Misconceptions About Native Americans w/S.C. Gwynne | Joe Rogan

It's also striking because you realize over the course of the book and then more books that I've gotten into subsequently that this was something that was going on before the white settlers even got there. That this way of life and the raiding and the killing, that's not what we associate Native Americans with. We associate with us with taking the Native Americans' land and them fighting back and that's when things get ugly. But it turns out this was just a wild way of life that they had had for who knows how many years. One of the things that surprised people when I wrote this book, and I didn't know that I was going to be surprising people because I was just reporting what I found, was that very thing that this was, I think people are often used to the bury my heart, wounded need narrative of Native Americans which is as victims. And there's no question that they were victims of a westward rolling empire and 378 broken treaties and we can just go on and we know what that narrative is like. But the narrative that I told was a narrative of power, of dominance, of power which came with brutality too. And I think it's surprising. It was a fact. It was a fact that if you go back in time, these Native American tribes, that eventually got crushed as the Comanches did and put on a reservation somewhere and had their livelihood taken away from them. But really anyway, it's a huge deal. And a narrative that I think to me that doesn't take into account the enormous power and dominance and behavior of Comanches is just missing half the narrative. Well, it's so fascinating because it's essentially they were living like Stone Age people and they were doing it very recently. They were doing it like in terms of the way Europe is, you could go and see buildings in Italy that were built long before any of this stuff happened, long before the settlers started encountering them and they were living like this in this sort of, I mean it's very romantic. The way they lived, just chasing the buffalo and killing them and then eating only buffalo meat and then doing very little farming, picking some berries and nuts, and that's about it. I mean it was just eating meat and raiding and killing. They were hunter-gatherers. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what they were. And what the horse allowed them to do was to, which is what they had been before, the horse allowed them to do that only just really, really, really well. In other words, they weren't in the position of becoming agricultural Indians. The horse gave them this ability to, and as you said, they got everything from the buffalo clothing and lodging and tools and saddles and bridles and food. I mean everything came from the buffalo. So the horse just enabled them to do this at an incredibly sophisticated level. It's the most sad part of the story is the extirpating of the buffalo. I mean that's not the most sad, but one of their way of life. It's almost like you know what happened, but I'm rooting for them in some weird way. You know? I mean I know that they're not going to win, but there's something about the way they lived that seems so exciting.