THE GREAT INDIAN WARS - 1540-1890 : BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICAN HISTORY : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

THE GREAT INDIAN WARS - 1540-1890 : BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICAN HISTORY :  ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

This documentary film covers a few hundred years of Indian (Native American) and American history, beginning with Francisco Vazques de Coronado and his expedition to the Great Plains, and includes some of the great battles such as Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the Battle of Wounded Knee.   It includes the Buffalo Cowboys too.  Perhaps most interesting to me was the way various tribes became experts at riding and using the horse for warfare in the years after the Spanish brought some to the America's, which is actually late when it comes to the occupation of the continent. There is a lot of what looks like old film footage, but I was unable to tell how much of this black and white film was truly historical or how much had been filmed for movies.  Covered are the heros of battles but ultimately the defeat of the Indians.

The film gave me a deeper understanding than I had of the progression from east to west, as well as an understanding that certain tribes had themselves moved from one place in the country to another, before the expansionists pushed them elsewhere. 

As a genealogist I've learned more about history from researching around the time and place that ancestors lived.  I've found documents that don't always agree with the official story, such as places where the big slave holder was a Native American, and I think the most important question when doing Native American research is WHAT TRIBE!

Today there is a lot of controversy over who is or isn't qualified to be part of a tribe.

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CANNIBALISM HEADHUNTING and HUMAN SACRIFICE IN NORTH AMERICA by GEORGE FRANKLIN FELDMAN : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

CANNIBALISM  HEADHUNTING and HUMAN SACRIFICE IN NORTH AMERICA by GEORGE FRANKLIN FELDMAN

GEORGE FRANKLIN FELDMAN's book is "a vivid account of the barbaric practices of both native Americans and European explorers and colonists."

At a time when New Age Spirituality seems to have taken on an interpretive view of Native American beliefs, it seems a relief to get back to historical reality, and that is that many Native American tribes practiced cannibalism, headhunting, and human sacrifice, often in war, sometimes in religious ritual. Covered are the Taensa and Natchez, the Calusa and Timucua, the Skidi Pawnee (they sacrificed 13 year old girls to their Morning Star god), The Iroquois, The Chippewa, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Yuki and Their Neighbors in California (where they didn't cannibalize but thought their enemies did), the Comanche, the Apache (Fierce enough to keep the Mexicans and the Spanish away for 300 years), and White Scalp Hunters.


The evidence is not just in the early explorer's diary, or anthropological study - though that's included, but in the latest in testing the physical evidence or bones, skulls, and most interestingly, human excrement which shows that human beings were eating human beings. While in some places and times this might have been the result of famine and drought, we learn that tribes warred with tribes, taking prisoners, slaves, and torturing captives before killing them and that taking scalps as trophies escalated when prizes for scalps were offered. Black hair being black hair, many humans innocent to various wars, died when their scalp was taken. So much for that New Agey idea that Native American paganism was essentially peace driven or that "Indians" had a sense that the earth was to be shared, rather than fought over for resources.


C 2008 by the author

The publisher is Alan C. Hood and Company Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

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All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

REVIEW of OUR SAVAGE NEIGHBORS by PETER SILVER : ANCESTRY WORSHIP BOOK REVIEW

OUR SAVAGE NEIGHBORS
How Indian War Transformed Early America
C 2008 Peter Silver
WW. Norton and Co Publishers

When is the last time you read about Colonialist's being scalped and terrorized by Native Americans as a form of terrorism, or suspicion of the new German-speaking immigrants, the Palatines, being thought of as crude by the Philadelphia establishment?

How about the dread of a Catholic-Indian conspiracy?

Peter Silver reintroduces these subjects without concern of how history collides with some present-day politically correct assumptions about imperialism. The Colonial world is rife with inter-tribal and inter-ethnic immigrant conflicts, some more visceral than others.

In the cities this is merely discomfort. In the wilderness - the frontier that is pushed west - the fear is palatable. Thus, the title, Our Savage Neighbors, is just right, for a book that might get booed at major American Universities where just the opposite stereotype of Native Americans is authorized.

Now that political correctness requires rewriting history, we Americans tend to think of all Native Americans as peaceful, spiritual (New Agey), and passive victims (with Casino Rights), maybe it's time to read OUR SAVAGE NEIGHBORS and learn again about the real terror of Indian War.

Scalpings and the slaughter of innocents kept European cultured colonials used to different Rules of War, outraged and terrified, as if the MANSON FAMILY struck on a daily basis. (Some Indian tribes were known to enjoy cutting open pregnant women and ripping their babes out of the womb.) And so much for the prevailing notion that Indians didn't "own" land but shared it like a commune. They sure fought for their turf. And the gun proved to be the great equalizer.

Heavily referenced, this book's strength lies in its focus on the Early America of the Mid-Atlantic region and especially of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Territories, places where the English were followed by the Irish of Scotland (Scots Irish) and the German Palantines, who came into Philadelphia and moved - bit by bit - west, pushing the borders. An Indian raid that left mutilated bodies - scalped and limbs cut off - and farmers fled their homesteads, leaving crops to rot, for the relative safety of the cities, where they stayed for months. They were more afraid of the condition their bodies might be found in, of cut off limbs and rotting rather than being given a Christian burial, than death itself.

This book also illuminates the union of the French and the Indians against the British at Fort Pitt and surrounds, as well as the role of the Quakers and Moravians, who were not trusted for their friendliness to the Indians. It reveals the snobbery of those who arrived to the Colonies earlier, against the Scots-Irish and Palantine Germans, who waited in sordid conditions and disease hoping someone would buy their contract for servitude.

A truly exciting read!

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