“The Plains Indians were cruel, bloodthirsty and uncivilised.

”
Explain, using your own knowledge, whether or not you agree with this
interpretation.

The supposedly bloodthirsty practice of scalping is a primary example of why

the Europeans who occupied America labelled the Plains Indians cruel. Though to
Westerners at the time and now it may have seemed cruel to cut the skin off the top
of a enemies head, for the Plains Indians it held significant religious meaning. They
believed that if you were scalped then you lost your soul and therefore could not
pass on to the Happy Hunting Ground (their equivalent of the Christian heaven) after
you died. To be able to regain a soul and therefore pass on successfully, you had to
scalp another person. The scalps were also displayed as trophies, showing how
brave the warrior was, a tradition going back generations, similar to counting coup.
So what may appear to people who had little to no education of other religions apart
from their own, which deplores acts such as scalping, this practice that the Plains
Indians performed would have appeared, no doubt, to be very uncivilised, though in
fact was rooted in the complex religion and traditions of a civilised society.
Another practice considered cruel by the European people was the sick and
elderly being left behind when the tribe moved to follow the migration patterns of the
buffalo they fed off. What the Europeans didn’t understand was that if the tribe had to
slow down for one person, there was a very real chance they would lose the track of
the buffalo and the whole tribe could potentially die of lack of food if they did not find
another herd in time. Elders were highly respected in the tribes as counsellors and
teachers of the young, and they knew that they the individual must be sacrificed for
the group, so when the time came when they couldn’t keep up any more, they asked
to be left behind. On the harsh Plains, the elderly and sick would quickly die of
exposure, from either the biting winds, baking days or freezing nights. From the view
of the Westerners, this was merciless and disgusting behaviour, but they often did
not understand the sacrifices which had to be made in such an arid place to keep up
with your only source of survival and that the people who were left behind chose to
be abandoned.
Furthermore, the act of polygamy, banned by both Christian and conventional
law, was widely practiced amongst the Plains Indians. There were no laws against it
in their faith and it was even encouraged in a society where there were fewer men
than women, so that rich men would take more wives and all the women in the tribe
were looked after and as many children as possible were produced to continue the
bloodline and hunting success of the tribe. Obviously, polygamy was considered
contemptible in Western society so the Plains Indians were considered backward
and immoral for this practice.
The environment itself in which the Plains Indians lived was uncivilised and
considered unsuitable for habitation or cultivation by early explorers of the Plains.
This further reinforced the idea of the Indians as creatures close to the animals they
lived off. Because the Indians lived in such isolated groups, much like a pack of
animals in the Europeans eyes, they were treated as such but were in fact a proud
and resilient people who did not take to being treated as beasts.