Been reading.
A lot.
A decent hunk of the reading is wanting to get The Sioux right.
I can tell, right now, that even if I sell millions of copies I will not be nominated for a Hugo if I'm honest about them.
The truth about any people is rarely politically correct and the revision to create a "noble savage," uninvolved in their fate and completely innocent in the conflict with the expanding USA is simply bullshit.
The revisions are aided by it being true that whites were pressing west and settling wherever they damn well pleased and, for the most part, their claim to the land they squatted on being backed by the US government.
The events cited most about the evils of whites come after literally years and years of trying to find some sort of peaceful settlement.
Neither side seemed to be capable of keeping their word.
It seems one-sided on the deceit front because the outcome was very one-sided.
A stone-age culture does not win against an industrialized one unless the industrialized culture stops itself for some reason.
I noticed that the revisionists don't mention how The Sioux stole a huge hunk of their territory from the Kiowa and Cheyenne.
They don't seem to know about how common slavery was among the plains Indians.
But the giant elephantine gorilla in the room that's most important for really understanding the why of how this all went was neither culture possessed the concept of cultural relativity.
They both viewed the world through their own lenses of right and wrong and that there could be a different view from their own was not rejected because it couldn't even be conceived of.
Revisionism is applying cultural relativism to the histories and has chosen a bad-guy while ignoring that there's enough blame to go around for everyone.
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It has occurred to me that the problem on both sides was, to borrow a phrase, that "they couldn't control their young men." The various Indian tribes couldn't control theirs, and the whites couldn't stop theirs from going off where they weren't supposed to go and stirring up trouble.
ReplyDeleteOn the Sioux, Pawnee and Cheyenne side the word is "didn't" not "couldn't".
DeleteA mistake that both sides shared was the belief the "Head Chief" was able to speak for everyone in the Balkanized mess that was the entirety of a Tribal Nation.
There was often confusion on the Indian side that they were being held to agreements that they didn't personally sign off on.
This also adds to the conflict when white settlers checked with the Indians whom "controlled" the area they were settling and thought they had permission from the tribe, only to find out that the area was not actually controlled by any single group.