Buffalo Bill vs. Native Americans
A while back, I read An Autobiography Of Buffalo Bill*
Near the end was this:
“I am and always have been a friend of the Indian. I have always sympathized with him in his struggle to hold the country that was his by right of birth”.
I had to stop reading for a minute and calm my mind.
After the almost 200 pages I just read? When he repeatedly referred to dead Indians as the only good kind?
Then I read the next line.
“But I have always held that in such a country as America, the march of civilization was inevitable, and that sooner or later the men who lived in roving tribes, making no real use of the resources of the country, would be compelled to give way before the men who tilled the soil and used the lands as the Creator intended they should be used”.
I had to stop again. So many thoughts colliding in my head.
Forget what you’ve seen portrayed in the movies and the old westerns. They are very wrong.
To begin with, a very great many tribes, far more than you think, were agrarian with permanent settlements. They had sophisticated irrigation systems. They had developed hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables. They were masters at building up the soil. They had large orchards and farms.
When hunting, only what was needed was taken, and nothing was wasted. They didn’t “just hunt”. They managed the forests and wildlife, not so differently from the way National Parks are managed today.
At one time, there were even large cities in the southwest and northeast, with roads connecting them. For unknown reasons, when Europeans arrived, the southwestern cities had been long abandoned, but there were still hundreds of permanent towns all over parts of what is now the USA. The Natives had road systems and extensive trade routes.
Their medicine was superior to and more advanced than that of the Europeans.
Why did you not learn of these things in school? Because from the beginning of European colonization, all traces of Native civilization was systematically erased. Buffalo Bill’s mindset epitomized the brainwashing which has permeated white American culture from the beginning of colonization to the present day.
It’s only with modern technology that archaeologists are uncovering the truth of the way things were in pre-Columbian America. The written accounts of early explorers and the oral stories passed down through Native American cultures are being confirmed.
Sometime in the future, I’ll be posting about this subject. There’s too much information for one post; there will be many. Be patient. It will take me a while to get to everything I want to post. Stay tuned.
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