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A review by roxymaybe
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
1.0
Shockingly racist for a book published this century. Frequently refers to native tribes as "savages" "primitives" and "backwards." The amount of positive reviews of it are, frankly, embarrassing.
A few choice excerpts:
"While the Comanches had a limited vocabulary to describe most things, a trait common to primitive peoples, their equine lexicon was large and minutely descriptive."
Although not the most offensive thing in the book by a HUGE margin, this common misconception is particularly annoying because Geoffrey Pullum's "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" was published in NINETEEN NINETY-ONE, and yet it is still somehow acceptable to say that "primitive" peoples have unsophisticated languages! This is just plain intellectual dishonesty.
"...it was not an empire in the traditional sense, and the Comanche knew nothing of the political structures that stitched European empires together."
Some nice Eurocentrism there, as if it matters at ALL what the Americans knew of European culture. Ask a European peasant in 1543 to tell you anything about political structures a whole ocean away and see if you get a coherent answer!
"They were descendants of the primitive hunters, who had crossed the land bridge from Asia to America in successive migration from 11,000 and 5,000 BC, and in the millenia that followed, they had scarcely advanced at all."
Again, check in with those European Dark Age peasants about hygiene practices or whether someone accused of a crime had a right to be tried by a jury of his peers, and see what kind of "advancements" THEY made in the millenia since arriving in Europe.
After a graphic detail of a white European woman's brutal mistreatment by her Comanche captors (from her own account), the author almost manages to have some perspective by saying that European readers would naturally be making moral judgements, but manages to fall back onto those very same moral judgements himself: "Not only did they [the Comanches] inflict horrific suffering, but from all evidence, they enjoyed it. This was perhaps the worst part, and certainly the most frightening part. Making people scream in pain was fun for them, just as it is fun for young boys in modern America to torture frogs or pull the legs off grasshoppers. Boys, presumably, grow out of that. For Indians, it was an important part of their adult culture, and one they accepted without challenge."
I really feel like the author is trying to dispel the "noble savage" myth (he says as much himself), but then takes the other extreme by just portraying them as barbarians who brutalise helpless white girls (a weird amount of references to the "blue eyes" of the captives). Does he not realize that, just like every other group of humans on the planet, sometimes you will encounter kindness, and others, cruelty? I really think you'd get a more nuanced account in one of those racist Disney cartoons from the 1940's. Also, not for nothing, the idea that white American boys grow out of their sadistic pleasures is itself questionable.
Maybe by the end of the book the author pulls a 180 and admits that everything in the first half is irresponsible sensationalism peppered with half-truths and whole disrespect. Maybe the Comanches really were a brutal breed of barbaric beasts without the brain capacity to be civil to white women. I don't know. I kept shouting "what?!" in public at the egregious and excessive disparaging commentary. I had to stop reading for the sake of my own blood pressure. In short, the person who recommended this book to me is no longer my friend.
For your consideration, if you are interested in the native peoples of the Americas:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language by Geoffrey K. Pullum (the eponymous essay is available to read freely with a quick Google search)
*Please note I had the audiobook version, so the punctuation in the quotations may be slightly off
A few choice excerpts:
"While the Comanches had a limited vocabulary to describe most things, a trait common to primitive peoples, their equine lexicon was large and minutely descriptive."
Although not the most offensive thing in the book by a HUGE margin, this common misconception is particularly annoying because Geoffrey Pullum's "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" was published in NINETEEN NINETY-ONE, and yet it is still somehow acceptable to say that "primitive" peoples have unsophisticated languages! This is just plain intellectual dishonesty.
"...it was not an empire in the traditional sense, and the Comanche knew nothing of the political structures that stitched European empires together."
Some nice Eurocentrism there, as if it matters at ALL what the Americans knew of European culture. Ask a European peasant in 1543 to tell you anything about political structures a whole ocean away and see if you get a coherent answer!
"They were descendants of the primitive hunters, who had crossed the land bridge from Asia to America in successive migration from 11,000 and 5,000 BC, and in the millenia that followed, they had scarcely advanced at all."
Again, check in with those European Dark Age peasants about hygiene practices or whether someone accused of a crime had a right to be tried by a jury of his peers, and see what kind of "advancements" THEY made in the millenia since arriving in Europe.
After a graphic detail of a white European woman's brutal mistreatment by her Comanche captors (from her own account), the author almost manages to have some perspective by saying that European readers would naturally be making moral judgements, but manages to fall back onto those very same moral judgements himself: "Not only did they [the Comanches] inflict horrific suffering, but from all evidence, they enjoyed it. This was perhaps the worst part, and certainly the most frightening part. Making people scream in pain was fun for them, just as it is fun for young boys in modern America to torture frogs or pull the legs off grasshoppers. Boys, presumably, grow out of that. For Indians, it was an important part of their adult culture, and one they accepted without challenge."
I really feel like the author is trying to dispel the "noble savage" myth (he says as much himself), but then takes the other extreme by just portraying them as barbarians who brutalise helpless white girls (a weird amount of references to the "blue eyes" of the captives). Does he not realize that, just like every other group of humans on the planet, sometimes you will encounter kindness, and others, cruelty? I really think you'd get a more nuanced account in one of those racist Disney cartoons from the 1940's. Also, not for nothing, the idea that white American boys grow out of their sadistic pleasures is itself questionable.
Maybe by the end of the book the author pulls a 180 and admits that everything in the first half is irresponsible sensationalism peppered with half-truths and whole disrespect. Maybe the Comanches really were a brutal breed of barbaric beasts without the brain capacity to be civil to white women. I don't know. I kept shouting "what?!" in public at the egregious and excessive disparaging commentary. I had to stop reading for the sake of my own blood pressure. In short, the person who recommended this book to me is no longer my friend.
For your consideration, if you are interested in the native peoples of the Americas:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language by Geoffrey K. Pullum (the eponymous essay is available to read freely with a quick Google search)
*Please note I had the audiobook version, so the punctuation in the quotations may be slightly off