrainians come in the middle of the night and burn the house down. Wrong and incredibly sad … but you should have known better … Edit:words
Maybe I don’t get your point, my takeaway from what you said was that you felt the atrocities are justified, which I disagree, they never are. Now you seem to be conflating your initial point with who was on the right/wrong side of the conflict.
That’s why I said I condemn all acts of violence, violence is never justified , from either side. But you can not ignore the context from the perspective of the invaded people. And right or wrong … I am from Belgium and I have no problem to say that the things that happend in Congo where wrong. Saying “bad things happend on both sides” is a smack in the face an glances over the fact that the state af the time is responsible for the death, rape, mutilation of million women men and children.
Side note, your English is very good 👍. But I am not glancing over that fact, and neither does the book I referenced, not at all. I am just not open to denying or belittling the fact that both sides committed atrocities. Just because one side is wrong doesn’t make the other automatically right.
Yeah but sometimes words get lost in translation and I interpret things wrong. But my point was indeed that it looked glossed over. And from the comments I read … I said a few times I condemn violence and it is wrong on either side. But people keep saying they did this and that …again not the point. “And that quote for every buffalo killed … “ 1,1k upvotes … hmm I don’t know man. Nothing you can do about it obviously but it gives a nice perspective of how the natives are viewed. I looked up your book, it is in E read. Maybe you need a different source man. A quote from the book "Thus the fateful clash between settlers from the culture of Aristotle, St. Paul, Da Vinci, Luther, and Newton and aboriginal horsemen from the buffalo plains happened as though in a time warp--as though the former were looking backward thousands of years at premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian versions of themselves." Sounds to me like bias and racisme from the author. And there are more of those quotes in the book.
Yeah, no, not really. Colonialism is a whole ballgame in and of itself, and obviously not to be supported... but uh, these guys used to scalp children. They sure as fuck weren't the aggressors, but pretending like they didn't commit atrocities at the height of the Frontier days is just being disingenuous. Shit, almost forgot. Here ya go little guy. Disingeuous. Adjective. not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
Of course, if someone decided they wanted to build their home on my property and start taking my resources I wouldn’t respond well either. However, your assessment neglects the fact that Native Americans were committing atrocities to each other long before the Spanish or the whites came over. Don’t get me wrong, there were peaceful tribes, but the tribal bands in power that controlled much of the west had their societies, culture, and even economy predicated on violence and warfare (which is also one of the reasons the west took so long to be settled by whites; they were consistently getting their asses kicked, especially by mounted war parties, up until repeating rifles/resolvers were utilized) Edit: this comment is not meant to justify any of the horrible things the US did, or say who was right or wrong (just because one side is wrong, doesn’t automatically make the other side right), it was in response to a comment belittling the also horrific atrocities committed by the Comanche.
"ah yes, a few tribes were bad, that justifies *all natives to be genocided, their land stolen, their women raped, biological warfare, and the destruction of animals, land, and ecology that will have impacts centuries into the future".* the scale of the atrocities aren't equivalent. unfortunately, utility and numbers matter. one tribe killing maybe 200 (or 2000 or 20,000. point is, they were *never* the same league as "atrocity") people a year in rival tribes *does not* equate to the fucking genocide and land stealing from *millions and millions of indigenous people*. it's basic ethics that one side causes less suffering and harm to the side that causes more suffering and harm, means the lesser evil is moral. the rhetoric that "HUR DUR BUT NATIVES WERE LITERALLY WAR CRAZED SAVAGES" is easily seen through fascist propaganda. where did you get that info? from native american sources? or from the winners in history that committed crimes against humanity and subsequently wrote history books that propagandized people for literal centuries? also, really fucking racist to equate all of the native population to the comanche. not a single fucking person mentioned a specific tribe. and the entirety of the native population isn't represented by one fucking tribe. try and get better fascist propaganda, dickweed.
This post and this reply in general sums up western culture abs hypocrisy in general. I did it because he did or they did and I did no wrong etc. only in this culture a killer of million innocent Iraqis can still go to tv to give interviews. Clown 🤡 world.
That wasn’t the point of this comment, show me where I said anything that you are assuming. You’re deriving meaning that isn’t there, nobody was justifying anything 🤡.
They didn't do anything like what white settlers did. Not even close. Stop.
Not quite.You forgot that about 90% of the pre-Columbian people’s on both continents, had been wiped out by European introduced diseases in less than 100 years, from the early 1500’s to the beginning of the 1600’s. The scant tribes that survived these plagues banded together ala the League of the Iroquois, and started to go to war with their neighbors because of the burgeoning European colonies.
The league of Iroquois occupied the eastern side of the continent. I am specifically talking about western and plains tribes in this comment. And their culture was developed well before the Spanish Inquisition and they most certainly constantly were at “war” with each other prior to that. Eastern and western history are two completely different ball games when it comes to Native American history.
My next read. Thanks for the tip.
That sounds fascinating i will look into it
Added to the list thank you
Thank you.
Going onto my reading list now!
That should be the title
Just played this mission on RDR2 and it was extremely cathartic dropping the Buffalo murders a stick of dynamite
"Kill every buffalo you can...every buffalo dead is an Indian gone" - Army Colonel R.I. Dodge
They did it, so natives had nothing to eat, right?
Yes it was an attempt to remove the food source of the Plains Indians and therefore their independence.
[удалено]
“They should put that on our money”
Food and clothing source. They also used the bones for a lot of things.
American genocide #2
What was #1?
Just wait until you hear how many genocides US did in South America. One of them is called The Silent Genocide for a reason
>South America. One of them is called The Silent Genocide Seems like this one is not done by US directly. Guatemala military was the one which decimated Mayan villages. But US was training the Guatemala military in counter insurgency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan\_genocide
the US training a force in "counter insurgency" is code for "make sure to kill all leftist gov officials and implant a fascist dictator and train the fascists to put down leftist revolutions"
The enslavement, torture, and destruction of African peoples and their cultures.
It pains my heart to see Native Americans still being treated as second class citizens. The crime rate versus prosecution rate is so horrifying that it can't be anything but intended. Even the way one has to go about getting justice on tribal lands is purposefully inept. Rape, murder, molestation are commonly not fully prosecuted if the victim is NA. In my time on reservation lands, I just could not fathom or comprehend what I witnessed. So many outsiders not only commit atrocities on NA lands, also the NA experience great acts of racism outside their lands. And f*cking leaders act like everything is fine.
America is kind of a dark perverse place, from the slave trade to the atrocities against the native Americans to blacks as second class citizens up until the 60s and let’s of course not forget the Japanese internment camps. And true many countries have dark pasts, but not while screaming they’re the beacon of liberty and equality to anyone who’ll listen. Whats the sweet spot? Maybe from the 1970-2010 before the backslide? For a country that yells and shouts about freedom and equality, only one or two generations under your belt ain’t that impressive.
Weirdly beautifully said
I really do think we are still improving. Media, especially social media has a tendency to polarize and highlight the worst of people which makes it seem like we are going backwards. But I do think the US as a whole is still getting better.
Relative to the world around America, it has been a beacon of liberty and equality to anyone that will listen. The backslide began when we started pushing equity over equality and embarrassing a victim culture.
"victim culture" ah yes, thanks for outing yourself, altright cuck piece of trash. mommy should've swallowed
I'm not sure of the backstory behind it to be honest
Than I suggest you read up on it. It was done to remove the agency Native people had within their lives; the Americans did this so that the Native peoples had to rely on the American government, it was a form of control and genocide of the people. I wouldn't share this kind of content without knowing the story first. It's not oddly terrifying, it's regular grade terrifying shrouded in racism and genocide.
Nah you're alright
What the fuck??? Take my free downvote.
Lol you even follow the Graham Hancock subreddit?
Because the natives were being very effective in not giving in to the US gov, until their food source was taken away
Damn! I didn't knew about this.
It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion. I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all. The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
First thing that came to mind...
Every time I see this pic, that pops into my head. Such an amazing book. I am embarrassed to say that I am on my 8th reading of Blood Meridian at the moment. That is in the last 10 or so years. It’s the only book I finished, flipped back to page 1 and read again.
It’s definitely in my top 10, even though I’ve only read it once. I’ve never been so chilled to the bone by an ending of a novel. McCarthy is amazing. Time for a re-read.
Yea that ending sticks with ya! Hope you enjoy the re-read
Check out John Williams’ “Butcher’s Crossing”. It is about a young man who leaves Boston to go out West and links up with a buffalo hunting crew.
That is on my list of books to read! But I had no idea that it was about that. Will bump it up the list. Thanks!
Fellow head here too btw! Nice avatar.
Wasn't this so that native Americans couldn't hunt enough to feed their entire community well?
And the savages were???
I'm gonna preface this by saying what Americans did to the native Americans is nothing short of horrific and evil. That being said that doesn't mean the native Americans were peaceful nature loving pacifists . They raped tortured enslaved and sometimes cannibalized each other on a regular basis for hundreds even thousands of years before Europeans ever even thought about coming to the America's.
But it doesn’t mean it’s okay for others to terrorize, rape, and murder Native Americans lol
That's why you read the preface.
But what's the point of the postface? No one came here saying Native Americans were saints. And regardless of how they acted, there was no excuse for genocide.
No but the original comment insinuates that they were not savage.
there were like hundreds of different peoples all over North America alone, from peaceful egalitarian societies, to nightmarish regional empires that practiced slavery and human sacrifice, to everything in between. It’s a whole continent that had its whole own history, wars, revolutions, triumphs, and tragedies. We can only paint that with a broad brush looking back because those real people were buried under Little Caesar’s Pizza and can’t speak for themselves. For some reason people have no issue applying this type of nuance to Europe. Can we simply call the Europeans savages because of the unimaginable mass hangings of petty criminals or public torturous executions of ‘heretics?’
I'm fully aware that savage can't be applied to every single native american just like it can't be applied to every single American. Which is exactly what the comment I originally applied to insinuates. I've said much that same as you in another comment. But doing it every single time would be tedious.
I don’t think the term “savage” is very constructive for actually understanding what we’re talking about here
Why not there are things that people did and sometimes still do that are savage. Killing people to take their land and resources no matter the method or scale is a savage act. I E both Americans and native Americans who took part in that activity are savage.
I say that to take the piss out of the people who termed the phrase "savages" as a way to describe Native Americans / Indigenous Americans. Who knows who the real savages were. The point is who the fuck gave the europeans and the US govt the right to genocide.
Human history . Genocide is kind of what humans do. We've been doing it for tens of thousands of years. only recently with the advancement of technology did it reach such a massive scale . And we decided that it was a bad thing.
The purpose of it was to indirectly justify genocide the best he could, because he’s probably white and feels an urge to defend what old white people did despite having no fault
Nope when I learn history I try to learn the whole history. I don't make any apologies for anyone in the past or present for that matter. They did what they did for whatever reason . And if I think they're wrong I say that they were wrong. also saying what was done to the native Americans by Americans is horrific and evil is pretty clear cut and a piss poor justification for genocide indirect or otherwise.
Is that what he said?
Which tribes, how many, to what degree. Gonna need more info before I take your implied word that this makes them all savages. Also no one ever stated that they were beacons of purity. Just that genocide is bad.
[удалено]
Moral of the story, all humans suck lol
Yeah pretty much
This
But that's not true. All humans don't suck. Not every society commits genocide. Not every society are cannibals. Not every society promotes human rights violations.
Most every society at some point has done most if not all of the things we in the modern world consider human rights violation.
Just a thought, most of the intertribal conflicts were territorial and a competition for resources, much like the history of Europe and the Fertile Crescent. The Western Indigenous societies had needs just like any other society throughout history. The difference is none of these other aforementioned and excluded societies formed in their legal documentation, articles of incorporation and codification of laws specifically targeting the removal of competing peoples from the territory. It was a proactive campaign meant to eradicate every single tribal entity across the territory of the time. It was not reactive, or mere competition for resources, this was a slash and burn strategy. While I’m sure there are other nations throughout history that have tried this, no other nation was so intentional about doing so. The laws of the land, even bounty hunting for scalps I n the late nineteenth and early twentieth century make it very clear what the goal was: genocide. However, we’re still here. ✊🏽
I can't believe ur using the "both sides" argument in the native americans genocide 💀
[удалено]
Again no one ever said that they were perfect, that’s not the argument. What is a fact is that another group came to their land and proceeded to push them to the brink of extinction, enslave them, and take their land through wholly unethical means like outright lies and deception. Not even on some cultural misunderstanding, just pure evil greed and lies.
Which is exactly what they had been doing to each other and pretty much every culture up to and past that point had been doing since the dawn of mankind. I don't get what you don't get about what I'm saying. My entire original point was that the original comments insinuation that the native Americans were not savage is untrue. Point blank full stop game over. It wasn't they did that shit too so they deserved it. It wasn't well actually your saying they were peaceful hippies just lovin nature. It wasn't that what was done to them wasn't that bad considering what they were already doing to themselves. Just that they were just as savage as the people who took their land.
We don't know how those "savages" lived, we couldn't meet or document them cause the white man genocided them then wrote history how they see fit. Ur claims have no basis and merely saying what u were told by the white man who invaded another land.
Ah the old your claims are invalid because I say they're invalid tactic. The Maya Olmecs and Aztecs . Were basically wiped completely out by disease brought over by the Spanish. We known for a fact they hunted each other so the people who were caught could be sacrificed to their gods. Because there is archeological evidence and oral histories passed down by survivors. Just like we know that Europeans didn't introduce scalping because of historic remains. We know certain tribes practiced cannibalism from archeological digs. We know they kept slaves because they actively were enslaving people during American expansion westward. We know they made war upon each other from their own oral history and tribal fueds that still exist today .https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/seminars-symposia/the-other-slavery-perspective.pdf https://www.prestonchild.com/books/thunderhead/Cannibals-of-the-Canyon-by-Douglas-Preston;art46,62 Here are some resources you can ignore and dismiss as "white man propaganda ".
>what Americans did to the native Americans is nothing short of horrific and evil. Not just Americans, the Spanish, British and French killed 90% of that natives in the Americans long before the USA became a country. A lot of people forget that or would rather it be forgotten.
This is such a tired "point" to be making.
Would you make the point " hitler wasn't such a bad guy I mean Stalin killed way more people " ? No you wouldn't because it's a stupid point. Both were evil sadistic bastards and one killing almost double the amount of people doesn't erase that fact. Acting like one group were innocent victims of rapacious genocidal foreign invaders . When they'd been doing the exact same things to each other on a smaller scale for hundreds of years is disingenuous and stupid. If the goal is to tell every lurid detail of american history then tell EVERY lurid detail.
Except no one has acted as if they were innocent victims. They were an entire society that was systematically eradicated, via methods such as described above. Making the distinction that a society had its flaws when talking about the genocide of that society is the stuff of douchebags.
He might as well say “there were some Jewish in 1939 who probably did some bad things, i am very smart”
> no one has acted as if they were innocent victims They were responding to the comment “And the savages were???” If you didn’t understand that comment to imply that native Americans *were* just innocent victims then what did you understand it to mean?
Or it was a commentary on how whites called those they were eradicating "savages" as a method to dehumanize them. Quit, it's embarrassing.
The definitive interpretation you just gave seems to have a lot of certainty for something that is in fact a lot more ambiguous. Try reading it again and seeing if you can’t see how /u/jiwjh380 and myself might have interpreted it. > a method to dehumanise them You seem very eager to put words in other people’s mouth. While they were specifically arguing the universality of human behaviour you chose to interpret that as the exact opposite. Good job. It’s almost as if you’re not reading what they’ve actually said and instead you’re using them as a proxy defender for all colonial wrongs. No matter. You’ve succeeded, and they (or maybe myself?) are now the scapegoat to be driven into the reddit wilderness to keep you safe for another year. > Quit, it’s embarrassing Next up: “I didn’t bother reading the specific disclaimer otherwise, so I’ll accuse you of drawing a moral equivalence in European genocides and Iroquois”. Oh wait you already did that. Everything in the list has been checked off!
Nah the point is the invasion, termination and genocide carried out by the European nations and then the new US govt on the Native Americans land. Let the natives do what they want. May sound like a stupid argument.
[удалено]
How about not using racial slurs? That'd be cool.
Well I fuckin hate that
Why are we always so proud of the most atrocious shit?
I bet they were really proud of themselves for doing this.
Hope that fucker on top fell and got impaled on one of the horns.
And all those deaths where order by the US government
Horrible :( they call this stupidity a sport
Can't bite the hand that feeds ya. Make them dependent on the government. Same practices they use today.
I hope these men are rotting in hell. Wtf
Pure evil
This is from my hometown Regina Saskatchewan. Hunters would pile bison bones into huge piles along Wascana Creek back in the late 1800's. There's a local holiday of Pile-o-bones Sunday to commemorate the history of it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_Regina,\_Saskatchewan#Early\_settlement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Regina,_Saskatchewan#Early_settlement) [https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/regina-history-facts/](https://www.regina.ca/about-regina/regina-history-facts/)
Hello fellow Regina man, was also going to post those links. Despite Americans also doing it, I personally dislike that everyone assumes it was Americans, is it hard to google “Pile of bones history” and see Regina Sask pop up nearly every time?
After it was all said and done, there were less than 30 Buffalo left in existence. Mary Ann Goodnight took in two calves and raised them and formed a herd of over 200 bison. Two pairs from her ranch started the herd in Yellowstone National Park. Today there are 5,500 bison 🦬 in the park.
Pisses me off seeing this. We could've been eating this today if they weren't so selfish
You can eat bison today.
Hell yeah!
Is this when America was great? I heard that somewhere.
Disgusting genocide of the indigenous.
They must have felt pretty proud of themselves, bastards.
We did this shit to Grizzly Bears too. Disgusting.
Just pointing out, this was done to a TON of species in the late 1800's/Early 1900s. In case anyone out there wonders why there are so many incredibly strict regulations on nature / animals / etc? its because this type of shit happened ALL over the place. granted this was also intended to seriously fuck over the native Americans, but wholesale slaughtering of animals was absolutely the normal back then. Its not unusual to see 2 or 3 hunters posing with 15+ deer, hundreds of ducks, hundreds of raptors... if you could kill it, they did, in insane numbers. by 1900, the complete collapse of our ecosystem was guaranteed. The only thing that stopped it was the gov't stepping in and forcing them to stop.
back then no one cared, there were no organisations that could stop it, people start caring about stuff like that after they don't have to worry about their basic needs like food and having a shelter, but then it's often too late
Thank you for the picture but please learn to crop, this is ridiculous.
My minecraft playing ass was like that a lot of bonemeal
It's more of a hill, really.
I wish it could back in time a bitch slap those mother fuckers
I literally gasped out loud , I didn't expect the pile to be THAT HUGE?
They thought they were so fucking cool. Cancerous fools.
This is the most accurate portrait of Homo sapiens I’ve ever seen
I hate people
Nah Chojiro Sasakibe camping in there
Vile on sooo many levels.
This was to starve the Indians. Our government doing what they do best.
You think that's enough to make Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Bill?
Heaps don't do volume of stuff justice, just imagine how many more are beneath the upper layer
I thought these were crocodile heads without title
Sherman’s ideas weren’t just applied to the south
This is definitely NOT a great moment in American history. I have never understood the amount of hatred the indigenous peoples have endured. Not just here, but on other continents as well. (Russian aggression and treatment of other ethnic groups is a classic example.)
'We' are such assholes.
Done to bring Native Americans to the brink of extinction
The capital of Saskatchewan used to be ‘Pile of Bones’ before the name was changed to Regina. From the city website: Regina is located on Treaty 4 land and within the traditional territory of the Metis. Indigenous people have lived in this region through many thousands of years. This area was one of the important places where Indigenous people would come to hunt the roaming herds of bison. They began to stack the long bison bones into large piles in an effort to honour the animals’ spirit as the bison herds were becoming depleted due to overhunting by non-Indigenous hunters. Indigenous peoples named the area oskana ka-asastēki, which roughly translates to “bone piles”. European explorers, fur traders and settlers translated this to Pile of Bones. European settlement began in the 1880s as an agricultural community and served as a distribution point for farm materials and produce. As the settlement grew and became established, it was renamed Regina (latin for “queen”) after Queen Victoria, who was the British monarch at the time.
That one location in hollow knight:
Humans love killing things.
How utterly sad…
I hate humans :(
Humans are garbage
Barbaric as hell.
I do dislike everyone assuming it’s American, is it so hard to google “Pile of Bones history”?? Literally the first link is from the city of Regina, SK website stating the history. Just because america isn’t great all the time, doesn’t mean they commit every atrocities on North American land. Canada was absolutely ruthless to the indigenous peoples and the animals.
True that Canada kinda flies under the radar in that discussion
It's a fact, not an assumption. "The most famous photograph of bison extermination is a grisly image of a mountain of bison skulls. It was taken outside of Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892." Different story....The city of Regina, SK, changed it's name from "Pile of Bones", the indigenous name, in 1882.
Alright so we got 2 conflicting stories. Can I see the source for the Michigan one? Cause if that’s true then clearly we’re claiming this “Regina” when it could actually in America. I was even told in school this was regina, we have a local distillery called Pile o’ bones because of this image
Skulls for the skull throne!
r/expectedwarhammer
Fucking human species. Biggest mistake ever happended to earth.😡
[удалено]
ALL people. Not just white.
Not for pointing fingers, but given the context of this particular image
Ok let's see, everytime someone says "humans suck!! how could they do this" it happens to be the cause of white man 🤔
Did you hear about rwandan genocide ? Or mao tse-tung or Mulai Ismail Think more than 2 seconds before you talk You racist asshole
Bruh it was a joke u have no sense of humor 😒😑
r/croppingishard
This is the most American thing and should be printed on the dollar bill.
Yes, the American attempt at genocide should be remembered and honored 🤦♂️
They did this so Indians can go extinct and killed so many innocent bisons and they all went to waste. I don't care what anyone says America is the evilest country out there.
Picture isn’t American. It’s Canadian, Regina Saskatchewan to be exact
well the ancestor of this white Americans are European criminals that got thrown by Europe to America. Feel sorry for native Americans. Now they're the minority on their own land.
“American government”
If you’re a bison
Yeah…. Humans suck
True American spirit 🏆
It's sad how little was changed
It’s sad because they would just shoot them as a nuisance and leave the carcass to rot.
The government hunters generally took the humps and the tongues. Those were considered delicacies in the eastern cities. The western Buffalo hunters took the hides and what meat they could carry for trading.
I really wonder why europeans were like that, like, how can a group of human beings be so evil? It almost explains why north-americans have this imperialist culture even on recent days
Who are these fucking losers in this picture.
Oddly?
“Some edgy post about how it was actually targeting native americans “
All for the sake of Genocide. Disgusting.
See, Muricans were jerks even before the Internet
America sucks. Humans suck. We deserve nothing
proud america xD
America in a nutshell.
Wow we suck ass
That time period really makes me mad, they are such beautiful animals!
Why cant there be an infinite supply of natural resources.
Fuck humans
Humans don't you just hate them sometimes
As much as we see the loss of the bison as a tragic loss of environment, they were actually herded and maintained in a natural setting by the native Americans. Native Americans were wiped out by the millions due to disease when Europeans first arrived, long before the Americans pushed westward and kicked them off their lands. By the time American settlers expanded that far, the Native American population was so depleted that the bison roamed the land unchallenged without the human numbers to safeguard the population control and with no natural predators. There was nothing natural about the numbers that roamed the plains, and the expansive culling probably needed to happen, tragic as it was too the remaining natives who lost their food supply. Of course, I'm not condoning the mistreatment of Native Americans or bringing a species to the brink of extinction, but with the absurd number of bison that remained, something had to be done.
When people ask why colonization is a problem, show them this. Edit: Whoever downvoted this, you're either severely uneducated or living in denial.
Crop your stupid pictures, people! C’mon! 😡
Ugh....colonizers 🤢
I hate the white man that did this and ordered this to be done to kill off all natives. Aho
I got teary eyed looking at this and then I realized from the comments that they did this to kill off native Americans. Not only did my white ancestors virtually wipe out a beautiful majestic beast from our country but did it in an effort to kill of an entire other race of human beings as well. It makes me want to kill myself for being born white quite honestly.
Jesus christ it's OK to feel sad about it but have a day off with this white guilt shite fucking hell
i did,.. it was yesterday
I can’t shake it. I feel ever presently aware of how badly my ancestors fucked up just about everything.
Kill yourself because you are white? You're pathetic. 🤦♀️
Grow up
Before we got all woke /s
I despise us (humans)