Matt Walsh

the biggest myths about the Native Americans.

This is the real history of the American Indians.

So we need to start with a central, critical, and load-bearing myth that supports all the others.

the widespread belief that the Indians were peaceful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Before we dismantle this claim, I have to warn you that to accurately convey the reality of intertribal and frontier warfare, I have to use real historical examples.

And many of these accounts contain graphic violence.

The Indians were brutal to settlers and to each other.

Some of these details may be unsuitable for young children, but they don't have any choice but to present them.

After all, this video is in pursuit of historical truth rather than comforting myth.

Since the end of World War II, American academics have pretended that pre-modern humans lived in a state of peace.

Academic dishonesty was so out of hand by the 1990s that, according to archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, the most widely used archaeological textbooks contained no mention of war before civilization.

Some of the biggest names in anthropology, archaeology, and history have gone out of their way to pretend that life before civilization was actually pretty great.

This might be because so many post-World War II academics deliberately ignored war.

In one case, academics were in such denial about pre-modern warfare that they pretended battle axes were a form of currency.

Now, you might be thinking, who cares about intellectuals?

Well, the myths they made ended up appearing downstream in our mass culture.

Around the same time that references to the Trail of Tears were rising, Hollywood started portraying Indians as peaceful and noble.

Dances with Wolves portrays, of all people, the Lakota Sioux as a peaceful, harmonious community living in balance with the land and the buffalo.

The Powhatan in Pocahontas were peace-loving environmentalists who sang about living in harmony with nature.