I dunno man. Its the one thing that made me unable to connect to Indians in books.If you wanted to disrespect a corpse I could understand how a dick would want to do that, cut off a few limbs or the head. But who was fucked up enough to bring up scalping? Its like some Indians straight off the Ice Bridge Connecting Russia and Canada kill some scouts of an enemy tribe and they wanna show their enemies they mean business. And one guy in the back brings up cutting off his scalp like scaling a fish. Seriously whats the significance of it?
And they did it while alive, too.
>>575407
They did it precisely to provoke your reaction.
Except when they were doing it, it was a real risk to white people and instilled fear as well as disgust. Whites were less likely to travel into Indian lands to settle if they feared being scalped.
>>575407
Scalping is much older than Indians and far from exclusive to them.
"...a reexamination of a 300,000 year old fossil skull found in the same region (Northern Ethiopia) shows evidence of having been scalped."
-Tim D. White, UC Berkley
That's just the readiest source I have on hand feel free to do your own research
I'm not positive but I think I remember reading somewhere reliable that the British and french actually payed their Indian allies to terrorize enemy colonists with scalping, and that was the main introduction of the practice to the Americas. Not sure on that though.
>>575407
When the stakes are high humans get brutal. Scalping was a pretty creative form of that.
It's pretty badass, really. Being slung on a cross is probably my favorite brutal execution, though
>>575407
It's like head hunting for rewards, and later trophies.
Scalps are much easier to carry and remove from the body than heads. Other body parts in other cultures served the same purposes, ears, noses, hands, etc.
>>575407
It was actually a european thing, We paid bounties for natives to bring scalps of opposing tribesmen.
>>575407
The Americans did it to any natives they got.
>>575407
>But who was fucked up enough to bring up scalping?
The French. They paid bounties on the scalps as proof of the kill.
>>575818
>>576036
>The Crow Creek massacre occurred around 1325 AD
>A conservative estimate of villagers who suffered scalping is 90%, but it could have been as high as 100%. This is based on skeletal remains that exhibit cuts on their skulls indicative of scalping.[12] Men, women, and children were scalped; the only difference was that younger children were cut higher on the skull than other groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Creek_massacre
>>576263
Thanks. Can't believe anybody would think that Europeans introduced scalping.
>>576036
>The Europeans introduced it to the Americas
HAHA yeah right
Those evil europeans!
There's a scene in The Last Mohican where they scalp Officer Munro. Yeah, it is nasty.
>>576036
They didn't introduce it you spanner, it emerged in both the old world and new independantly.
It was just a way of collecting bounties for kills, heads were more commonly used as it was more obvious. But scalping became an easier alternative.
Indian scalps were bought in new mexico and texas as it was an effective way of culling troublesome Indians (ofc many peaceful tribes were invariably scalped too).
>>576875
Also scalps were usually done on corpses as who the fuck has time to hold down and scalp a prisoner, films and books have led many people to believe that scalping people live was common.
