Matt Walsh

Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon, quote, enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years.

A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.

It was what everyone had always done.

What the Sioux did to the Assiniboine, what the Crow did to the Blackfeet, a Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment, which is why Indians always fought to their last breath on the battlefields.

Often this led to a tit for tat, where one raid would lead to another ad infinitum.

Those early Indian raids were brutal and included tribes widely celebrated as advanced by modern historians.

Consider the case of the Iroquois, who were often presented as a sophisticated tribe, who, according to the documentarian Ken Burns, influenced America's founding fathers.

Somehow, strangely enough, Ken Burns forgot to tell us that when the Iroquois captured an enemy combatant, the combatant was not immediately executed, but instead tortured during the war party's return to camp.

They made it back to the village.

The hostages were given to the families of dead Iroquois soldiers, adopted by the families, and given the names of the dead Indians, and then, according to Keeley, quote, tortured to death over several days.

The prisoner was dead.

Some parts of his body were eaten, usually including his heart.

by his murderers.

These kinds of misrepresentations are completely pervasive.

The Mendocino Land Trust in California has land acknowledgements celebrating the Yuki and Kato tribes that once lived on land now occupied by rich, liberal Californians.

The land trust claims that these tribes were stewards of these lands for millennia, and we mourn the atrocities committed against them in the past while recognizing that these injustices continue today.

But they fail to mention that the two tribes hated each other.

When Yuki Indians discovered that katos were encroaching on their obsidian mine and plant-gathering territory, they retaliated by killing four kato girls.

Such violence was par for the course in pre-modern California.

At a 1,000-year-old excavation site in central California, 5% of human skeletons were embedded with arrowheads.