North American Indians. "Bloodthirsty Indians" (35 photos) Indian girl

It is difficult to convey reliably the reverent horror with which educated Europe looked at the Indian tribes. North America.
“The battle cry of the Indians is presented to us as something so terrible that it is impossible to endure. It is called a sound that will make even the most courageous veteran lower his weapon and leave the ranks.
It will deafen his hearing, his soul will freeze from him. This battle cry will not allow him to hear the order and feel shame, and in general to retain any sensations other than the horror of death.
But it was not so much the war cry itself that frightened the blood in the veins, but what it foreshadowed. The Europeans who fought in North America sincerely felt that falling alive into the hands of monstrous painted savages meant a fate worse than death.
This led to torture, human sacrifice, cannibalism and scalping (all of which had ritual significance in Indian culture). This was especially helpful in stimulating their imagination.

The worst was probably being roasted alive. One of the British survivors of Monongahela in 1755 was tied to a tree and burned alive between two bonfires. The Indians at this time were dancing around.
When the moans of the agonizing man became too insistent, one of the warriors ran between two fires and cut off the unfortunate genitals, leaving him to bleed to death. Then the howling of the Indians ceased.

Rufus Putman, a private in the provincial troops of Massachusetts, on July 4, 1757, wrote the following in his diary. The soldier, captured by the Indians, "was found fried in the saddest way: the fingernails were pulled out, his lips were cut off to the very chin from below and to the very nose from above, his jaw was exposed.
He was scalped, his chest was cut open, his heart was torn out, and his cartridge bag was put in his place. The left hand was pressed against the wound, the tomahawk was left in his guts, the dart pierced him through and remained in place, the little finger on the left hand and the small toe on the left foot were cut off.

In the same year, Father Roubaud, a Jesuit, met a group of Ottawa Indians who were leading several English prisoners with ropes around their necks through the forest. Shortly thereafter, Roubaud caught up with the fighting party and pitched his tent next to their tents.
He saw a large group of Indians sitting around a fire eating roasted meat on sticks as if it were lamb on a small spit. When he asked what kind of meat it was, the Ottawa Indians replied that it was a fried Englishman. They pointed to the cauldron in which the rest of the cut body was being boiled.
Nearby sat eight prisoners of war, frightened to death, who were forced to watch this bear feast. People were seized with indescribable horror, similar to that experienced by Odysseus in Homer's poem, when the monster Scylla dragged his comrades off board the ship and threw them in front of his cave to devour at his leisure.
Roubaud, horrified, tried to protest. But the Ottawa Indians would not even listen to him. One young warrior rudely said to him:
- You have a French taste, I have an Indian. For me, this is good meat.
He then invited Roubaud to join their meal. It looks like the Indian was offended when the priest refused.

The Indians showed particular cruelty to those who fought with them by their own methods or almost mastered their hunting art. Therefore, irregular forest guard patrols were at particular risk.
In January 1757, Private Thomas Browne of Capt. Thomas Spykman's green service unit of Rogers' Rangers was wounded fighting Abenaki Indians on a snowy field.
He crawled out of the battlefield and met with two other wounded soldiers, one of them named Baker, the other was Captain Spykman himself.
Tormented by pain and horror because of everything that was happening, they thought (and it was a big foolishness) that they could safely build a fire.
The Abenaki Indians appeared almost instantly. Brown managed to crawl away from the fire and hide in the bushes, from which he watched the unfolding tragedy. The Abenaki began by stripping and scalping Spykman while he was still alive. They then left, taking Baker with them.

Brown said the following: “Seeing this terrible tragedy, I decided to crawl as far as possible into the forest and die there from my wounds. But since I was close to Captain Spykman, he saw me and begged, for heaven's sake, to give him a tomahawk so he could kill himself!
I refused him and urged him to pray for mercy, since he could only live a few more minutes in this terrifying condition on the frozen ground covered with snow. He asked me to tell his wife, if I live to see the time when I return home, about his terrible death.
Soon after, Brown was captured by the Abenaki Indians, who returned to the place where they had scalped. They intended to put Spykman's head on a pole. Brown managed to survive captivity, Baker did not.
"The Indian women split the pine tree into small chips, like small skewers, and plunged them into his flesh. Then they laid down the fire. After that they proceeded to perform their ritual rite with spells and dances around it, I was ordered to do the same.
According to the law of preservation of life, I had to agree ... With a heavy heart, I portrayed fun. They cut his bonds and made him run back and forth. I heard the poor man plead for mercy. Due to unbearable pain and torment, he threw himself into the fire and disappeared.

But of all the Indian practices, scalping, which continued well into the nineteenth century, attracted the most horrified European attention.
Despite a number of absurd attempts by some benign revisionists to claim that scalping originated in Europe (perhaps among the Visigoths, Franks or Scythians), it is quite clear that it was practiced in North America long before the Europeans appeared there.
Scalps have played a significant role in North American culture, as they were used for three different purposes (and possibly all three): to "replace" the dead people of the tribe (remember how the Indians always worried about the heavy losses suffered in the war, therefore, about decrease in the number of people) to propitiate the spirits of the dead, as well as to mitigate the grief of widows and other relatives.

French veterans of the Seven Years' War in North America left many written memories of this terrible form of mutilation. Here is an excerpt from Pusho's notes:
“Immediately after the soldier fell, they ran up to him, kneeled on his shoulders, holding a lock of hair in one hand and a knife in the other. They began to separate the skin from the head and tear it off in one piece. They did this very quickly , and then, demonstrating the scalp, they made a cry, which they called the "cry of death."
Here is a valuable account of a French eyewitness, who is known only by his initials - J.K.B.: "The savage immediately grabbed his knife and quickly made cuts around the hair, starting from the top of the forehead and ending with the back of the head at neck level. Then he stood up foot on the shoulder of his victim, who was lying face down, and with both hands pulled the scalp by the hair, starting at the back of the head and moving forward ...
After the savage scalped, if he was not afraid that he would be persecuted, he would get up and begin to scrape off the blood and flesh left there.
Then he would make a circlet of green branches, pull his scalp over it like a tambourine, and wait for a while for it to dry in the sun. The skin was dyed red, the hair was tied into a knot.
Then the scalp was attached to a long pole and carried triumphantly on the shoulder to the village or to the place chosen for it. But as he approached every place in his path, he uttered as many cries as he had scalps, announcing his arrival and demonstrating his courage.
Sometimes there could be up to fifteen scalps on one pole. If there were too many of them for one pole, then the Indians decorated several poles with scalps.

Nothing can diminish the cruelty and barbarism of the North American Indians. But their actions must be seen both within the context of their warlike cultures and animistic religions, and within the larger picture of the general cruelty of life in the eighteenth century.
Urban dwellers and intellectuals, who were awed by cannibalism, torture, human sacrifice, and scalping, enjoyed attending public executions. And under them (before the introduction of the guillotine), men and women sentenced to death died a painful death within half an hour.
The Europeans did not mind when "traitors" were subjected to the barbaric ritual of executions by hanging, drowning or quartering, as in 1745 the Jacobite rebels were executed after the rebellion.
They did not particularly protest when the heads of the executed were impaled in front of the cities as an ominous warning.
They tolerably endured hanging on chains, dragging sailors under the keel (usually a fatal punishment), as well as corporal punishment in the army - so cruel and severe that many soldiers died under the whip.

European soldiers in the eighteenth century were forced to obey military discipline with a whip. American native warriors fought for prestige, glory, or the common good of a clan or tribe.
Moreover, the wholesale looting, looting, and general violence that followed most successful sieges in European wars was beyond anything the Iroquois or Abenaki were capable of.
Before the holocausts of terror, like the sacking of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years' War, the atrocities at Fort William Henry pale. Also in 1759, in Quebec, Woolf was completely satisfied with the shelling of the city with incendiary cannonballs, not worrying about the suffering that the innocent civilians of the city had to endure.
He left behind devastated areas, using scorched earth tactics. The war in North America was bloody, brutal and horrific. And it is naive to consider it as a struggle of civilization against barbarism.

In addition to what has been said, the specific question of scalping contains an answer. First of all, the Europeans (especially irregulars like Rogers' Rangers) responded to scalping and mutilation in their own way.
The fact that they were able to sink to barbarism was facilitated by a generous reward - 5 pounds sterling for one scalp. It was a tangible addition to the ranger's salary.
The spiral of atrocities and counter-atrocities soared dizzyingly after 1757. Since the fall of Louisbourg, the soldiers of the victorious Highlander Regiment have been decapitating any Indians that crossed their path.
One eyewitness reports: "We killed a huge number of Indians. The Rangers and soldiers of the Highlander Regiment did not give mercy to anyone. We scalped everywhere. But you cannot distinguish a scalp taken by the French from a scalp taken by the Indians."

The European scalping epidemic became so rampant that in June 1759 General Amherst had to issue an emergency order.
"All reconnaissance units, as well as all other units of the army under my command, despite all the opportunities presented, are prohibited from scalping women or children belonging to the enemy.
If possible, take them with you. If this is not possible, then they should be left in place without causing them any harm.
But what use could such a military directive be if everyone knew that the civilian authorities were offering a scalp bounty?
In May 1755, the governor of Massachusetts, William Sherl, appointed 40 pounds for the scalp of a male Indian and 20 pounds for the scalp of a woman. This seemed to be in keeping with the "code" of degenerate warriors.
But Pennsylvania Governor Robert Hunter Morris showed his genocidal tendencies by targeting the reproductive sex. In 1756 he set a reward of £30 for a man, but £50 for a woman.

In any case, the despicable practice of rewarding scalps backfired in the most disgusting way: the Indians went on a scam.
It all started with an obvious deception, when the American natives began to make "scalps" from horse skins. Then the practice of killing so-called friends and allies was introduced just to make money.
In a well-documented case that occurred in 1757, a group of Cherokee Indians killed people from a friendly Chickasawee tribe just for a reward.
Finally, as almost every military historian has pointed out, the Indians became experts at "multiplication" of scalps. For example, the same Cherokee, according to the general opinion, became such masters that they could make four scalps from each soldier they killed.

A jaguar woman whose speech is like fire. With blurry eyes and a hand armed with a dagger, this is her. Like stars, black sky obsidian, loops of light, moonlight, starlight, all night long. She is the soul of the forest bush. She is a waterfall that no one has seen. She is the place where the sun rests. Expand the universe in all directions and bring it into the house.

Jack Crimmins, Jaguar Woman

Indians ... They are familiar to us from the books of Reed and Cooper. Their sonorous nicknames - Hawkeye, Swift Deer, Big Serpent, made our hearts beat faster in anticipation of the next feat. Who doesn't know Winnetou, St. John's wort, Osceola, or Chingachgook? And what woman didn't want to be that squaw that a real man would protect? Or maybe you were more attracted by the image of the beautiful Pocahontas and you imagined yourself running with the wolves?

What are they, Indian women?
Indian women since the discovery of the New World have been rated as beauties, this is stated in the diary of Columbus's first voyage: "They are all, without exception, tall and well-built. Their facial features are correct, their expression is friendly."

History knows the Great Woman - the leader of the Crow Indian tribe in the upper Missouri, they wrote about her that "her way of life, along with courageous deeds, lifted her to the top of honor and respect ... The Indians were proud of her and sang songs of praise for her, composed after each of her fearless act. When a council of all the chiefs and warriors of the tribe was convened, she took her place among them, being considered the third person in rank among the 160 present.

Among the steppe tribes, “women often took part in raids and were glorified. One of them became the heroine of the book “Running Eagle, Warrior Girl” by W. Schultz”: “Some Indian women were excellent at using weapons and fought on an equal footing with men. They earned ku (a sign of the highest military prowess) and had the right to wear sacred eagle feather headdresses. Such female warriors were known among the Sioux, the Assiniboins, the Blackfoot. And the famous warrior woman from the Crow tribe even became a military leader and one of the leaders of the tribe. ... The Cheyenne had a society of Warrior Women. It was composed unmarried girls usually the daughters of the chiefs of the tribe.

I especially like the amazing names of Indian women - the Woman of the Noon Sky, the Woman of the Thunder Bird Cloud, the Woman of the Middle Earth, the Eternally Standing Woman, the Little Seagull, the Little Fish-Moon, the White Bird, the Big Star, etc. Agree that these are very sonorous and sublime names.

And also Indian women were engaged in needlework, well, how could it be without it? With the discovery of America, the demand for beads increased significantly. Its direct consumer was the local population - the Indians. Indian women used beads to decorate suede, as a decoration of national clothes, to create necklaces, bracelets and other decorative elements. At that time, it was not quite familiar to us beads, but rather beads of various sizes. These beads accompanied the Indians from childhood: they also made original “rattles” from them, which were hung out at the cradle for decoration.

Native American women learned to work with beads from the age of 7 or 8: the mother taught her daughter embroidery with beads. Education was mandatory, as this was required by the status of a woman who had to be hardworking, since she was responsible for the life of the family and tribe. Girls first embroidered doll dresses, gradually improving their skills, moving on to adult clothes. Almost all the clothes of men and women were subjected to decoration and decoration, from moccasins to headdresses. But everyday clothes were more modest than festive ones.

I would like to pay special attention to the Indian woman-mother. Interesting observations belong to travelers who visited areas of North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, where Indian tribes lived. They stated the fact of an easy pregnancy and painless childbirth among the natives. More than once they had to see how a woman in labor, stopping her galloping horse, and stepping aside, spread a cloak on the snow and calmly gave birth to a child. Then, wrapping the newborn in rags and not experiencing the slightest symptoms of postpartum depression, the woman mounted her horse again and caught up with her fellow tribesmen, who often did not even notice that she had a childbirth.

Later, scientists explained this phenomenon by the fact that, within the framework of difficult living conditions and the need to survive in harsh natural conditions women do not allow themselves to show generic fears and complexes, which ensures the easy nature of the course of pregnancy and for the most part painless childbirth. From a psychological point of view, this is due to the presence of a strong psychophysical preparation aimed at the ability to mobilize one's will at the right time.

As you can see, Indian women have numerous virtues and undoubtedly they have a lot to learn. It only remains for me to wish you to always be a Bright Star, a Vigilant Owl and stop the horse of your luck at a gallop.

Today we are embarking on yet another fascinating journey through time and space - one hundred years back to the territory of the United States of America. These rare and beautiful vintage portraits of young Native American girls were made in the late 1800s, but despite their impressive "age", many of them are still perfectly preserved and are of good clarity and clarity.

In traditional Indian culture, women have always been respected, and although their role in society, as a rule, was very different from that of men, they often had the same rights as men. They owned the house and everything in it, and in some tribes the woman was even responsible for the choice of housing. In addition, the activities of women in Indian tribes have always been central to the welfare of society.

Let's see what the young representatives of the indigenous American people looked like at the turn of the 19th century. Their extraordinary beauty and unique style cannot fail to impress!

Marcia Pascal - half-Cherokee, daughter of US Army officer George Pascal, 1880s.

Oobi, Kiowa, 1894.

Hattie Tom, Apache, 1899.

Native American girl, 1870-1900.

Gertrude Three Fingers, Cheyenne Representative, 1869-1904.

Cherokee Nanyehee, Lakota.

Unknown Indian girl, Lakota, 1890.

Elsie Vance Chestuen, Chiricahua.

Indian girl in traditional dress.

Taos Pueblo girl, 1880-1890.

Tsavatenok girl, 1914.

Hopi girl, 1895.

A young Ute woman, 1880-1900.

Kiowa girl, 1892.

Sweet Spout, Cheyenne, 1878.

Man is a curious being. We all tend to be interested in those who are not like us, and learn something new. Perhaps it is for this reason that we love to travel so much, communicate with foreigners, learn about the traditions and cultures of other peoples. Let's try to figure out how Indian women differ from European and Russian beautiful ladies, and also find out how to call them correctly.

Who are the Indians?

Indians are the right name for all the indigenous peoples of America. Very often this term is confused with the Indians - the natives of India. And this does not happen by chance. The name was given to the inhabitants of America by the discoverer Christopher Columbus, and he, like most navigators of the 15th century, believed that India was located across the ocean. Interestingly, the Indian women struck him from the very first meetings. In his notes, Columbus wrote that these ladies are tall and have an excellent physique, smile a lot and are distinguished by natural charm.

Today, there are about 1,000 different Indian peoples on the territory of modern America. Remarkably, there were more than 2,000 of them at the time of Columbus' voyage.

Indian woman. What is the correct name for the fair sex among the Indians?

People who are not fond of anthropology and the culture of the indigenous peoples of America cannot always immediately remember the correct name of the local natives. With men, it is even more or less clear: an Indian lives in India, and an Indian is a Native American. If you want to give the impression of an educated and literate person, try to remember this distinction and not get confused.

So, we figured out the men, but what are the Indian women called? It's simple: Indian. What is curious: this word is appropriate for representatives of indigenous American tribes, and for beautiful ladies from India.

An interesting fact: today in the United States, against the backdrop of mass propaganda of tolerance, the word "Indian" is practically not used, more often a more correct definition is used: "Native American".

What are they, real Indians?

Modern culture in fiction about life in the Wild West most often gives all the main adventures to men. But in reality it is not so. Indian women are not only the keepers of the hearth and excellent needlewomen. Many of the fair sex among the indigenous peoples of America were fearless warriors. And such a phenomenon as a female leader of a tribe occurs today. But still, girls are still trained in needlework and household duties from birth. Many tribes have elaborate traditional attire. Weaving, beadwork and other handicraft techniques have been intensively taught to mother's daughters since the age of 7-8.

The Indians, who have retained their tribal affiliation, reverently preserve all the traditions and customs of their people. Remarkably, many modern people lead a completely modern lifestyle, visit large cities and enjoy the benefits of civilization.

The life of modern Indian women

Today Indians and white women are equal in rights. In many indigenous tribes, young girls are allowed to receive education away from home, and marriages with members of other nationalities are not uncommon. And yet, many Indian women prefer to lead a traditional way of life and not leave their native villages anywhere.

The culture of many tribes is striking in its originality. Here they still believe the predictions of shamans, respect the elders, live in large families, do not know evil and envy. It is believed that Indian women by nature have a very good health. Traditional Indian families usually have many children. At the same time, pregnancy and childbirth among Indian women are easy and without problems, despite the low level of medical care by modern European and American standards.

What is remarkable: among the representatives of indigenous American peoples, there are many people who have achieved public recognition and world fame. Among the Indians and Indians there are well-known figures of culture and show business, politicians, athletes and simply highly qualified specialists in certain areas.