I don’t have words immediately coming to mind for this. I think I’m going to lay down soon and see what others come up with. 
I don’t have words immediately coming to mind for this. I think I’m going to lay down soon and see what others come up with.
White people finding some kind of middle ground between racist “the red man is a barbaric heathen” and (different but also racist) “actually the natives were hippie noble savages” challenge: impossible.
After roughly 1600 it was virtually impossible for Europeans to encounter natives as they had existed before Columbus. Their reality was downright apocalyptic in some cases because of the spread of disease that preceded European explorers and settlers, sometimes by almost a century.
Imagine if the natives had made ships and sailed to Northern Italy and made landfall in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death or landed in Germany during the height of the 30 Years War. They’d have records about how wild shit was, too. “They don’t trust outsiders, they’re superstitious, and I saw them stab a guy.” No shit, you’re seeing them during a time of world-historic tumult and upheaval.
And that’s not even touching the whole colonization, displacement, and active genocide parts of the equation.
It is wild that one of the biggest turns of world history seems to be that my ancestors were so filthy there existence was a bioweapon.
The Europeans weren’t as unhygienic as the hyperbole would have you believe, it’s more that they had diseases that jumped from domestic animals to humans that the natives had never encountered. The whole idea that medieval peasants were rolling in mud and manure all day isn’t accurate. They didn’t take baths often because baths are impractical. They took sponge baths. They didn’t wash their outer clothes but not many people wash their winter coat today, either. They’d wash the linen underclothes they wore under the outer garments. I mean, cleanliness to be desired, and other regions and cultures at the time were bigger on the hygiene thing, but they weren’t all looking like Pigpen from the Peanuts comics.
They were probably filthy as shit when they arrived, though. Months on a boat with a bunch of people and live animals. Just big wooden petri dishes at that point. Yuckers.
Fair, I was speaking too loosely They were very cleain. Using ash to make a strong simple soap they were simply riddled with pestilence while being surprisingly tidy
They still did some really gross things, like centuries of medical practitioners deciding hand washing was optional, and dying of dysentery constantly whenever they gathered into armies.
It is interesting how the people in the industrial era were probably dirtier and in worse health than their medieval forebears because they were all clustered in cities drinking poo water and breathing fumes and smog which impacted respiratory health so tuberculosis was having a dance party in everyone’s lungs.
wish i could be rollin in mud
The apocalypse had happened even before the mongols arrived, the aztecs were basically a horde from the north that ordered the destruction of all historical records that disagreed with their mythology and worship of the war God. That’s part of why the other groups initially thought the Spaniards were gods coming back to save them.
Various indigeonous South American groups: “You’ve freed us!”
The Spanish: “Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘freed’, more like ‘under new management’.”
You’re talking about the lowland guarani after being mistreated by the incase, not the tarascans after being mistreated by the mexica
The US military loves naming weapon systems and vehicles after the “barbaric heathens” that are also “noble savages” and wants to basically LARP their crudely imagined energy while standing over their graves.