Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yet when it comes to merciless savagery, all other tribes were pretenders compared to the Comanches, who ruled a giant empire in what is now Texas, Kansas, and eastern New Mexico by systematically terrorizing, dominating, slaughtering, and enslaving their supposed blood brethren the Apaches, Hopis, Navajos, and Utes. Books such as Comanches: History of a People and Empire of the Summer Moon document such delightful cultural practices as:

• Tying infants to horses and having them dragged through cacti until they were torn to pieces
• Disemboweling live victims and having dogs eat their intestines out
• Burying captives up to the chin and slicing off their eyelids so that their eyeballs were broiled by the sun as they starved to death
• Kidnapping a white woman and burning off her nose to the bone
• Scalping and castrating a white man while he was alive
• Roasting American and Mexican soldiers alive over open fires
• Capturing Tonkawa Indians, burning their hands and feet, then amputating the charred body parts and beginning the fire treatment anew on the raw stumps
• Castrating males, shoving their genitals into their mouths, and then sewing their lips together
• Sewing captives in tanned leather, then leaving them out in the sun, where the leather would dry and squeeze them to death

Oh! And then there was all the slavery.

Just like every other group that has managed to survive throughout history, successful Indian tribes thrived by dominating other tribes in war and turning their POWs into slave workers. During an annual festival known as Potlach, slaves were frequently slaughtered as “entertainment” for the partygoers.

Mangling the narrative even further, many Indian tribes owned black slaves. The Cherokee owned black slaves at rates comparable to, and possibly higher than, the quotient of Southern white families who owned slaves.

In short, these “Native Americans” whose land we supposedly “stole” were stealing one another’s land for eons before whitey arrived. They were raping, murdering, and enslaving one another. There was no act of brutality ever attributed to white people that the Injuns didn’t also commit.

When it comes to ethics, there were no differences. It was every tribe for itself. The only difference was technology. These po’ red bastards weren’t even living in the Iron Age when Europeans arrived. They hadn’t even figured out the wheel yet.

Yes, they fought—very nobly. But they were undone by their own primitiveness. But at least they fought—which is more than can be said for Paleface these days.

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