Facts Trump Fiction

For almost 200 years literature, plays and in modern times, TV and radio have created a mythos of the noble American Indian being cruelly oppressed and mistreated by the White Man. This revisionism began in the early 1800s in books and theatre and continues to this day. One need only listen to NPR awhile to hear this blather in real time. What all this re-writing lacks is any link to original sources or facts. Simply put, most of this mythos is sheer fiction.

Reading that first sentence stating the mythos reveals one internal contradiction in it. How could the White Man "mistreat" the American Indians ? They are people and had a culture and controlled the continent. The answer was given in my blog post of Columbus Day, October 12, 2009: The American Indian culture and technology was very, very primitive compared to the western European culture and technology. There was no equality of ability or capability or even of simple social organization at all.

Last week's Book of the Week (March 8 - Changing Military Patterns of the Great Plains Indians by Frank Raymond Secoy) provided a large amount of first hand information gutting the mythos to shreds. Before 1500, the American Indians had no horses and no metal tools. That means they had to walk everywhere and had no tomahawks, iron arrow points and no guns. This is irrefutable. The reality of the diffusion of the horse and guns meant that neither were present in the Great Plains in significant quantities until beginning around 1650 and the full diffusion was not complete until about 1800.

Before the horse and gun, Indian warfare used clubs and lances with hardened wooden or stone points, and bows with stone tipped arrows. The bows had little penetration power. "Armor" was folded hides to create layers or layers of hides held by glue. Sand-glue coatings gave some external hardness. With six or so layers, an arrow or lance could not penetrate. Hide shields were used and could ward off arrows.

The reality is that an Egyptian army with bronze weapons could have routed any Indian force on the Great Plains. A force of Greeks under anyone like Alexander the Great could have created a huge empire. Genghis Khan could have replicated his empire in the New World with ease. American Indian technology was just so primitive compared to anything in Europe or the Near East for 4,000 years.

The horse arrived via the Spanish and local breeding populations were large enough in the northern New Mexico area around commencing around 1650. What happened ? The Apache developed a Post Horse, Pre-Gun culture and immediately used the technical superiority to attack, kill and enslave neighboring tribes. This was not the White Man - this was the noble Indian, simply acting as people have done for millenia. The Apache simply behaved like the Mongols, Turks and other steppe peoples.

What else ? The Shoshone to the north obtained horses and did the same thing, expanding onto the Great Plains from the west. How did they obtain the horse ? By selling Indian captives as slaves to the Spanish. The "noble" American Indian was a slave merchant.

The gun arrived to the Great Plains from a long trading line stretching back to France and England: furs - primarily beaver - were traded for metal axes (tomahawks), iron pots and guns. The Spanish forbade selling guns to Indians. The French and English would sell them, hence the gun diffused from a completely different direction from the horse.

Tribes with access to guns pushed out and massacred tribes without guns. The "noble" Indian did that themselves. Tribal cultures were rather different from the woodlands to the plains. Plains Indians like the Sioux were shocked by the cruelty they saw in the woodlands Indians as those Indian mistreated, oppressed and stole their lands: burning prisoners cruelly and cannibalism was unknown to them. Those were standard practiced of the "noble" woodland Indians of the Northeast (i. e., east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio).

I will not reproduce the first hand accounts of Indian cannibalism - they are sickening. The book provides such with documented quotes of persons who saw it.

The early Sioux had an unusual custom: they would weep when greeting strangers. This was misinterpreted by new arrivals such as the Ottawa and Huron, who thought they could easily defeat such "women". Eventually the Sioux acquired guns by training pemmican and other foods to fur traders who needed concentrated, high caloric foods for long journeys into the Canadian fur zones. Then the woodland Indian found out how wrong they were. And with guns, the Sioux were able to encroach onto the northern plains. Beginning around 1775 the Sioux acquired horses and could expand onto the entire Great Plains, pushing out indigenious tribes that depended partially on horticulture for food.

In the south the arrival of guns enabled oppressed tribes to push the Apache back. The Apache resorted to stealing horses and guns from the Spanish. This was helped by the Mexican revolution that ended in 1821 and which left a vaccuum of power in the entire Southwest.

[Aside: to those who hear hispanic baloney about how the US stole the southwest, one can note the Mexicans got independence just 14 years before Texas won its own independence. Mexico had no effective authority over that entire area, as the accounts of Apache successes when Spain's power crumbled proves.]

Over the decades, the horse and gun became available to the entire Great Plains principally from American traders from St. Louis or New Orleans. The Hollywood image of the Plains Indian culture is true, BUT that culture was a new one, being in existence only about 100 years or less. And it derived from and was entirely dependent on trade with the White Man. The entire American Indian mythos is built on sand.

This information is all available in books. TV and the Internet do a lousy job in compiling a complete or true account. One need the facts and sources records that books can provide. Last week's Book of the Week in 100 pages trumps hours upon hours of NPR, TV, and fiction accounts in plays, literature and theatre.

Read books.

Markets

Futures are down for now. I see no significant news. I am holding my puts. On further moves up, Krypto will have sell orders.

Word of the Day

"Bricolage" - noun [?? perhaps $10] a loan word from French that is now in some English dictionaries. It's NOT in the OED or any of my normal paper dictionaries. This word came to me from Woodie, one of the Epicurean campers, who saw it in "Green Days in Brunei", a book by Bruce Sterling (fiction).

Here is the French meaning for "le bricolage" : do-it-yourself; makeshift repair or job; odd jobs. In French, le bricoleur is the handyman, or a do-it-yourselfer.

Dictionary.com gives this for English now: (A) 1.a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things; 2. (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources; 3. (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork; 4. the use of multiple, diverse research methods. OR (B) Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available: "Even the decor is a bricolage, a mix of this and that" (Los Angeles Times).

The English meanings seems to use more of the sense of bric-a-brac than the original French.

From all this, I presume it's a recent adoption in English from the French and its meaning is not yet stable.

Sentence: Obama annouced a new education initiative. He now seems to be the bricoleur trying to perform some emergency bricolage with the pieces of his crumbling presidency.