Do you believe the Native Americans to be savages?

I have seen plumbums in artifact collections meaning that native Americans were surveying and constructing complex structures. I have also seen the remnants of the City of the Dead and Cahokia mounds. I have also studied the mathematics of the Mayan, and seen the Wampum of the Iroquois that functioned as their written records for contracts and treaties.

So no, I do not consider Native Americans as savages. What I do see is technically advanced invaders who needed to dehumanize the vanquished in order to commit cultural genocide.

Too bad the Native Americans didn't have a couple of hundred years of technical advancement, then the tides might have been different and the world would be significantly different.

But that is a game of shoulda, coulda, woulda and it isn't what came to pass.

Rap

Since when do Hollywood movies pass as credible historical evidence?

Well i watch Stagecoach and those films that had people working for that film that supposedly knew the knowledge about that era of the Native Americans to portray them in the way they feel accurate.

Stagecoach was made in 1939. We have come a long way in terms of our perceptions and prejudices since then. I also suggest you don't rely on Hollywood for facts. Try reading a few good non-fiction books.

If you watch movies for guidance on Native Americans try 'Little Big Man.' The savages there weren't the Indians.



Rap

If you want to see a view of Native Americans portrayed by Hollywood in a more balanced way, why not try watching Dances with Wolves? That was a movie that tried to get it corrwect and was sensitive to the real character of that tribe and the military at that period in time.

Why would you want to focus on a movie made pre- 1950. That was in the last century - back when Hollywood got nothing historically correct?

The wild west was very much a kill or be killed kinda place for native americans.
War cries or making god awful sounds aren't limited to native americans, the scottish created the bagpipes for such affairs.. Uncivilized... hmm. You should read about the treatment most native americans got at the hands of the french, dutch, british, and then there was the spanish. There are very few natives in the, north eastern USA or Newfoundland, or the Caribbean now..., at times, rivers and the landscapes were littered with the bodies and blood of these people. Read about the history of Chile, where the rivers ran red with blood, for days on end, as the conquistadors chopped the hands and feet off all the men, and later enslaved whole groups to dig mines. Read about dehumanizing residential schools, and small pox... and how the churches, kings and queens deemed them less than human, how subsequent generations have denied them proper education, housing, medical care or the right to vote, to own property, to parent their own children.
Uncivilized... give your head a shake. There are savages in our history, rarely have the monsters been accurately portrayed.

So you guys are biased against film because it was made in 30's and is black and white?

Also, i will watch Stagecoach because that's what film professors will say to watch and they will laugh at Dances with Wolves and say it is terrible movie and tedious such things but i have seen that too.

No Stagecoach is a good movie--but it's a movie, and as such is open to interpretation as a timely fiction.

Rap

Nothing to do with black and white film. It was made at a time when America had some bigoted perceptions of other races. It was also the time of Jim Crow laws in the south and movies reflected that too. Should we believe what those laws and movies implied about black people?

Actually the most honorable character in Gone With the Wind was played by Hattie McDaniel, and that movie was contemporary with Stagecoach.

Rap

Yes, but how do explain all those other films and black characters who played stupid servants or black adults behaving like children? Remember even Lena Horne was edited out of the southern version of films for being seen as too normal.

Well i understand what you mean about bigoted perceptions of those times, but i want to know why they are regarded as such by those pro-columbus people who say better for the whites to wipe them out because they would never make progress technologically and couldn't build a sandcastle.

I was born in Queens County, New York; that makes me a Native American.
I don 't believe myself to be a savage.





David

It is easier to steal from and kill people when you convince yourself you are much better than they are. Same for all of history.

By just about any definition that you could conjure up the indians were uncivilized...some were savage and some were not...and since they had no match for the white mans military ability they had no ability to resist the will of the newcomers. The only real debatable point is the question of were they given a reasonable opportunity to assimilate before they were destroyed. Given that the indians do a poor job of assimilating even now I have to think that they were but refused, but there is also evidence that many of the newcomers thought the indians to be not worthy of mixing with (interbreeding with).

That philosophy (filosofy) applies to those who like screwing kids out of their natural right to vote.

It was NOT without a reason
that Thomas Jefferson referred to them
in the Declaration of Independence,
as "the merciless Indian savages. . .".





David