Here's Something You Don't Find Often

Still doing basic historical research for Sabers and Shamans.

Something that doesn't often get mentioned when you read recent treatises about the American Indian Native American is the outright hatred the plains Indians had for anyone whom wasn't in their tribe.

It's no joke that the word that most tribes use for themselves translates to human being, and the names we commonly use for these tribes are not this word.

Quite often the common name for a tribe translates to "those fucking prick subhumans," and it was given them by a different tribe.

One reason for a lot of the conflict is the inability of the various tribes to see anyone else as human, and therefore worthy of being dealt with honorably.

White men called Indians savages, but even a savage is still human.

It's also lost that the plains Indians are a territorial, warrior culture.  Pacifist societies whom never bother anyone until bothered first don't have a warrior culture.

The plains tribes were aggressive and expansionist.

So was America.

Conflict was going to happen, even if westward expansion had halted west of Minnesota/Iowa/Missouri.  The Indians would have tried coming east, eventually.

A key issue of this being territorial was a refusal to allow transit by outsiders.  For a good long time the only whites transiting the great plains were people trying to get to the Pacific Northwest.  Notice that the game "Oregon Trail" doesn't have a "stop and build a town" option?

It doesn't take too many times of a wagon train getting wiped out before "someone should do something" is intoned.

Wanna know something?  The first attempts were apparently successful and led to agreements to allow transit.

Guess how long that lasted and who broke the agreement first.

Hint, it wasn't the settlers, whose only interest was to (well) transit and be someplace else.

Warriors got to war and one does not war on oneself.

So the leaders who made the agreement were denigrated, the agreement discarded, and a war to repel the invaders organized.

"Someone should do something!"

"Hey, Chief, we mentioned that we'd be out here shootin' y'all if you wiped out any more people who'd managed to survive the dysentery, typhus, cholera and drowning."

This period also establishes, in the minds of American culture, that Indians are liars who cannot be trusted.  You know, because they lied and showed no trustworthiness.

LATER, when the cavalry was kicking their asses in earnest, the Indians did learn (for the most part) to take these agreements seriously.  This is also the period where The Bureau of Indian Affairs is at its most corrupt.  Much of what happens here is directly the result of the corruption in the government of The United States.

Lately we tend to focus on the evils of the white man without looking at the road that led to a place where such corruption could have such power over people.

There are reams of contemporary accounts who knew that what was being done was unjust, had valid solutions and were powerless to do anything because the government had divided things to facilitate the corruption.

Had either BIA or The Army been given sole responsibility over the issue, different outcomes would have happened.  The split responsibilities guaranteed conflict and buck-passing.  There was much "I've just created a problem, your job to fix it.  Bye!" going on.  It's so bad that one entity solving one of the problems they were responsible for would, almost to a certainty, create a new problem for the other entity.

It was a shit show for everyone.  We need to remember that.