On the Comanches at their peak (early 19th century):
…warriors and women, lived a short, perilous, brutish existence, full of pain and sorrow, but also filled with marvelous exhilaration and exultation. The patterns of their life, with the male population kept low by hunting and warfare and the females kept barren by constant riding and heavy labors, assured that they would never overpopulate the plains. The Comanches could not have destroyed the buffalo, their staff of life, in a million years of this closed cycle. They lived, or seemed to live, in a world without end, and it was the only world they knew or wanted to know…
On Anglo-American children captured during Camanche raids:
…Such children quickly forgot their native language and old associations and strove to become accepted Comanches. The girls looked forward to becoming the wives of great warriors. The boys dreamed of the day when they would become an honored member of the warriors’ circle, or lead their own war band. The children absorbed the beliefs and drives of the People, and many who returned or were rescued admitted candidly that they had learned to love the wild life on the plains, with its thrills, raw dangers, exaltations, and leisure that no civilized existence could match. Once children adjusted to Comanche life they were almost never able to readjust again to civilization. They became as culturally wild and stubborn as born Comanches. The process seemingly could not be reversed…
On the chasm of world views:
…But the Amerindians were isolated from all Europeans by world-views and cultural divergences that had been widening for at least four thousand years. To become “civilized” like Anglo-Americans (or Spaniards), the truly primitive tribesman had to do more than learn a new language and pick up a few new techniques. He had to betray his whole concept of the world and man’s role in it, and destroy all his cultural instincts and laws and beliefs—everything that to him seemed natural or sacred. The Amerindian spirit world and the European universe of cause and effect did not just exist on higher and lower technical planes. They were utterly disparate and innately hostile; the freedoms of one were the abject tyrannies of the other, and vice versa. The Amerindian adjusted and attuned to nature, gaining an enormous spiritual intoxication but little power over the real or physical world. The Indo-Europeans who reached America eschewed spiritual intoxication and even spiritual peace while mastering the physical world—even if they had to destroy it—by appalling, incessant labor. Even in the hungriest bands, no Amerindian warrior accepted such crushing tyranny. The Indian, as an Indian, could not go very far down any white man’s road to civilization…
On conflicts of interest:
…the British had had no experience with a primeval wilderness. The first settlers could not have survived had they not learned agronomy and woods lore from the tribes that received them with the hospitality reserved for distant travelers. Once ensconced, the planters and Pilgrims were compelled to attack and destroy the wilderness in order to create civilization as they knew it. They felled trees, made roads, put up fences, and erected permanent structures; they carved out fields and made smoke rise from a thousand raw clearings. A mere handful of industrious white men in a region soon utterly changed the face and nature of the land forever, ruining it for the ancient uses of the Amerindians…
On history repeating itself:
“All men from Washington are liars” –Spotted Tail, Dakota war chief
…First contacts between the strangers were usually peaceful. The Indians lacked hatred for strangers; their energies were engaged in enmities with neighboring tribes. …
…The bloodiest Indian wars were actually fought along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century, never on the western plains. Here, the whites suffered their greatest losses in proportion to total numbers. Thousands of English colonists were killed from the Virginia tidewater to New England when at last the various eastern confederacies took the war trail in despair, to throw the encroaching newcomers back into the ocean….
On feminism:
…The individual family groups were ruled by a tyranny of biology and circumstance. Only males had the power to hunt and fight, the two roles that ensured immediate survival. All other work logically fell to females, with one symbolic exception—men made weapons. The males being stronger, though not necessarily more aggressive, they could enforce their dominion over females and family. The male-female roles had long been set in hardening custom-cement. Females had become inferior and subordinate. Among the Nermernuh as among most other Amerindians, women had become almost chattels, as the ancient practice of wife-immolation revealed…