The Plains Indians

“The Plains Indians were cruel, bloodthirsty and uncivilised.” Explain, using your own knowledge, whether or not you agree with this interpretation. The supposedly bloodthirsty practice of scalping is a primary example of why the Europeans who occupied America labelled the Plains Indians cruel. Though to Westerners at the time and now it may have seemed cruel to cut the skin off the top of a enemies head, for the Plains Indians it held significant religious meaning. They believed that if you were scalped then you lost your soul and therefore could not pass on to the Happy Hunting Ground (their equivalent of the Christian heaven) after you died. To be able to regain a soul and therefore pass on successfully, you had to scalp another person. The scalps were also displayed as trophies, showing how brave the warrior was, a tradition going back generations, similar to counting coup. So what may appear to people who had little to no education of other religions apart from their own, which deplores acts such as scalping, this practice that the Plains Indians performed would have appeared, no doubt, to be very uncivilised, though in fact was rooted in the complex religion and traditions of a civilised society. Another practice considered cruel by the European people was the sick and elderly being left behind when the tribe moved to follow the migration patterns of the buffalo they fed off. What the Europeans didn’t understand was that if the tribe had to slow down for one person, there was a very real chance they would lose the track of the buffalo and the whole tribe could potentially die of lack of food if they did not find another herd in time. Elders were highly respected in the tribes as counsellors and teachers of the young, and they knew that they the individual must be sacrificed for the group, so when the time came when they couldn’t keep up any more, they asked to be left behind. On the harsh Plains, the elderly and sick would quickly die of exposure, from either the biting winds, baking days or freezing nights. From the view of the Westerners, this was merciless and disgusting behaviour, but they often did not understand the sacrifices which had to be made in such an arid place to keep up with your only source of survival and that the people who were left behind chose to be abandoned. Furthermore, the act of polygamy, banned by both Christian and conventional law, was widely practiced amongst the Plains Indians. There were no laws against it in their faith and it was even encouraged in a society where there were fewer men than women, so that rich men would take more wives and all the women in the tribe were looked after and as many children as possible were produced to continue the bloodline and hunting success of the tribe. Obviously, polygamy was considered contemptible in Western society so the Plains Indians were considered backward and immoral for this practice. The environment itself in which the Plains Indians lived was uncivilised and considered unsuitable for habitation or cultivation by early explorers of the Plains. This further reinforced the idea of the Indians as creatures close to the animals they lived off. Because the Indians lived in such isolated groups, much like a pack of animals in the Europeans eyes, they were treated as such but were in fact a proud and resilient people who did not take to being treated as beasts.