Hope of Israel Ministries (Ecclesia of YEHOVAH):

The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived

by HOIM Staff

Long before European settlers arrived, America was already a battlefield. From the icy Arctic to the jungles of Central America, tribes fought for survival, honor, and the will of the gods. There's a mythology about the native Americans, that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature -- it's easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

Long before Columbus, many historians agree that Native American tribes committed atrocities against each other, thirsting for power and land and killing anyone that stood in the way long before any European settler set foot on the continent. Consider the words of Columbus in his journal. Upon arriving at San Salvador, Columbus wrote: “I saw some with scars of wounds upon their bodies…that there came people from the other islands in the neighborhood who endeavored to make prisoners of them, and they defended themselves.”

With the indoctrination that routinely occurs in our schools, even predating such contemporary silliness as critical race theory, our education system seldom touches on this darker side of Native American history. Yet numerous scholars have documented their brutality against one another. Harvard scholar Steven Pinker wrote that indigenous societies were “far more violent than our own.” In War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, anthropologist Lawrence Keeley wrote, “the dogs of war were seldom on a leash” among Native American societies.

Renowned historian Bernard Bailyn described pre-Columbian America as “not a terribly peaceful world. They were always involved in warfare.” Moreover, Bailyn describes how Native Americans sought to control and exploit Europeans for their own gain and self-interest.

“The Indians had the view they wanted to use [the Europeans],” he writes. “They wanted the English there on the fringe so they would have the benefit of their treasure, their goods, even their advanced weapons. They wanted that, but under their control.”

In other words, many Native Americans viewed European settlers as useful in their broader fight to kill and enslave other Native Americans.

Consider the Chippewa. In what could be dubbed the original “trail of tears,” they forced the Sioux from their land in present-day Minnesota. In turn, the Sioux massacred the Omaha, the Kiowa, and the Pawnee, lusting for their resources and territory.

Consider the Iroquois. They had a reputation for violence among Europeans from the beginning of their mutual contacts. Their name comes from a term meaning “killer people” in the pidgin Basque jargon used around the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the late sixteenth century. Archaeology and oral traditions both provide clear evidence that this reputation was not one that began with European contact but was deeply rooted in the Iroquois’ relations with other American Indian nations of the Northeast.

By the 1640s, to obtain furs, the Iroquois were raiding far to the north to intercept Algonquian and Montagnais hunters as they were carrying their catch to market, as well as raiding the villages of their neighbors -- Hurons, Eries, Neutrals, Petuns, and Susquehannocks -- to drive them out and win their hunting territories. Within a few years, the Iroquois were raiding into Ohio and as far west as Illinois. The scale of these attacks, especially the number of deaths produced, eclipsed that of traditional warfare. This intensified warfare cost more lives, necessitating more raids for captives. The Huron Confederacy and the Erie, Neutral, and Petun nations were destroyed, and entire villages of the defeated were adopted as Iroquois.

A prisoner tortured and burned by the Iroquois was dedicated to Aireskoi, their god of war, and great care was taken to keep the prisoner alive through the night-long burning with firebrands so that he might be taken outdoors at dawn and placed on a special raised platform. When the first sliver of the sun appeared, the charred but still living victim was killed by a blow. Then the body was butchered and boiled in a kettle, and the flesh was shared in a community-wide feast.

Consider the Californian Natives. In the popular imagination and in scholarly treatments, California Indians are frequently depicted as peaceable peoples, living in harmony with each other and the environment at the advent of European contact. This common perception is at variance with both the written record of contemporary Spanish observers and direct testimony of elderly California Indians interviewed by ethnographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inter-village raids, ritualized battles, larger-scale hostilities among opposing allied groups, and even territorial conquest were all part of the spectrum of enmity relations in Native California.

Overlooked and under-reported for much of the latter half of 20th century, violence among California natives has been a growing focus of archaeological research in California and beyond in the last two decades. A certain de-emphasis on inter-group conflict and warfare was a hallmark of many anthropological studies from the 1960s through 1980s as researchers sought consciously or unconsciously to minimize the occurrence of ecological and/or social problems in pre-industrial societies.

Following a ground-breaking study of the bio-archaeology of violence in small-scale indigenous societies, the trend to overlook violence in California was countered most decisively in the 1990s by the research of Lambert and Walker who examined skeletal remains and burial records from the ethnographic Chumash area of southern California collected between the 1920s and 1960s. Lambert tabulated a series of traits indicative of violence (forearm parry fractures, cranial injuries, and projectile injuries) from 1774 skeletons dating from ca. 5500 cal B.C. to post-European contact, and ordered her findings chronologically using field notes, earlier publications, and radiocarbon dates. With this large sample and a rigorous, multi-faceted analysis, Lambert documented a peak in violence during the Late Middle Period (ca. cal A.D. 580–1380) on the southern coast, and established unequivocally that California was not violence-free prior to the arrival of Europeans.

The most abundant forms of violence in central California were sharp force/projectile trauma, blunt force craniofacial trauma, and trophy-taking/dismemberment. Evidence of violence is concentrated in two areas: (1) those with the highest ethnographic population densities (Sacramento River), and (2) the southern San Francisco Bay area.

There, as elsewhere in North America, no evidence exists to suggest that American Indians lived in peaceful harmony.

Consider the Aztecs. Schools teach the story of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes conquering the Aztecs, but they omit the two centuries of Aztec ruthlessness that preceded this and convinced many other tribes to fight alongside Cortes. The Aztecs had an enormous empire with a long history of raping women, pillaging, and enslaving neighboring tribes to build their empire. Historical accounts of the Aztecs alone reveal an “industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world.” They punished homosexuality with the death penalty and habitually murdered women.

Some Indigenous Peoples’ Day celebrations are even honoring the Aztecs, even though they make the Spanish look like genuine humanitarians. Such is the level of historical ignorance involved here.

Consider the Plains' Indians. Intertribal warfare was intense throughout the Great Plains during the 1700s and 1800s, and archeological data indicate that warfare was present prior to this time. Human skeletons from as early as the Woodland Period (250 B.C. to A.D. 900) show occasional marks of violence, but conflict intensified during and after the thirteenth century, by which time farmers were well established in the Plains. After 1250, villages were often destroyed by fire, and human skeletons regularly show marks of violence, scalping, and other mutilations. Warfare was most intense along the Missouri River in the present-day Dakotas, where ancestors of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras were at war with each other, and towns inhabited by as many as 1,000 people were often fortified with ditch and palisade defenses. Excavations at the Crow Creek site, an ancestral Arikara town dated to 1325, revealed the bodies of 486 people -- men, women, and children, essentially the town's entire population -- in a mass grave. These individuals had been scalped and dismembered. Violence continued from the 1500s through the late 1800s.

This study adds to a growing body of research that supports the notion that violence was an important part of the local inhabitants' ideology and an adaptive strategy for securing resources and maintaining group solidarity. The results indicate a great deal of variation in violence among the groups over time but in general, there were many periods of conflict in this region long before Euro-American contact.

These stories aren’t taught in history classes. They are not offered as a comparison when discussing Columbus or any other European explorer. They are swept under the rug so that the false narrative that Native Americans were a peaceful group, living off the Earth and unnecessarily attacked by the white man and exterminated. And while there are elements of truth to this, it is important to know that Native Americans were doing the same thing to one another.

The narrative promoted in schools that Native Americans were a peaceful society before the appearance of Europeans is a fanciful myth.

The Evidence of Mesa Verde

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent -- on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

"If we're identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to zero in 30 years.

From the days they first arrived in the Southwest in the 1800s, most anthropologists and archaeologists have downplayed evidence of violent conflict among native Americans.

"Archaeologists with one or two exceptions have not tried to develop an objective metric of levels of violence through time," said Kohler. "They've looked at a mix of various things like burned structures, defensive site locations and so forth, but it's very difficult to distill an estimate of levels of violence from such things. We've concentrated on one thing, and that is trauma, especially to the head and portions of the arms. That's allowed us to look at levels of violence through time in a comparative way."

It wasn't just violent deaths that poke holes in the harmony with the land and each other myth. A paper in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the Southwest also had a baby boom between 500 and 1300 that likely exceeded any population spurt on earth today. The northern Rio Grande also experienced population booms but the central Mesa Verde got more violent while the northern Rio Grande was less so.

Kohler has conjectures on why. Social structures among people in the northern Rio Grande changed so that they identified less with their kin and more with the larger pueblo and specific organizations that span many pueblos, such as medicine societies. The Rio Grande also had more commercial exchanges where craft specialists provided people both in the pueblo, and outsiders, specific things they needed, such as obsidian arrow points.

But in the central Mesa Verde, there was less specialization.

"When you don't have specialization in societies, there's a sense in which everybody is a competitor because everybody is doing the same thing," said Kohler. But with specialization, people are more dependent on each other and more reluctant to do harm.

If that sounds like rationalization based on Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, it is.

"Pinker thought that what he called 'gentle commerce' was very important in the pacification of the world over the last 5,000 years," said Kohler. "That seems to work pretty well in our record as well."

The episode of conflict in Southwest Colorado seems to have begun when people in the Chaco culture, halfway between central Mesa Verde and northern Rio Grande, attempted to spread into Southwest Colorado.

From 1080 to 1130, the Chaco-influenced people in Southwest Colorado did well. In the mid-1100s, there was a severe drought and the core of Chaco culture fell apart. Much of the area around Chaco lost population, and in 1160, violence in the central Mesa Verde peaked. Slightly more than a century later, everyone left that area, too.

"In the Mesa Verde there could be a haves-versus-have-nots dynamic towards the very end," said Kohler. "The people who stayed the longest were probably the people who were located in the very best spots. But those pueblos too were likely losing population. And it might have been the older folks who stuck around, who weren't so anxious to move as the young folks who thought, 'We could make a better living elsewhere.'" Older, or with too few people to marshal a good defense, the remaining people in the Mesa Verde pueblos were particularly vulnerable to raids.

At least two of the last-surviving large pueblos in the central Mesa Verde were attacked as the region was being abandoned. Some of their inhabitants probably made it out alive, but, says Kohler, "Many did not."

Evidence of Cannibalism

According to Marvin Harris, "The Iroquois are well known for their incessant warfare and their training of males to be immune to pain. They are also well known for their merciless treatment of prisoners of war. Captives were forced to run a gauntlet, their fingernails were pulled out and their limbs hacked off, and they were finally decapitated or roasted alive at the stake – after which their remains were consumed in cannibalistic feasts" (Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures, Glasgow, 1978, p. 69).

Garry Hogg, in his book Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, notes the following:

"The Kwakiutl Indians [of the north-western United States and Canada] have asserted, when interrogated, that the practice of cannibalism only became general about a hundred years ago. White men who traveled in their territory were able to witness many of their ceremonial dances, and two of them, Hunt and Moffat, brought back first-hand information about their customs. They say that sometimes slaves were killed for the benefit of Hamatsas [the cannibal members of the Kwakiutl], and that at other times the Hamatsas contented themselves with snatching mouthfuls of flesh from their own tribesmen -- usually from the chest and upper arms of well-fleshed individuals.

"They vouch for an example of ritual cannibalism which took place near Fort Rupert. A Kwakiutl shot and wounded a slave, who ran away and collapsed on the beach at the water’s edge. He was pursued by the tribesmen, including a group of the ‘Bear Dancers’ and Hamatsas. The slave’s body was cut to pieces with knives while the Hamatsas squatted in a circle round them crying out their terrible cry: ‘Hap! Hap! Hap! Hap!’

"Helpless to intervene, Moffat and Hunt watched the Bear Dancers snatch up the flesh, warm and quivering, and growling like the Grizzly they represented, offer it to the Hamatsas in order of seniority.

"The wife of the dead slave was at the time in Fort Rupert, and, like Hunt and Moffat, witnessed the slaughter of her husband, helpless to avert it. But she had a weapon that the white men did not possess: she could throw a curse over the Hamatsas.

"‘I will give you five years to live,’ she shrieked at them from the walls of Fort Rupert. ‘The Spirit of your Dancing is strong, but my spirit is stronger still. You have killed my husband with knives; I shall kill you with the point of my tongue.’

"Within five years of this episode, the white men report, every member of the tribe who had taken part in the killing of this slave was dead. In memory of the grim episode, a rock on the beach where the ritual feast took place was carved into the likeness of the Baxbakualanuxsiwae mask.

"The tradition died hard. A Hamatsa demanded that another slave -- this time a female -- should dance for him. She stood a moment looking at him in terror, and said: ‘I will dance. But do not get hungry. Do not eat me!’ She had hardly finished speaking when her master, a fellow member of the tribe, split her skull open with an axe, and the Hamatsa thereupon began to eat her flesh. This actual Hamatsa was still alive towards the end of the nineteenth century, and on interrogation remarked, among other things, that it is very much harder to consume fresh human flesh than the dried flesh of corpses that have been left to mummify in the trees and then brought down to appease the Hamatsa’s hunger. He also said that it was common practice to swallow hot water after a mouthful of flesh taken from a living body, as it was believed that this would cause the inflammation of the wound made by the teeth. All cannibal tribes, of course, file their teeth to sharp points in order to deal more effectively with their food.

"There was a variant of the practice whereby the returning Hamatsa ran riot among the members of his tribe, biting flesh from them. Sometimes he brought a corpse with him -- that of a slave or some victim captured and killed for the purpose. He ate part of this corpse after his ceremonial dance was completed, but because this was the first corpse to be devoured by him since his initiation, it was prepared with extra elaborate care.

"One of the most important details was the removal of the skin at the wrists and ankles, for the Kwakiutls believed that to eat of either hand or foot would result in almost immediate death. This is one of the many examples of the divergences of custom in this respect; to the Kwakiutls, hands and feet were tabu; but among the Mangeromas of the Amazon jungles, whose customs we shall be examining in due course, the palms of the hands, and the soles of the feet, were looked upon as the greatest delicacies, and were reserved for those of the tribe who for one reason or another demanded priority.

"Most recently, that is to say at the very end of the nineteenth century, it seems that the barbarous practices among the Kwakiutls had become modified to a very great extent: the ceremonial was retained, but symbolism played a larger and larger part in the ceremonial, replacing the physical act. For example, the late-nineteenth-century Hamatsa did not necessarily bite a mouthful of flesh from the chest or the arm. Instead, he caught a piece of skin between his teeth and sucked at it hard, to extract the taste of blood. Then, with a sharp knife, he would snip off a piece of skin and pretend to swallow it. However, instead of swallowing it in fact, he put it into his hair behind his ear, to lie there until the ceremonial dancing was over. Then it was returned to the owner, who was thus assured that a piece of his own skin would not eventually be used to his harm in some piece of witchcraft.

"It was, as it were, the beginning of the end. From the horrors of that house on the mountainside in which Baxbakualanuxsiwae and his hideous attendants practised their fiendish rites, the customs of the Kwakiutls have been refined to a ritual dance with gestures hardly more dangerous than mime" (pp. 70-72).

It's no secret that prehistoric Indians in the Southwest killed, butchered, and cooked their enemies. But now a team has evidence for what many have suspected. A dried hunk of human excrement, or coprolite, proves that the Anasazi ate human bodies as well. The 850-year-old coprolite comes from a site in southwestern Colorado. The Four Corners area (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet) contains a number of sites offering strong evidence of cannibalism: human bones disarticulated, cut, burned, and cast about in exactly the same fashion as the bones of animals known to have been used for food. Investigating this small settlement of three half-buried "pit houses," scientists found two that contained mutilated remains of seven men, women, and adolescents -- apparently massacre victims whose bodies were butchered. The coprolite was found in a fire pit in the third pit house.

An article by Thomas H. Maugh II in the September 7, 2000 Los Angles Times notes that

"The most compelling evidence yet that some Native Americans practiced cannibalism has been discovered by researchers studying a small Anasazi settlement in southwestern Colorado that was mysteriously abandoned about AD 1150.

"As many as 40 sites scattered across the Southwest contain human bones that show distinctive evidence of having been butchered and cooked -- -signs consistent with cannibalism.

"Until now, however, most archeologists have shied away from conceding that the evidence proves cannibalism -- favoring alternative explanations for the butchering, such as ritual burial or the execution of people believed to be witches."

Maugh goes on to say:

"The new, conclusive evidence comes from preserved pieces of human excrement found at the site. The pieces contain human proteins that could be present only if the subjects had eaten human flesh, the researchers said.

"Researchers believe that if cannibalism has been definitively proved at this one Southwestern site, it is overwhelmingly likely that the practice was common enough to have taken place at the other sites where butchered bones have been found.

"....The report in today’s issue of the journal Nature seems sure to heap kindling on a controversy that has been simmering for many years, in part because it contradicts the view of Native Americans as spiritual and peace-loving that many have favored."

Most rumors of the presence of flesh eaters amongst the people derive from the people themselves. Tales of Natives consuming the bodies of their enemies are recounted by the elders leaving their descendants questioning whether or not they are fiction. The Mohawk, a tribe located in the region of New York, is today debating whether its ancestors were cannibals. The word Mohawk in their Algonquian dialect directly translates to “flesh eater” -- which emphasizes that they were most likely guilty of cannibalism. The superstition about their ancestors is that they ruthlessly tortured their prisoners and even from time to time, ate them. Experts strongly believe that most of these rumored cannibalistic tribes did indeed practice some manner of the phenomenon.

The Skidee Pawnee migrated from the Red River valley to Nebraska circa 1400. They were part of the Caddoan culture. The Caddoans believed they had to sacrifice a young woman to the morning star or their corn crop would fail. Although they would sacrifice one of their own if necessary, they preferred to sacrifice a captured slave. When the Skidee Pawnee raided a village, they’d kill all of the adults. They’d carry the small children back with them to serve as food on the return journey, and they’d keep the older children as slaves, some of whom were used for the sacrifice to the morning star. The slaves were treated well, and these ritual sacrifices were made quick and painless -- the victim probably even thought they were about to be honored not killed. But captives meant to be eaten were severely tortured as the following account by Andre Penicaut illustrates:

“All the men and women in the village assemble around the flames where these poor fainting persons are tied. Each family lights its fire before which they place a pot full of hot water, and, when the sun has arisen, four of the oldest savages, each one with a knife in his hand, make incisions in the arms, thighs, and lower legs of the ones hung up whose blood runs from their bodies to the extremities of their feet where four old men receive it in vessels.

"They carry this blood to two other old men whose duty it is to have it cooked in kettles, and when the blood is cooked, they give it to their women and children to eat. After they have consumed the blood, the two dead men are detached from the frame and placed on a table where they are cut up. The pieces are distributed to the entire assembly of the village, and each family cooks some of it in its pot. While the meat is being cooked they begin to dance. Then they return to their places, take the meat from the pots, and eat it.”

Before battles the Iroquois always pledged to the Sun God that they would eat their enemies. The French Jesuit priests witnessed Iroquois eating captives. The Iroquois tortured and ate the patron saint of Canada, Father Jean de Breboeuf. They baptized him with boiling water, held fire-heated axes to his skin, cut off his tongue to stop him from praying, scalped him, and removed his still beating heart. They drank his blood before they chopped him up and distributed his meat to be eaten.

The Tonkaway lived on a narrow strip of land in south Texas between the Karankawa and the Comanche. Besides cannibalism, the Tonkaway are infamous for infanticide. All female babies were thrown to the dogs to prevent inbreeding. Apparently, all wives were captured from other tribes. If a parent had a bad dream, they killed the male babies too. It’s frightening to contemplate this irrational belief system. The Comanches especially hated the Tonkaway because the latter would eat captured Comanche braves. The Comanches had no problem with the brutal torture to death of prisoners, but not cannibalism.

Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and cartographer known as the "Father of New France," who founded Quebec City in 1608, described Montagnais, Algonquin and Huron treatment of an Iroquois prisoner in 1609:

"Our Indians kindled a fire, and when it was well lighted, each took a brand and burned this poor wretch a little at a time in order to make him suffer the greater torment. Sometimes they would leave off, throwing water on his back. Then they tore out his nails and applied fire to the ends of his fingers and to his membrum virile. Afterwards they scalped him and caused a certain kind of gum to drip very hot upon the crown of his head. Then they pierced his arms near the wrists and with sticks pulled and tore out his sinews by main force, and when they saw they could not get them out, they cut them off. When they saw I was not pleased, they called me back and told me to give him a shot with the arquebus. I did so....When he was dead...they opened his body and threw his bowels into the lake. Afterwards they cut off his head, arms and legs, which they scattered about; but they kept the scalp....They did another awful thing, which was to cut his heart into several pieces and give it to a brother of the dead man to eat and to others of his companions who were prisoners."

A year later Champlain saw an Iroquois corpse "cut into quarters, to be eaten." At this same time he noted that some Iroquois prisoners "were reserved to be put to death at the hands of the wives and daughters of these [Algonquins and Montagnais], who in this matter show themselves no less inhuman than the men; in fact they greatly surpass the men in cruelty; for by their cunning they invent more cruel torments, and take delight in them"

Pekka Hamalainen’s Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, published in New Haven, Connecticut by the Yale University Press in 2019 contains in its pages a focus on the cannibalism practices of certain native tribes; In particular, the tribes in the east and mid-western regions in the U.S. beginning in the 1600s.

In the first chapter titled “A Place in the World,” there is a section titled “They Have Eaten Me To The Bone.” In this section, Hamalainen describes in a grim manner how the Wyandot tribe in 1670, convinced another tribe (Sinagos) to hand captured Sioux over to them. Once the Sioux were given to them, the Wyandot, “…boiled and ate them” (page 34).

Later in the same section titled, “They Have Eaten Me To The Bone”, Hamalainen describes how the Sioux, who were not cannibalistic, captured Singo, a “brutal slaver and chief of the Odawas (tribe)” who were close allies of the Wyandots (both tribes being cannibalistic), and made him eat his own flesh. They told him that “he had eaten so much human flesh and shown himself so greedy for it, he might now…eat his own.” The Sioux sent one of Sinagos’s slaves back so that “he might faithfully report what justice that had been administered” to one who was cannibalistic (page 35).

In 1672, Hamalainen describes how the Odawas tried to attack the Sioux, “but the Sioux quickly regrouped and “slew them (Odawas) in great numbers, for their terror was so overwhelming that in their flight they (Odawas) had thrown away their weapons”; “the disorder among them (Odawas) was so great that they ate one another” (page 36). This incident of cannibalism was described by a French explorer named Nicolas Perrot who wrote about the upper Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes region.

In the chapter “Facing West,” Hamalainen describes another grisly incident in 1752, where men from the Odawas, Ojibwes, Potawatomis, and the French, attacked a Miami tribal village near the Ohio Valley in the Mid-West. The leader Memeskia, known as La Demoisell by the French, who had sheltered British traders, was killed. But, not just killed, in Hamalainen’s disturbing detailed description, “Memeskia and three traders were dragged outside. The Odawas, Ojibes, Potawatamis killed one of the traders, cut out his heart, and ate it…they boiled and ate Memeskia in front of his relatives” (page 79).

Native Americans and Slavery

Many Native-American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.

The Haida and Tlingit, who lived along Alaska's southeast coast, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war -- children of slaves were fated to be slaves themselves. Among a few Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves. They were typically captured by raids on enemy tribes, or purchased on inter-tribal slave markets. Slaves would be bought, sold, or given away at potlatches like any other property. Some were killed ceremonially because of a death or important event; at a potlatch they might be killed to demonstrate their owner's wealth. Slaves were also sometimes freed to show favor to them or to honor a relative.

Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche of Texas, Creek of Georgia, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California; the Pawnee, and Klamath.

Long known as war-like and aggressive, some estimates state that up to 20,000 people were kidnapped by the Comanche. Unfortunately, the Comanche did not treat their captives well, considering them little more than slaves and commodities. From the moment of their capture until their death or release, they were both physically and mentally abused.

Some tribes held people as captive slaves late in the 19th century. For instance, "Ute Woman" was a Ute captured by the Arapaho and later sold to a Cheyenne. She was kept by the Cheyenne to be used as a prostitute. She lived in slavery until about 1880. She died of a hemorrhage resulting from "excessive sexual intercourse".

Large-scale Indian slaving with modern weapons -- in which Indians would raid other Indians to capture slaves -- took place for around a century, from about 1620 to 1720. The main slavers were the Occaneechees, Westos, Chiscas, Chickasaws, and Iroquois; these have been defined as "militaristic slaving societies". Their territory was Eastern North America. The consequences of their slave raiding included "widespread dislocation, migration, amalgamation, and, in some cases, extinction of Native peoples".

Most see slavery as a simple black-vs-white issue. But those who do may not realize that the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the southeast -- Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole -- also participated in the institution of slavery. Because these tribes were located outside the sovereignty of the United States, constitutional amendments did not apply to them.

In the period before the arrival of the Europeans, the Natives practiced flexible forms of slavery that often allowed slaves avenues to freedom through intermarriage. That all changed with the arrival of the Europeans, who introduced Native Americans to a system of permanent bondage based on race.

According to journalist Alaina E. Roberts, this switch occurred after the Yamasee tribe lost a war against the English Carolina colonists in 1717. The Europeans began turning from Native slavery to African slavery, and the Native Americans followed their lead. Many Natives, especially those in the “Five Civilized Tribes” (so-called because they embraced the ways of American settlers) picked up on the trend. By 1800, they had developed “plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors.”

While many Native American nations allowed white slaves to earn their freedom through intermarriage, the tribes also had strict laws forbidding any intermarriage between a Native and a black slave, often punishing those who married their slaves with banishment from the tribe.

The Native slave owners could also be horrifyingly brutal towards their black slaves. This is illustrated by the case of Lucy, a black slave burned alive for the murder of her native master. She had no part in the murder but was executed anyway at the request of the murdered warrior’s wife.

During the Civil War, the “Five Civilized Tribes” fought on both the Union and Confederate sides. After the war, the Treaties of 1866 freed the slaves. Even after that, blacks still faced discrimination in the Indian territories, with many tribes passing laws similar to the infamous “Black Codes” in the South.

What you probably don’t picture are Cherokee slaveholders, foremost among them Cherokee chief John Ross. What you probably don’t picture are the numerous African-American slaves, Cherokee-owned, who made the brutal march themselves, or else were shipped en masse to what is now Oklahoma aboard cramped boats by their wealthy Indian masters. And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.

The Cherokee owned slaves for the same reasons their white neighbors did. They knew exactly what they were doing. In truth, the Cherokee and other "Civilized Tribes" were not that complicated. They were willful and determined oppressors of blacks they owned, enthusiastic participants in a global economy driven by cotton, and believers in the idea that they were equal to whites and superior to blacks.

So much for the myth of the "noble savage"!