The left’s narrative of peaceful Native American Indians brutalized by colonizing Europeans, is rhetorically used to undermine the legitimacy of property rights that are a foundation of a system of innovative dynamism. The history is messy, but before and after the arrival of Europeans, Indians were frequent violent aggressors.
(p. C8) . . . Wayne E. Lee’s “The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800,” [is] an ambitious and thoughtful reassessment of Native American war-making before and after permanent European settlement in the early 17th century.
. . .
Rather than simply harassing enemies, Native American fighters sought to isolate and destroy them. It was a technique that could be scaled up as opportunity allowed, ranging from the elimination of an unwary scouting party to the surprise of an unsuspecting town.
. . .
The notorious fate of the Mystic Pequots provides an example of Mr. Lee’s approach. Witnessing the conflagration, the New Englanders’ Narragansett allies were appalled by the indiscriminate slaughter, and reproached them for waging, as they put it, a war that was “too furious.” But as Mr. Lee points out, this reaction was not primarily an expression of “culture shock” at the use of “fire and mass killing.” Rather, the Narragansetts were aggrieved because such ruthlessness denied them their anticipated harvest of prisoners.
“Paradoxically,” Mr. Lee notes, Native American attitudes toward captives demonstrated “both the most and least restraint in the overall violence of their warfare.” Prisoners were living proof of victory. Taking scalps—a pre-Columbian practice encouraged by colonial bounties and often cited by Europeans to epitomize Native American “barbarity”—was a poor substitute. Adult males, especially, became the objects of communal vengeance, tortured to death in prolonged rituals that channeled a community’s frenzied grief. Luckier captives were adopted to replace the casualties. Others, as recent research indicates, were effectively enslaved.
. . .
. . ., precontact conflict was endemic, driven by blood feud in a grim cycle of retribution that was hard to break “in a society ill-suited to top-down coercion,” and further motivated by the pursuit of respect, resources and dominion.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated October 4, 2023, and has the title “‘The Cutting-Off Way’ Review: Native Americans at War.”)
The book under review is:
Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.