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America's Hamas, Once Upon A Time:Several people have noted in recent days how much the bloody Hamas raid was like the raids American Indians made on white settlements in the 19th century. A fantastic book to read is
Empire Of The Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne. It came out in 2010. It's a biography of Quanah Parker, the last great chief of the Comanches. His mother was a white woman who had been kidnapped as a girl from her pioneer parents, and who went native. I didn't read it until just after I had moved away from Texas; this fact left me really frustrated that I hadn't learned this history while I lived within easy driving distance of the important places in Quanah Parker's life.
We have a strong tendency in contemporary American life to romanticize the Indians, in the same way a previous generation romanticized the settlers. There can be no doubt that the whites were there to take Indian land. But it's also the case that the Indians responded with unspeakable savagery.
In this 2010 Fresh Air interview, author Gwynne discusses it. Excerpt:
Quote:
Sam Gwynne, welcome to FRESH AIR. So, let's start with the story of how Quanah's mother was captured by the Comanche when she was nine. I mean, the family lived in a fort on the outer edge of white settlements, about 90 miles from what is now Dallas. So they were very exposed. Why were they there?
Mr. S.C. Gwynne (Author, "Empire of the Summer Moon"): They were part of that kind of vanguard of Scots-Irish settlement that really, you know, in effect, was what eventually beat the Indians. But they were people who were determined. They were hard-nosed. They were predestinarian Baptists, and they settled, as you say, about 90 miles south of what is now Dallas.
It was the outermost edge of the frontier. What they didn't know when they built their fort in 1836 was that it was right at the point where this giant, 250,000-square-mile Comanche empire touched this nascent American empire. They were exactly at that point.
And so the Comanches raided the fort in May of 1836, killed a bunch of people, you know, killed five people. There were a bunch of people wounded. Some escaped, but five captives were taken. and one of those captives was the nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, which became, in effect, the start of a 24-year-old captivity that she came to see not as captivity.
GROSS: You describe very vividly what the raid, what the Comanche raid on the Parker fort was like, and it's gruesome.
Mr. GWYNNE: Extremely.
GROSS: So I'm going to ask you to describe it, but first I'll say if you don't want to hear a gruesome description, this is your opportunity to tune out for maybe two minutes. Come right back.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GROSS: But, I mean, this is history. So - and I think it's very important and interesting history. So please describe what happened.
Mr. GWYNNE: Well, what happened was what happened in every plains Indian raid going back for centuries. In other words, it was - this is what Indians did to Indians, and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites.
But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. That was automatic. That's one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. The white men were astonished at it, but they were assuming - assumed that they would be killed.
The most - the small children were killed, very small children were killed. A lot of the, say, children in the, I don't know, three-to-seven or three-to-10 range were often taken as captives. The women were often raped and often killed. And so it was an extremely brutal - and it was when - all of the people in the settlements back in those years knew what it was, knew what a Comanche raid meant, which was the same as a Kiowa raid or an Arapaho raid or another kind of raid.
But they were grim. They were grisly. Captives were usually involved, you know. and it's an interesting kind of moral question that you have to - as an historian about plains Indians or about American Indians in general, you have to come to terms with this, with torture, which they did - which they practiced all across the West and, in fact, all across the East - and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death.
GROSS: I mean, you're talking not only about scalping. You're talking about various forms of mutilation, cutting off fingers and toes, gang...
Mr. GWYNNE: Torture by fire, torture by all sorts of different things - I mean, putting, you know, hot coals on your stomach. I mean, there were lots and lots of imaginative tortures that were, indeed, practiced by Indians all across the Americas.
GROSS: And this includes gang rape.
Mr. GWYNNE: It includes gang rape.
GROSS: And what I find provocative about this right now is that in American's attempt to reconcile the atrocities that Americans committed against Native Americans, a lot of the Indian story was maybe rewritten a little bit to leave out some of those atrocities.
Mr. GWYNNE: Oh, I think absolutely.
GROSS: I mean, after focusing so much on, like...
Mr. GWYNNE: Yes.
GROSS: ...you know, cowboys versus Indians in Western movies, I think so many Americans felt bad about that kind of, like, good-guy-versus-bad-guy description when white Americans were responsible for so much bad stuff themselves, that maybe - are you suggesting in your book that history maybe got rewritten a little too much in terms of leaving out some of the atrocities that Native Americans did commit in those wars?
Mr. GWYNNE: Oh, I think so. I think that's a good point. And there was even an attempt at some point to deny that Indians were warlike. They were - Comanches were incredibly warlike.
They swept everyone off the Southern plains. They nearly exterminated the Apaches. They were warlike by nature. And, you know, if you look at, say, the Comanches, and then you look back in history at, for example, you know, Goths and Vikings or Mongols or Celts - or old Celts are actually a very good parallel.
In a lot of ways, I think we're looking back at earlier versions of ourselves. It was we - we, being white Europeans - did all of those things. Not only that, but torture was institutionalized in things like the Counterreformation and the Spanish Inquisition. It was part of, you know, the Russian empire. I mean, torture is not the exclusive province of the Indians.
But I think you're right. I think there was a certain wave of books, a certain type of book that wanted to kind of set the record straight in a different way. But yes, it was - life was extremely brutal, and it was extremely brutal on both sides. And in my book, I don't - I try not to take sides. The whites were perpetrators of some of the most astonishing massacres in history, but so were the Indians.
What we in the modern West have forgotten is that this kind of extreme brutality is part of human nature. It remains, no matter how civilized we have become. This is the meaning of the Holocaust: the most culturally and technologically advanced nation on earth at the time used its intelligence and skill to resurrect ancient barbarism at industrial scale. The skull is always and everywhere just beneath the skin.] -Rod Dreher