More Research that cannot be denied by the United States

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Garrison, T. A., and O’Brien, G., (2017): The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies; University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln; 279 Pages.

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Page 96 – 97

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For hundreds of years, the South was a borderlands region, where diverse populations of settlers, slaves, and Indians lived in close proximity. As in other borderlands, ideas, technology, and even people moved between the porous bounds that separated colonial and indigenous societies. Warfare, in particular, occasioned some of the heaviest trafficking. This creolization began in the sixteenth century, when Hernando de Soto's soldiers discarded their heavy chain mail in favor of Native armor made from woven cane, and when they forced hundreds of Indians—mostly women—to serve as sexual partners and servants. Although scalping was unknown to sixteenth-century Europeans (who preferred to sever entire heads), colonists quickly adopted the practice and even innovated, adding ears and eyes to their menagerie of war trophies. Euro-Americans also borrowed methods of execution from Indians. In a gruesome divide-and-rule strategy used during the 1729-1731 war between the Natchez Indians and French Louisiana, colonial officials handed three enslaved Africans who had aided the Natchez over to Choctaw warriors. Employing their usual method of executing captured warriors, the Choctaws burned the enslaved men alive on a public square in New Orleans. A Jesuit observer believed that the execution had succeeded in "inspir[ing] all the Negroes with a new horror of the Savages," but he fretted over the fact that "our own people, it is said, begin to be accustomed to this barbarous spectacle."

Carolinians took a more active role in the ritual deaths of several captured Indians during the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715. In January of 1712, colonial commander John Barnwell invaded Tuscarora territory, and his army, largely composed of allied Indian warriors, took hundreds captive. On at least two occasions, Barnwell ordered soldiers to torture and burn captured Indians alive, and, after the capture of Narhantes Fort, white troops from South Carolina reportedly "cooked the flesh of an Indian in good condition and ate it." Captivity was part of a much broader exchange of martial values in the American borderlands, where ritualized violence became a mutually intelligible language.19

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