We’re finally getting some sunny days here in swamp-east Arkansas. It’s so flat here, water doesn’t run off. Luckily, we get lots of sun to dry up the pools from the latest rains. The sun brightens spirits just as it evaporates excess water. But this sun cannot brighten the souls of the miseducated.
Before the sun came up this morning, I put on the hat of a peer-reviewer. I opened the food systems paper I’d been asked to review and found a new example of one of the foremost areas where America’s youth have been miseducated for generations. Our textbooks for a hundred years have been doing an excellent job of educating the young on the cruelties inflicted on the “indigenous” peoples of the Americas. What has gradually been scoured from the textbooks is anything related to indigenous blood-thirstiness—which often matched and exceeded that of Europeans.
The highly educated authors of the paper I reviewed today ignorantly parroted the idea of indigenous peoples as peaceful stewards of Nature, spiritually and culturally devoted to man’s oneness with Nature. They are blindly or willfully ignoring the facts of Aztec (also called Mexica) rule prior to the arrival of the Spanish.
When the Mexica invaded the highland plateau now known as the Valley of Mexico and present site of Mexico City, they brought with them their gods’ need for human sacrifice. About once a month, every holiday, the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, selecting their victims from the tribes they had conquered in the Valley. They incurred the hatred of surrounding tribes by such practices as skinning the daughters of other tribes’ nobility and wearing the skins at ceremonies their fathers were required to attend.
Hatred of the Aztec/Mexica led surrounding tribes to assist the Spanish in their lightning conquest of Central America.
In North America, examples of human sacrifice include a mound in Cahokia, Illinois which contained 272 teenage girls ritually sacrificed.
The Cahokia mounds were the center of a city of 20,000 people. Smaller cities centered on mounds were encountered by early explorers in Mississsippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The powerful mound-building cities routed the early explorers and kept the Spanish from making inroads from the south and west. However, horses escaped from the Spanish and were adopted by many tribes. Especially when combined with guns from the English invading from the east, new raiding and hunting cultures arose.
These new cultures raided and destroyed the mound-builder cities.
The mound-building Caddo were run out of most of Arkansas due to the gun and horse-fueled raids of the Osage. When English speaking settlers arrived, they encountered the fierce, semi-nomadic Osage and the abandoned mounds of the Caddo.
Further North, the Lakota used horse and guns to invade the Black Hills and almost exterminate the agricultural Crow at the Massacre at Tongue River in 1820.
The cities and intensive agricultural systems of the mound-builders of the 1500s had been destroyed by a far less sophisticated hunting and raiding culture by the time settlers arrived in the 1700s.
The fact of disciplined, violent societies with new weapons conquering more peaceful, advanced, diverse agricultural peoples has recurred throughout history. Let’s look at the territory now known as Syria, Iraq and Iran. Sumer invented agriculture and writing in today’s Southern Iraq, but was overrun by the more warlike Assyria, then the even more warlike Babylon took over.
To Babylon’s east were the previously peaceful Persians. They followed the world’s first monotheistic religion and governed a vast network which other tribes willingly joined, keeping their traditions while following the Zoroastrian rules of peaceful coexistence. Despite being the more advanced civilization, they were defeated by the more militaristic Babylonians. From them the Persians eventually adopted the spirit of militarism and empire. When they did, the Persian swept west to conquer the Babylonians and let the Jews return to Judea.
Later Alexander the Great found the spirit of militarism and empire and moved east to conquer the territories that Persia got from Babylonia who got it from Assyria, who got it from Sumer. And then Alexander’s territory was taken by the Romans. Along this violent path were lost many methods of agriculture, engineering and construction. What was left was mostly desert and ruins.
Similarly, the violent in America have taken over classrooms and cities from the peaceful and educated who sent a man to the moon in 1969. The decline of education and America will continue until the violent culture is understood and conquered. Sometimes only fire can fight fire.
Resilience 