The Perennial Appeal of Terror
A review of “Cannibalism, Headhunting, and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten” by George Franklin Feldman
Cultural programming is a powerful thing. Despite reading books on the history of the Iroquois and Comanches, my knee-jerk setting was that North American Indians did not engage in practices such as cannibalism, headhunting, or human sacrifice. I maintained this attitude even though I had just read books describing the practices of these nations to engage in horrific, ritual torture murders of captured prisoners. For that matter, I maintained this naïve position despite reading the 1798 account by Richard Parkinson of the gruesome torture of English prisoners.
Numerous sources describe the North American Indians’ terrifying practice of torturing prisoners to death. These killings were not carried out by warriors or tribal leaders; the entire community was involved. The killings were cathartic. They showed not an ounce of empathy or recognition that the tables could someday be turned.
I am also currently reading Tacitus, who describes the practice of German tribesmen of torturing captured Roman soldiers to death and/or sacrificing them to German gods. Likewise, according to Roman sources, the Celts were headhunters, even as Roman auxiliaries. Archeological evidence suggests that cannibalism was present in Iron-Age Britain. For that matter, as late as the 15th century, the Samurai of Japan would collect the heads of fallen enemy samurai as trophies.
Headhunting is a well-established human custom.
Yet, when it comes to North American Indians, we seem to have been programmed to think that these noble warriors would not engage in such a declasse practice unless they were goaded into it by uncultured Europeans. This mindset played out today in the context of the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay for plagiarism. [1] Conservative activist Christopher Rufo claimed a “scalp” for bringing the plagiarism to light. This led to the AP advising its readers that:
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.[2]
The gist of the AP’s charge is a distraction on multiple levels. The vague, passive-voice phrasing of the allegation seems designed to lead the reader to the belief that white settlers eradicated Native Americans by scalping. Further reflection — more than would usually be invested in such a short squib — raises various questions, such as, “From whom did the white colonists “take up” this practice?” “Who were these white colonists?” and “How effective was this practice?”
To cut to the chase, the AP’s gaslighting is nonsense. It is presumably the product of the pseudo-history that passes for a college education based on an oppressor/oppression narrative. Naturally, the AP reporters would put all the blame on the oppressors — the “white colonists” — and none on the oppressed.
History, however, is more complicated than this kind of simplistic binary. The AP’s superficiality might work in the short term, but over the long term, inconvenient facts undermine the binary.
George Franklin Feldman’s book goes a long way to documenting the inconvenient facts. Feldman is not a professional scholar, which probably is to his credit in this day and age. He seems to be a layman with an interest in digging up information on a particular theme, namely, the dark side of history that professionals seem to want to bury.[3]
Feldman’s book is another book indebted to Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization. [4]
Taking a leaf from Keeley, Feldman begins with well-established archeological sites establishing the long war before civilization, i.e., before the “white colonists.” One such site — the Crow Creek site — dates to around 1325 AD in central South Dakota. The Crow Creek site was a fort prepared for defense against an attack. The attack came and resulted in the massacre of over 500 Indians. Feldman describes the carnage supported by the archeological record as follows:
Whoever the attackers were, there is archeological evidence that the villagers expected them. A huge fortification ditch, 1,250 feet long, had just been completed, or was in the process of completion, when the attackers struck. At least five hundred men, women, and children were killed — and not just killed but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped; the remains were left scattered round the village, which was burned. (p. xv.)
A death toll of five hundred was rarely reached in massacres of Indians by “white colonists.”
The violence of this attack followed previous rounds of violence. Feldman notes:
War was not new to these unknown people. At least two of them had been scalped before and survived; others had projectile points embedded in their bones, which had been healed over. Other excavations at a site north of Crow Creek, Whistling Elk Village also indicate that warfare in the plains was a way of life in the pre-history era of Middle America. (p. xv.)
So, to underscore the point, we have archeological evidence of Indians scalping Indians long before any “white colonists” set foot on North America.
Warfare was endemic before Columbus. Feldman reports that twenty percent of burials between 1400 BC and 300 AD on the Channel Islands of California show that the cause of death was the result of skulls being crushed. Burial sites for the Oneota Indians in west-central Illinois indicate that one-third of the burials were of individuals who had died violently. (p. xviii.)
None of this should be surprising to anyone who has read Keeley or is acquainted with the tradition of low-level warfare that plagues hunter-gatherer culture. What Feldman brings to the table is the other part of this tradition, which involves the terrifying treatment of war victims. Feldman notes the “cutting off way” warfare strategy used by Indians; the attacks by ambush, the unwillingness to attack unless the attacker had overwhelming superiority, the capture of captives, etc. These are laid out in detail in “The Cutting Off Way” which I reviewed last month.
Feldman delves into the darker side of Indian warfare. He looks at the documentation available for particular Indian tribes. This approach is necessary because that is how the written records are organized. In other words, people who dealt with the Natchez dealt with the Natchez and not the Apaches. This approach also allows an examination of the diversity among Indian tribes.
Thus, it seems that all the tribes discussed in the book engaged in torture-executions of prisoners. These executions seem to follow a standard model where the prisoner — male or female, warrior or not — was tied to a post and then attacked by all members of the community. On the other hand, ritualized sacrifice to deities was associated with a minority of tribes, e.g. the Natches, the Pawnee, and the Huron. Headhunting was more endemic. Scalping seems to have been a short-form version of headhunting. Heads may have been preferred but scalps were portable. (See p. 91.)
Cannibalism is more problematic. Anthropologists have described some highly ritualized cannibalistic practices. The Kwakiutl had an order of cannibals — the hamatsas — that ate corpses, although the corpses may have been the corpses of slaves killed for the purpose. Iroquois and Chippewa had a reputation for eating the villagers they had ambushed and slain.[5] Sometimes Iroquois raiding parties would use the children they had kidnapped on raids as an available larder during their escape from enemy territory. Archeological evidence supports the conclusion that the Anasazi engaged in culinary cannibalism.
Although these practices were generally reciprocated, they were still terrifying to neighboring populations, particularly so after one tribe began to dominate surrounding tribes.[6] At some point, the non-dominant tribes found it in their interest to move far away, either incorporating themselves into stronger tribes or attempting to carve out territory in some other contested territory As Feldman notes, the idea that tribes occupied the land they happened to be on when the “white colonists” arrived from time immemorial is problematic given the constant state of warfare that existed.
History is complicated, but one has to wonder what was going on. Why did Indians do these things? How did they feel about doing these things? On the one hand, there seems to be a lack of empathy for other Indian tribes. Feldman points out that a lot of the names for Indian tribes that we know mean things like “enemy” or “other.” So, the lack of empathy may have been quite real.[7]
Empathy is often the product of being able to imagine oneself in the position of the Other. Indians were able to make such connections. We know that Indians found these practices terrifying. When they were on the losing side, they were quick to realize that getting out of the way was preferable to becoming a torture victim or a side dish.
The ethos of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is fostered by the realization that others can easily find themselves in the position to do unto you. While war was endemic, so was trade. Indians could see the Other as themselves when convenient.
This insight seems particularly germane to cannibalism. It does not seem that anyone was particularly proud of cannibalism. Even the groups that acknowledged cannibalism tended to excuse it based on circumstance. Who is getting eaten is never clear from the description of the Kwakiutl hamatsas. It doesn’t sound like the Kwakiutl were marching off to harvest neighbors for dinner. There does seem to be a broad antipathy with being identified as a cannibal.
Again, what gives? Perhaps, the answer is that it was good to have a terrifying reputation as someone who might well torture their enemy to death if captured in war: Pro-tip — don’t go to war with those people. On the other hand, cannibalism is a bit over the line. Indian tribes needed allies. Being the kind of people who ate other people might just make the tribe an “enemy of mankind” rather than just a tough neighbor. You wanted to cow your neighbors, not inspire a crusade by everyone else to exterminate you.[8]
In short, if you found yourself living in a tough neighborhood, terrorism was a strategy to communicate, “don’t mess with me.”
Feldman offers some potted tu quoque arguments against the “white colonists.” Thus, at the tail end of one war in the 1680s, Puritans responded to the usual Indian practices of torture and ambush by taking the heads of various Indian leaders — who had been killed on the battlefield or while trying to escape capture — and mounting them on pikes in Boston, Plymouth, Harford, and Taunton. These six heads remained on display for decades, it is said.
We might wonder at the barbarity of our ancestors, although there was a tradition of displaying the heads of executed traitors in England. In addition, the six heads represent a fraction of the head-hunting that was going on among the Indians themselves. Finally, in terms of the strategy of terror, the display of heads, communicated what would happen to the perpetrator of the next surprise attack, which may have been the only way to speak in a language that the Indians would understand.
Feldman also points out that the Mexican government had an off-again/on-again policy of paying for Indian scalps. This is probably the basis of the claim that “white colonists” adopted the Indian practice of scalping, although, in other contexts, Mexicans are not identified as “white.” This Mexican policy led to an industrialization of the Indian practice of ambush and scalping by Mexicans, escaped slaves, other Indians, and some well-known Mexican and American entrepreneurs.
Even the description that Feldman gives undermines the “Oppressed/Oppressor” narrative that we are supposed to adopt. The Indians against whom this practice was directed — the Apache — were winning their own game of genocide and terror. The Apache had effectively driven the Mexican population into small territorial enclaves where they awaited their eradication.[9]
The bounty for scalps policy of the Mexican government was less about marshaling terror as a weapon, than creating a privatized system for projecting military strength. The bounty was a kind of system of marquee and reprisal.
History is complicated. There is no reason to think that American Indians did not engage in torture, headhunting, cannibalism, or genocide given the extensive archeological and documentary evidence that they did. If they did, they were quite ordinary in terms of cultural norms throughout the world.
Further, terror is an effective strategy. It worked for the most part. There was no system for adjudicating disputes. Each tribe lived in a Hobbesian world of sovereignty where it was the sole determiner of justice, law, and order. There was no higher power to appeal to. In a Hobbesian world, life is “nasty, brutal, and short” and so one needed to be nastier and more brutal to make the other guy’s life shorter.
The problem is that this strategy ran up against a clash of civilizations. Western cultures would not accept ambush, torture, and terror directed against them at their stage of development, and when they had the population resources, they did not have to.
Some Indian cultures, on the other hand, could not give up their way of war. Alfred Kroeber studied the Yuki-Kato cultures of California. These cultures were head-hunters who were engaged in a genocidal conflict with each other right up to the arrival of “white colonists” in large numbers in the 1850s.
The California Genocide is often discussed, but how much of it was fueled by the clash of cultures. On the one hand, California Indians were trained to terror tactics. On the other hand, population and technology had reached a tipping point in favor of Westerners. Are we to believe that California Indians did not attempt to employ the strategy that had worked for them during their history?[10] And if they did, what kind of reaction would that have provoked?
This leads to the recent attack by Hamas. Gang rapes and burning babies are pre-modern, but not, as we’ve seen, irrational. If the purpose is to scare off neighbors, then Hamas is replicating a strategy that worked for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, as we’ve seen, these clash of civilization scenarios do not work out well for the vastly outnumbered and outgunned pre-modern civilization.
Can Hamas give up its terror strategy? The Hamas practice of raising Gazan children to hate Jews with such an intensity that the result is the war crimes we saw on October 7, 2023, resembles the Apache technique of raising children to torture animals. Can that kind of thing be turned off?
In the American case, the answer was reservations. We decry and condemn reservations today, but if you have habituated a people into the ways of terror, is there a better solution than segregation? Education and appeals to common humanity are optimistic but does our experience suggest that they work well enough that we would risk the lives of our children on them?
History is complicated. Sometimes all we can do is acknowledge that complexity.
Footnotes:
[1] Plagiarism has always been condemned as contrary to the ethos of scholarship. However, now that a leftwing avatar of DEI has been credibly accused of plagiarism, the issue of plagiarism is being treated as if it were an unfathomable freak of nature — like breast cancer or lightning — which randomly strikes people who are on their best behavior. Media reports are taking an interest never seen before in issues of intent and proof and are now very concerned with the motivations of those who bring accusations of plagiarism when they should just leave those issues up to the scholarly institutions who presumably know best. All of this appears designed to distract from the fact that the putative leading scholar at Harvard engaged in practices that would have gotten a “non-diverse” student expelled.
[2] AP “stealth edited” this passage to read: “On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies.” This doesn’t help much since it implies that all “white colonists” engaged in the practice but that only “some” tribes did, which reverses the actual frequency of the practice.
[3] To give credit where credit is due, I’ve been tentatively playing with the idea that Indian war practices, like their modern variants, were intentional applications of a strategy of terror, that they were, and still are, intended to inspire fear in neighbors such that the neighbors decide that they need to find a neighborhood with less terrifying neighbors. Feldman agrees with this position. He expressly covers this ground in the final chapter of his book with a discussion of September 11.
[4] Keeley’s book is a kind of ur-source for cognitive dissonance. For whatever reason, the modern mind rejects the idea of our uncivilized ancestors being, well, uncivilized. It may be the case that scholars who discover some forgotten bit of history — the Maya, the early Britons, etc. — feel invested in their discovery, e.g., it reflects on them if their discovery acts badly. Inevitably, though, we find some pit where bones have been split to get at the marrow and the pristine culture became yet another human culture that engaged in culinary cannibalism. (See e.g., After the Ice by Steven Mithen, p. 110–112 (Describing the evidence of culinary cannibalism at Gough’s cave in southern England circa 12,700 BC.) At this point, anthropologists would probably be better off assuming cannibalism until it is disproved.
[5] The Chippewa had legends of the Windigo: giants with a taste for human flesh. (p. 80.) Feldman views the Chippewa as opportunistic cannibals; people who resorted to cannibalism in the face of starvation.
[6] The Aztec situation is outside the scope of the book, but it may provide a good example of what happens when a cannibalistic, sacrificing tribe achieves hegemony over surrounding tribes.
[7] Feldman points out that the Yuki Indians of California got their name from a neighboring tribe for whom the word “yuki” literally meant “stranger” which translated to “enemy.” (p. 123.) Likewise, “apache” means “enemy” in the Zuni language. (p. 160.)
[8] The Aztecs are a case in point. Once enough neighbors had been catalyzed into an anti-Aztec crusade by a handful of Conquistadors, the fate of the Aztecs was sealed.
[9] On a different front, the Apache were facing a more serious effort at genocide at the hands of the Comanches. History is complicated.
[10] Feldman reports that Apache boys were given animals to practice torturing and were rewarded for originality. (p. 177.) This seems like a recipe for raising psychopaths. Are we supposed to think that people raised this way gave up their core cultural values because we think that those values are gross? The way we flip between cultural relativism and an absolute sense of justice is problematic.
