Haven’t seen the video. Likely never will. But I am sure it spews all the nonsense you quite correctly dispute. The idea that the colonists “discovered democracy” through contact with native tribes is so positively stupid that I cannot understand why it keeps getting repeated. Except of course because those at PBS etc. are ideologues or can’t stand the thought of being called some kind of name for raising questions. The Founders had never heard of or studied the Athenian Democracy, the Roman Republic, the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, the British Parliament, the centuries long struggle to take control away from the Crown? They had never read Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, Locke, Montisque, etc.? Such staggering ignorance. And the (f/k/a) Iroquois Confederation was by no means a democracy. It was a military and to some degree economic alliance, run by appointees of hereditary monarchs or the monarchs themselves, who ruled maybe 12,000 people and which was designed to and did dominate maybe 100,000 members of other nearby tribes. No democracy, it.
They also ignore the practice of taking captives and forcibly assimilating them into tribes (common in the Southwest, but also practiced elsewhere) or the thriving trade in slaves conducted between some of the tribal groups and Mexico (Comancheros, anyone?). And of course if they bothered to look south of the Rio Grande there's the whole Inca Empire thing... But why let accuracy get in the way of a good outrage narrative? Not unlike the whole 1619 Project thing.
I've always found it fascinating that the people who so loudly proclaim that US policy toward the Natives was "genocide" remain conspicuously silent about the conduct of the Spanish in Central and South America. They probably are also completely unaware that the vast majority to tribal groups west of the Mississippi were at best hunter-gatherers and limited subsistence farmers (with some exceptions in the Southwest) prior to the arrival of (gasp) Europeans with horses. I like to call their misconception the "Dances with Wolves" theory of native history. The so-called "buffalo culture" was actually fairly short-lived in the great scheme of things. And let's not forget that prior to the arrival of the horse most buffalo "hunts" were conducted by sneaking up on a herd and stampeding them over a cliff. I have yet to see a reasonable explanation as to how a small tribal group could use "every bit" of, say, over 200 buffalo when they had no pack animals or other means of transporting heavy items.
In the Algonquin tongue the word Mohawk means "flesh-eater." St. Kateri Tekakwitha told of her Mohawk tribe eating their enemies. It doesn't absolve the cruelty inflicted on Native Americans, but some of it was between tribes themselves.
Haven’t seen the video. Likely never will. But I am sure it spews all the nonsense you quite correctly dispute. The idea that the colonists “discovered democracy” through contact with native tribes is so positively stupid that I cannot understand why it keeps getting repeated. Except of course because those at PBS etc. are ideologues or can’t stand the thought of being called some kind of name for raising questions. The Founders had never heard of or studied the Athenian Democracy, the Roman Republic, the Venetian Republic, the Dutch Republic, the British Parliament, the centuries long struggle to take control away from the Crown? They had never read Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, Locke, Montisque, etc.? Such staggering ignorance. And the (f/k/a) Iroquois Confederation was by no means a democracy. It was a military and to some degree economic alliance, run by appointees of hereditary monarchs or the monarchs themselves, who ruled maybe 12,000 people and which was designed to and did dominate maybe 100,000 members of other nearby tribes. No democracy, it.
They also ignore the practice of taking captives and forcibly assimilating them into tribes (common in the Southwest, but also practiced elsewhere) or the thriving trade in slaves conducted between some of the tribal groups and Mexico (Comancheros, anyone?). And of course if they bothered to look south of the Rio Grande there's the whole Inca Empire thing... But why let accuracy get in the way of a good outrage narrative? Not unlike the whole 1619 Project thing.
I've always found it fascinating that the people who so loudly proclaim that US policy toward the Natives was "genocide" remain conspicuously silent about the conduct of the Spanish in Central and South America. They probably are also completely unaware that the vast majority to tribal groups west of the Mississippi were at best hunter-gatherers and limited subsistence farmers (with some exceptions in the Southwest) prior to the arrival of (gasp) Europeans with horses. I like to call their misconception the "Dances with Wolves" theory of native history. The so-called "buffalo culture" was actually fairly short-lived in the great scheme of things. And let's not forget that prior to the arrival of the horse most buffalo "hunts" were conducted by sneaking up on a herd and stampeding them over a cliff. I have yet to see a reasonable explanation as to how a small tribal group could use "every bit" of, say, over 200 buffalo when they had no pack animals or other means of transporting heavy items.
At least our tax dollars no longer fund PBS propaganda. Now, about that leftist-to-education pipeline...
In the Algonquin tongue the word Mohawk means "flesh-eater." St. Kateri Tekakwitha told of her Mohawk tribe eating their enemies. It doesn't absolve the cruelty inflicted on Native Americans, but some of it was between tribes themselves.