Daily we Canadians are reminded of the moral squalor of our past, of the fact that we occupy this land because our ancestors viciously wrested it from its innocent Indigenous owners. But Lawrence Keeley, in his 1997 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage,” points out that only 13% of America’s Indigenous did not engage in warfare with their neighbors at least once a year, conflicts rooted in disdain for the very principle of “ownership,” conflicts which frequently ended in the torture, rape and more or less complete annihilation of the vanquished. A mass grave in Crow Creek, South Dakota, dated approximately 150 years before the arrival of Columbus, revealed the bodies of more than 500 scalped and otherwise mutilated men, women and children. While it has long been known that torture and cannibalism were common among the Aztecs, their Spanish conquerors having found mountains of severed skulls in their travels, it has more recently been discovered that the Anasazi who dominated the Southwestern regions of the States until their mysterious disappearance around the end of the 13th Century, were also cannibals, approximately 40 sites having been found riddled with bodies that had clearly been butchered and cooked. The Indigenous of the Americas failed to spread their mayhem world-wide not because they were innocent but because they lacked the technological ability to do so. Their oft-invoked claim of Victimhood is crassly disingenuous given that their ancestors frequently engaged in atrocities far more repugnant than those of their European conquerors. This is hardly meant as high moral praise for the latter, but the vast majority of Indians who died as a result of the European presence in the Americas did so because their immune systems were unable to cope with diseases to which they had not previously been exposed. The myth of the Noble Savage is absurd; Marcuse’s contention that Western Civilization is the most pernicious moral force in all of history, equally so.
Not coincidentally, the Myth of the Noble Savage was a product of the Romantic Imagination, Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-1778] having been convinced in his travels to America that the Primitivism of its Indigenous was far preferable to the Rationalism of his own people. Ralston Saul’s book is but a latter day expression of the same principle, the principle that is in fact the sentimental basis of “progressivism.” In a piece in the Toronto Star of June 27, 2015, Rick Salutin suggests that the primitive life-style of America’s Indigenous 500 years ago was perhaps preferable to the scientific orientation of their European invaders inasmuch as it did little to upset the delicate balance of the environment. No sane person, presumably, would suggest that our species would be better off had it never left the primeval forest. Yet look at how deftly Salutin avoids actually assessing the efficacy of the two world-views in question: “But today unfettered growth and environmental despoliation are clearly disasters. Those aboriginal approaches now seem wise, even prophetic….” He is actually equating ignorance with wisdom, non-achievement with achievement! I would have far more respect for those radical environmentalists equally disdainful of Western technology were they each to abandon their condos and computers to live cold and naked beneath the stars. But of course, they do not. It is but one aspect of the incredible hypocrisy that lies at the heart of Western “progressivism.”