Scalping.

Here’s something regarding Native Americans that I have always found to be very interesting..

Scalping.

We have all seen movies that depict the act. One of my favorite movies is Dances With Wolves starring Kevin Costner. There is a scene in the beginning of the film that shows several Native Americans attack and eventually kill a man transporting goods throughout the plains. The scene is definitely violent – and shows the Native Americans shooting the man with several arrows before eventually scalping him.

Here is the link to the YouTube clip of the scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hW4nTYNSEA

 

I always wondered if scalping was a widely used practice by Native American warfare, or if this is just another prime example of films, drawings, and paintings portraying Native Americans as a savage and violent race. I generally assumed that the art of scalping was made-up (I was wrong). It was quite the eye-opener when I read Treuer’s section on scalping in Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask.

He writes “ Early seventeenth-century documents clearly show that scalping was an embedded custom when the French first enetered the Great Lakes. Samuel de Champlain, for example, reported meeting the Algonquians at Tadoussac in 1603 when they were celebrating a victory over the Iroquois and dancing with about a hundred scalps..” (Treuer, p. 19)

I’ve gotta admit – I thought this was pretty cool. However, it also necessary to state the manner in which scalping was WIDELY exaggerated. The overwhelming majority of tribes never scalped their enemies after battle. Deeply embedded propaganda schemes surrounding the art of scalping were created to rally pacifists during the eventual conquest of the western plains. Pretty interesting stuff.

References

Treuer, Anton. Atlas of Indian Nations. National Geographic, 2013. Print.