The Comanche Were Brutal and Awesome and Violent and I Love Them
Humanizing humans is good
A two-part Twitter thread on the history of the Comanche has gone viral. I don’t know if any of it is true; while I am unqualified to do literally anything, I am somehow even more unqualified to parse that particular history.1 What I do know is that if the stories are remotely true, I’d like to know more. The thread portrays the Comanche as expert and ruthless horse warriors existing in a political landscape that has long since disappeared. I find it interesting because…well, it’s interesting. And it’s got me thinking about how nuanced and even unflattering portrayals of people are infinitely more humanizing than the one-dimensional “noble savage” tropes that we usually see in TV and movies.
The thread includes (though is not really about) acts of torture that the Comanche are said to have done. For example:
“Men would be tortured, sometimes staked to the ground facing the sun with their eyelids cut off.”
“Captives were taken back to camp so that the women could torture and wring every ounce of pain out of the body. White girls would have their noses cut off to the bone, scarred with flames, then made to be slaves in camp.”
“They cut off the soles of the feet of one man, made him run for miles tied to a horse, then killed him.”
For the record: I Might Be Wrong reaffirms its longstanding opposition to staking people to the ground facing the sun with their eyelids cut off. And our six-part debate about the ethics of cutting off the soles of someone’s feet and making them run for miles before killing them is coming soon.
If you pitched a movie containing these elements to a Hollywood executive, they would probably go crashing through the nearest window somewhere around the phrase “eyelids cut off”. If they somehow survived the fall, they would limp down the street with their hands over their ears to avoid being further contaminated by the unsavory pitch. They would then travel to Finland and have the pitch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-ed from their brain. A story that involves Native Americans doing horrible things is a potential career Chernobyl, and most execs will flee from the potential fallout as quickly as they can.