Where do conservatives get the idea that we weren’t taught about native American tribe wars and raids and all that? And what is their point anyway? That the injustices against them were justified or what?
Posted by worried68
Where do conservatives get the idea that we weren’t taught about native American tribe wars and raids and all that? And what is their point anyway? That the injustices against them were justified or what?
Posted by worried68
4 Comments
No at *all* defending the genocide of the Native Americans or conservative circlejerking about it, but it’s not hard to see where the cultural divide is. The pop culture vision of Native Americans is a Disneyfied enlightened, peaceful people living in concert with nature vs aggressive and destructive colonists.
The cons want to have their own Disneyfied White Man’s Burden bullshit version of history. There’s very little political hay to be made out of “it was a different time, and killing people to take their land was just a much more accepted practice. We can recognize the injustices and blood on our hands without performative self loathing.”
Yes it’s to justify the genocide and violence against them.
These are the same people who didn’t pay attention in school who argue that schools don’t teach you anything useful, plus it allows them to go
“See? Native Americans had wars too so we shouldn’t feel bad about how we treated them”.
Our core national myth, whether or not people realize it these days, is the Frontier Myth. It’s what gave birth to the idea of American exceptionalism, that what made Americans and our ideals superior was that we could go out into a “savage frontier” and through rugged individualism, and superior values, we turned it into civilization. Acknowledging the Native American Genocide is a direct contradiction to that myth, you cannot claim that we are a more enlightened society if we had to participate in those kinds of atrocities to build it.
They may not even completely realize their reasons for doing so, but this leads to an instinctive defensiveness among conservatives, they cling to that idealized version of an America which never existed because it is fundamental to the entire worldview of American conservatism.