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Native American tribes practiced slavery:
Slavery in America
Native American tribes tortured, skinned, and dismembered their enemies:
David Scheimann
History News Network
Native American tribes were cannibalistic:
Tests Show Cannibalism Among Ancient Anasazis / But descendants of Southwest Indians dispute findings
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Man-Corn-Cannibalism-Prehistoric-Southwest/dp/087480566X]Amazon.com: Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest: Christy G. Turner II, Jacqueline Turner: Books[/ame]
History News Network
Slavery in America
Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America; but none exploited slave labor on a large scale. Indian groups frequently enslaved war captives whom they used for small-scale labor and in ritual sacrifice.
The situation of enslaved Indians varied among the tribes. In many cases, enslaved captives were adopted into the tribes to replace warriors killed during a raid. Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away; others allowed enslaved captives to marry the widows of slain husbands. The Creek, for example, treated the children born of slaves and tribal members as full members of the tribe rather than as enslaved offspring. Some tribes held captives as hostages for payment. Other tribes practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; but this status was only temporary as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society.
Native American tribes tortured, skinned, and dismembered their enemies:
David Scheimann
Of all the North American Indian tribes, the seventeenth-century Iroquois are the most renowned for their cruelty towards other human beings. Scholars know that they ruthlessly tortured war prisoners and that they were cannibals; in the Algonquin tongue the word Mohawk actually means "flesh-eater." There is even a story that the Indians in neighboring Iroquois territory would flee their homes upon sight of just a small band of Mohawks. Ironically, the Iroquois were not alone in these practices. There is ample evidence that most, if not all, of the Indians of northeastern America engaged in cannibalism and torture—there is documentation of the Huron, Neutral, and Algonquin tribes each exhibiting the same behavior. This paper will examine these atrocities, search through several possible explanations, and ultimately reveal that the practices of cannibalism and torture in the Iroquois were actually related.
History News Network
Professor Barbara Graymont describes, in The Iroquois in the American Revolution, Iroquoian torture as “the most horribly excruciating death imaginable,” followed by cannibalism:
“Burning was a common element in torture. The victim was frequently made to walk barefoot over fires, as well as being slowly roasted in other ways. Hot knives and hatchets would be applied to his body till his skin was in shreds. His muscles would be pulled out and pierced. Hot irons or splinters would be thrust through his limbs. His fingernails would be wrenched out, his fingers crushed, his flesh cut, his scalp removed. The whole village – men, women, and children – would usually participate in torturing the prisoner . . . After the death of a particularly brave captive, the torturers sought his heart to eat and his blood to drink that they might also share his strength. A victim’s body was cut up after his death, cooked, and eaten in a ritual feast.”
Native American tribes were cannibalistic:
Tests Show Cannibalism Among Ancient Anasazis / But descendants of Southwest Indians dispute findings
Scientists have found evidence that during a period of severe drought some 850 years ago, an unknown raiding party swept through several Anasazi villages in southwest Colorado, killing the inhabitants, boiling their bones and eating their flesh. In one case, the archaeological team found ancient human feces that contained residues of human blood.
``We believe the entire community was extinguished in a single episode of violence and terroristic cannibalism during a period of social chaos brought on by the drought,'' says Brian R. Billman, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina who has studied the Anasazi for many years.
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Man-Corn-Cannibalism-Prehistoric-Southwest/dp/087480566X]Amazon.com: Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest: Christy G. Turner II, Jacqueline Turner: Books[/ame]
"The primal command," writes anthropologist Christy Turner, "is, do not eat people." Historically, cultures across the world have violated this prime directive, some regularly and without apparent afterthought, some only under harshest duress. Turner has uncovered what he considers to be incontrovertible evidence of human sacrifice and cannibalism in a part of the world once thought to have been free of such horrors: the American Southwest. There, Turner maintains, thousands of burned and broken human bones, sometimes buried en masse, have been uncovered, most in sites ranging from a thousand to a few hundred years old. In one such site, the Arizona village of Awatovi, dozens of suspected witches were massacred by their fellow Hopis; in another, the great mountaintop city of Mesa Verde, Colorado, several pits containing the remains of cannibalized murder victims have been excavated. Turner suggests that the great Anasazi city of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, may have been a center of violent ritual and cannibalism, which helps explain why modern Indian residents of the region shun it as a place of bad medicine.
History News Network
Thomas S. Abler of the University of Waterloo commented, in an article published in the journal Ethnohistory in 1980, upon “the contemporary Native political movement’s attempt to sanitize (remove all blemishes . . . ) from the aboriginal past.” He noted that numerous scholars had written of Iroquoian cannibalism in the past, and there is “no point in suppressing these facts . . . it is dishonest to consider Iroquoian torture and cannibalism without recognition of its cruelty.”
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