Noble Savages?

A frequently heard claim is that white Europeans stole the land in North and South America from innocent bucolic Indians living peacefully in harmony with man and nature. What's often omitted from this tale is that these Indians, or their ancestors, themselves stole the land from whomever the original inhabitants were. Indian tribes had been at war with each other for millennia before Columbus ever set sail. Control of the land had doubtless passed back and forth from one conquering tribe to another countless times.

Whatever tribe was on the land when Columbus landed was very unlikely to be the descendents of the first humans to inhabit that soil.

Nevertheless, we know from accounts like that handed down to us by 16th century Spanish priest Bartholomew de las Casas who personally witnessed the horrors inflicted upon the tribes of Hispaniola and Central America by the Spaniard colonizers that the Spaniards were capable of unimaginable cruelty. De las Casas' record of their crimes was later incorporated into a book titled The Destruction of the Indies. It makes for very grisly reading.

We know about these awful atrocities because of eyewitnesses like de las Casas, but what tends to get overlooked, because they weren't as well-documented, are the even worse crimes of the native Americans against each other.

Nirmal Dass has an enlightening column at The Daily Caller in which he describes some of the practices of "pre-contact" native Americans, i.e. native American tribes prior to contact with Europeans. Much of what he describes - torture, child sacrifice and cannibalism - is quite gruesome, and it raises some interesting moral and anthropological questions.

Here's a portion of his column:

The recent unearthing of the remains of sacrificed children in Peru highlights the widely known but little discussed topic of human sacrifice and cannibalism — especially of children — among native populations of the Americas.

This latest find is not unique. Evidence shows that humans were butchered and de-fleshed in the Nanchoc Valley, and at the Pyramid of the Moon, in the Moche River Valley, at the Piramide Mayor at Caral and at the Cave of the Owl in the Peruvian Upper Montaña. Human bones, charred and often shattered to extract the marrow, have been found at Los Gavilanes, Huaca Prieta, Asia, and Aspero — to name but a few places.

Further, the curious study of paleofeces, where coprolite (naturally preserved feces) is studied to determine the food available to ancient populations, shows the presence of human proteins, which can only come from consuming human flesh. Fecal samples are taken from various sites throughout the Americas.

Peru also preserves the earliest evidence of headhunting in all the three native cultures (the Paracas, the Nazca and the Huari). Given the dry climate, well-preserved heads have been found which show the process of ritual mutilation (the brain was removed through a hole in the forehead and the lips were sealed shut by two thorns). A similar practice existed among the Jibaro of Puerto Rico.

Nor is Peru unique in the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, for both were important features in all native cultures, throughout North, Middle and South America. Take for example, the Tiwanaku in Bolivia; the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil; the gathering of Inca children (usually little girls) as tax payment who were then sacrificed.

The Aztec cooked the flesh of victims into a stew, with tomatoes and peppers. We also have the finds at Ecatepec, near Mexico City, at Tula, at Burnt Mesa, New Mexico, at the Mancos Canyon, the Atakapa of Southwestern Louisiana, among the Tupinamba, and the Carib (the very term “cannibal” comes from the name of this tribe, whom Columbus first encountered).

Further North, there are the elaborate torture-slaughter-cannibal rituals of the Iroquois, the Huron, and other people of the Great Lakes, the Westo, the Anasazi, the plains, the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts (such as the Kwakiutl), the Pacific Islands, and even up into the Arctic, as at the Saunuktuk site. I have been privately assured by scholars who study the Pre-Contact period (before contact with Europeans) that “you wouldn’t want to be living in most parts of the Americas back then.”

Dass then makes this interesting remark about how this data is viewed by scholars and students in the grip of multiculturalist assumptions and the moral and cultural relativism that accompanies those assumptions:

This glut of evidence is processed in the mill of relativism, however, and what emerges is the intellectualization of man’s inhumanity to man, which passes for scholarly neutrality. In other words, no one can bring himself to say that one culture can be better than another, especially if that other happens to be the Western one. The exhortation is always the same: We must understand, not judge. But how do you understand children being tortured, slaughtered and then eaten? More importantly, what is there to understand?

He's exactly right. If torturing children in order to eat them isn't an appallingly degenerate moral evil then nothing is, and the relativists who refuse to call it evil, who insist that no culture is any better than any other, that eating children is no different, morally speaking, than eating beef, are themselves complicit, even if only centuries later, in the degeneracy.

The appropriate judgment on these cultures is to declare that one is glad that they died out, that the world is much better off without them, and that they richly deserved to perish.