Buffalo Bill is sometimes charged with the near extinction of the American buffalo, due to his hunting exploits.
But he wasn’t the only one. A “buffalo jump” was not an athletic event involving leaping over buffalo, some sort of native American rodeo. It was simply organized mass slaughter of buffalo by native Americans.
Does this sound like they were terribly reluctant about killing animals en masse?
Native Americans also contributed to the collapse of the bison.[28] By the 1830s the Comanche and their allies on the southern plains were killing about 280,000 bison a year, which was near the limit of sustainability for that region. Firearms and horses, along with a growing export market for buffalo robes and bison meat had resulted in larger and larger numbers of bison killed each year.
The common myth of the Native American living in “harmony” with his environment continues to be passed along… but to the extent that it is true, it is because of their lack of the technology to do anything else, not due to some spiritual connection to Gaia. They were basically stone-age people in most ways until the Europeans arrived.
I suppose the myth of the wise primitive will continue to be promulgated in movies and other media. But if I had to be captured by someone, I think I would prefer the US Army circa 2010 to the Apaches or Commanches circa 1700. After all, I also saw A Man Called Horse.
For the most part, primitive people were not/are not wise. Instead, they were/are typically racist, xenophobic and sexist, not to mention chauvinistic, jingoistic, and ageist. If you don’t know that, you need to get out more. Maybe read a book.
This is the ludicrous aspect of multiculturalism. The people that the multiculturalists would like to lionize are themselves the exact opposite of multiculturalists, by and large.
I do prefer buffalo to horse meat. Good ‘ole cornfed black angus beef is even better.
