God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.
Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.
Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.
The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.
Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.
A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.
Likewise, a society does not need to be ethically pure for violent conquest and subjugation of that society to be ethically monstrous.
Also, a person is not the society they come from, and the moral deserts of that society (or its military, or its ruling class) should not be confused for theirs. The average Aztec civilian may have been complicit in some loose way in their state's imperialism, as the average Japanese civilian was in their military's atrocities in China, as the average American was in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but no one with a scrap of moral sense would say that's enough to judge that each deserves to be murdered or enslaved. Moctezuma may have been a brutal imperialist cut from the same cloth as the conquistadors who killed him, but the same is not true of the hundreds of thousands of his subjects who died in the Spanish conquest.
The uwu-washing is obviously a response to centuries of colonialist propaganda painting indigenous peoples as violent, bloodthirsty savages who needed to be exterminated, or at best to have their culture wiped from existence and replaced with a carbon copy of Christian values.
uwu-washing is preferable to justifications for genocide, but it's ultimately making the same mistake: Reducing entire societies to a caricature far too broad to encapsulate an individual, let alone a continent's worth of cultures.
