Over the summer, we took a short family vacation to Sedona, AZ and also toured the Grand Canyon. Our canyon tour guide seemed very knowable about Indigenous Peoples’, especially the Hopi Tribe of NW Arizona. In fact, he said the Hopi people granted him a formal title of “Friend of the Hopi”.
(Note: I’ll use the term “Indian(s)” for the rest of this post because it’s simpler and because, “A rose by any other name…”)
During the bus ride up from Sedona to the Canyon (one of the most scenic drives in the county), he began to speak to us about “raiding cultures”. According to our guide, the Hopi Indians were peaceful, but other tribes were not; he described them as raiders. Certain tribes would steel Hopi land, mistreat them and even kill them. The Hopi had specific names for these tribes. The names translate in English to terms like “throat slitters” and/or “skull crushers”, because this was what the raiding tribes did to the Hopi people. This was the name they used for the entire tribe, not just the warriors or braves who attacked them. Even a baby in a raiding tribe could be called a little “throat slitter”.
Imperialistic Europeans also had a raiding culture, but with perhaps two main distinctions from raiding Indian tribes.
- They were better at it:
Better weapons & technology and perhaps more organized with homeland support across the ocean.
- They were tempered by Christianity:
Here is an example of what I mean. On December 21, 1511 a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos delivered a scathing sermon condemning Spanish policy toward the Taíno Indians; locate in what are now Haiti & the Dominican Republic. Here is an excerpt:
“In order to make your sins against the Indians known to you I have come up on this pulpit, I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island…This voice says that you are in mortal sin, that you live and die in it, for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude?… For with the excessive work you demand of them they fall ill and die, or rather you kill them with your desire to extract and acquire gold every day. And what care do you take that they should be instructed in religion?. . . Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?” 1
Perhaps the Spaniards didn’t listen, but this kind of early criticism from the Catholic Church helped set the stage for the beginnings of International Law. For whatever evil was done by Europeans long ago, what would the Vikings or Ancient Romans have done to the Indians given the same opportunity & know-how? For that matter, in more modern times, what would Hitler, Stalin or Mao have done to them? Would they have bothered to put them on reservations where they can at least keep their culture and live in peace? Or would they have simply killed them all.
As full disclosure, I was not able to substantiate the details our tour guide told us about the Hopi and their foes, but I can believe it for one reason: Original Sin.
Original sin gives us a natural inclination to do evil instead of good. All humans have a natural tenancy to think “my tribe is better than your tribe”. Once convinced of a fundamental superiority, it’s not a far stretch to see the people of another tribe as sub-human, not made in the image & likeness of God. These ideas have consequences because our thoughts lead to our actions. In the case of tribalism fueled by sin, the consequences can likely be the taking of your stuff and/or the taking of your life. This goes for Caucasians as well as any other kind of human “tribe”.
- Thomas E. Woods, How Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington D.C: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005), 135-136
Having recently been heavily immersed in how after WII we saved and rebuilt Europe and turned occupied Japan into a thriving democracy, as well as saving South Korea from repressive communism, I just can’t get into the left’s mantra of evil white people being racists.
If aliens visited our planet, they’d observe Homo sapiens as a binary species, of different sizes and colors.
They’d also observe some cultures developed technology faster, because of climate (temperate), geography (navigable rivers, and inland oceans) and philosophy (creator, logos, an understandable world.)
And observe that we are quite stupid for not realizing that these are the only real differences between peoples.
@ David,
Well said. I wonder what aliens would say about our sexual behavior? Perhaps they would observe that we are quite stupid for not realizing that monogamous & permanent heterosexual relationships are what is best for our species.
@Ben Butera, Absolutely. They certainly would. We’d be large binary “featherless bipeds” who should be mating for life and raising the next generation. They’d think we’d lost our collective minds and leave the atmosphere in search for intelligent life.
Oct 19 was the feast of St Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf and the North American Martyrs. They suffered horrible torture and deaths at the hands of of I guess a raiding culture, the Mohawks. A member of our mission had 25 family members killed by the Lakota uprising in MN in 1800s. On my maternal side had family lost in the same wars. My father’s family did too in MA in the 1700s. That said my parents always supported the J. S. Indian missions.