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.
July 30th, 2010 7:52 am
I hope you’re not blaming the Indians for our constant labeling of them.
Labeling, multiculturalism, xenophobic, harmony with the environment, mass slaughter, Indian reservations, firearms, Native Americans, Indians, wise old Indians, books, movies, whiskey, technology, primitive technology, stone-age, stone-age romanticism: Indians didn’t invent those words. If you ever had the chance to “get out much” and live with them for a few years without studying them, you’d realize Indians don’t like to read books about themselves. And like most people, they don’t appreciate being studied, pitied, blamed, written about, educated about, argued about, felt guilty about, and labeled.
Nobody will actually know how many bison the whites killed and the Indians killed. It happened a long time ago. They didn’t keep an accurate count then. They didn’t care about that. Buffalo was about food and insulation.
July 30th, 2010 8:50 am
Actually, my target in the post, as I guess was not clear to you, is multiculturalists.
I don’t think native Americans were better, or worse, than any other people. I am tired of the cliches about primitives (of any continent, color or origin) being used by modern Leftists and “multiculturalists” to bash capitalism, freedom, Christianity, technology, patriotism, and so on. I am fully aware that the PR campaign to do this did not originate with native Americans or Australian aboriginals or Maori tribesman or the Kalahari bush people or the Samoans or the Polynesians, though it’s pretty clear that some of them have been only too happy to join in once they realized it could have benefits for them. Which I completely understand… like I said, it’s the multiculturalist Left that is the real problem, whose main agenda is to appear to bash modernity, while using its fruits (technology/media/unified political systems) to exercise political control over people.
I suspect that like most people, native Americans wanted then, and want now, to simply be left alone to live their lives.
July 30th, 2010 9:35 am
Thank you. Although the difference between primitive-ism (originalism) and modernism depends on your perspective. I don’t believe the two terms are antonyms or opposites.