[Shawnee123]

Absolutely Native Americans warred with each other, killed critters, and other unpleasant things.

My problem was with Coign looking at these pictures and commenting that it is a romanticization of a culture that was savage. He used "they" referring to NAs as if they were a homogenous group. A homogenous group of land-rapers and savages.

Another side of the culture is the respect for nature, as a whole, the awe of their gods (i.e. nature), loyalty to the tribe and family, and an inner peace with the ways of life and death.

When I look at these pictures, of course I romaticize the Native Americans. As a societal victim of genocide, they don't get the kind of press that African Americans, or Jews, or Rwandans, but I can bet the fear of the unfathomable concept that someone wants to wipe out you and your loved ones and your entire way of life were comparable.

My grandpa once said he never felt closer to God than when he was on the lake, fishing and thinking. I tend to feel that I got a lot of traits from him, and that his traits came from his ancestors.

Romanticize away. Give this culture some respect, it is no less a deserving object of this diversity thing you hear about in every seminar, lecture, class, and whatever other venues you can think of. It's a deeply beautiful culture.

As a society we have not cared for a long time, we have swept the issue under the rug because it is hard to look at and is so easily dismissed due to the current culture of the Native Americans, living on reservations or trying to assimilate: a calm demeanor, an attitude of seeming defeat that arises from an inner strength I think most of us couldn't understand. And we don't like to ever look like the "bad guys."

Though everyone is entitled to their opinion, I don't know that it would be met with such complacency had Doign walked into a thread about slavery and said something that amounts to the slaves being bastards and getting what they deserved.

Can't we just appreciate the beauty?