american-holocaust

110 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTWe are minded to live at Peace: If we intend at any time to make War uponyou, we will let you know of it, and the Reasons why we make War withyou; and if you make us satisfaction for the Injury done us, for which theWar is intended, then we will not make War on you. And if you intend atany time to make War on us, we would have you let us know of it, and theReasons for which you make War on us, and then if we do not make satisfactionfor the Injury done unto you, then you may make War on us, otherwiseyou ought not to do it. 46The simplicity of this seems naive and even quaint to modern observers,as it did to seventeenth-century Britishers, but it made perfect sense tonative peoples who simply did not wage war for the same reasons thatEuropeans did. "Given ample land and a system of values by and largeindifferent to material accumulation," writes a scholar of military law,"the New England tribes rarely harbored the economic and political ambitionsthat fueled European warfare." Instead, an Indian war usually wasa response to personal insults or to individual acts of inter-tribal violence.As such, it could be avoided by "making satisfaction for the injury done"(as noted in the quotation above), but even when carried out "native hostilitiesgenerally aimed at symbolic ascendancy, a status conveyed by smallpayments of tribute to the victors, rather than the dominion normally associatedwith European-style conquest." Moreover, given the relative lackof power that Indian leaders had over their highly autonomous followers,Indian warriors might choose not to join in battle for this or that cause,and it was even common for an Indian war party on the march to "meltaway as individual warriors had second thoughts and returned home." 47Prior to the European assaults on their lands, Indians throughout thecontinent held similar attitudes toward the proper conduct of war. Theidea of large-scale battle, wrote Ruth Benedict more than half a centuryago, was "alien" to all these peoples. Of the California Indians, even longafter they had almost been exterminated by white malevolence, Benedictwrote: "Their misunderstanding of warfare was abysmal. They did nothave the basis in their own culture upon which the idea could exist." 48 Asfor the Indians of the Plains, who have been turned into the very portraitof aggression and ferocity by purveyors of American popular culture (andby far too many serious historians as well), wrote George Bird Grinnell:Among the plains tribes with which I am well acquainted-and the same istrue of all the others of which I know anything at all-coming in actualpersonal contact with the enemy by touching him with something held in thehand or with a part of the person was the bravest act that could be performed... [This was known as] to count coup on-to touch or strike--aliving unhurt man and to leave him alive, and this was frequently done. . . .It was regarded as an evidence of bravery for a man to go into battle carryingno weapon that would do any harm at a distance. It was more creditable