Thanks for another great, one-sided, hypocritical, politically correct DE editorial grounded in smug, self-satisfied, willful ignorance of history, anthropology, and the cultures involved.

I find the now politically correct term Native American to be a bigoted, racist slur. The aborigines present on this continent were no more native than Japanese honeysuckle, Europeans, or kudzu. The fact that they arrived first is only an accident of history.

The aborigines present at the time of contact were hardly love-bead wearing innocents living in the woods and grooving with nature. The very fact that the indigenes were called savages by the Europeans (whose barbaric behavior you condemn with 500 year hindsight) should tell you something about their social graces. Should you ever design to read the actual first-hand accounts of some of the parties they threw for their captives , your perceptions of the sweet, loving Aztecs, the gentle Iroquois, and the innocent, good-natured Mohawk and most of the rest might change. At least the Europeans didn’t eat their captives after they finished torturing them.

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Slavery was practiced by every indigenous tribe that had a culture capable of supporting slaves. The aborigines systematically tortured, raped, looted, pillaged, plundered and ravaged each other with the same enthusiasm they lavished on the European tribes that were invading them. They engaged in genocide, chemical warfare, and ecological devastation to the best of their technologically limited abilities.

I know that this information, while available to anyone who can read, is not currently politically popular. Nor is it apparently taught at SIU. The fact is that five hundred years ago, two dissimilar cultural traditions met and did what dissimilar cultures always do, have always done, and unfortunately will probably always do when they meet. The one fact that you failed to mention is that finally, after five hundred years of continuous overt and covert warfare, the two sides are talking and learning from each other. Inflammatory, one-sided, biased, patently false, bigoted, racist editorials like yours are not helping the dialog that took rivers of blood to establish.