Al Carroll on Tarantino's scalping

Correspondent Al Carroll comments on Tarantino's Apache Warfare Fiction and Tarantino's Indian Revenge Fantasy:There was scalping done by Indian soldiers in both WW I and WW II. Offhand I recall it being done by Kiowa, Navajo, Ojibwe, Pawnee, and Lakota. There were scalp dances done with actual German scalps in the Kiowa and Pawnee communities. There was also at least one case of Germans being scalped by a Cherokee soldier, which I'll get to in a moment.

There was also an enormous amount of scalping and collecting of Japanese body parts done by Anglo soldiers in WW II. The most famous case was a Japanese skull sent to a white Marine's fiancee, which made the cover of Life magazine. FDR also got sent some Japanese body parts as gifts from a serviceman. He was appalled and threw them away.

What you describe in the film much more resembles the second case, collecting body parts for trophies or doing it to intimidate the enemy. Kiowa and Pawnee scalp dances are done by women to reconcile the spirit of the dead warrior with that of the man who killed him. The same reasoning is behind Navajo scalping, where it's actually the sideburns that are taken, not the whole scalp, and are burned in a ceremony done by the man taking them. I should also add this was not a widely done practice. The Navajo have very strong taboos about viewing or handling the dead, so most Navajo soldiers never did this.

The single case I know of where a Cherokee soldier (actually an officer) scalped German soldiers happened in Italy. He was part of an elite commando unit. The unit ambushed a German patrol. The officer decided to scalp the dead patrol members and leave them sitting by the side of the road, arms neatly crossed, unhelmeted with the bloody heads on display. This was done to intimidate and shock the enemy.

When I first read this account, I thought the officer may have known about Germans' love affair with Karl May books and all the falsehoods in them. In WW I some German commanders actually ordered their snipers to kill Indian soldiers before white ones when possible. There were some articles in both US and German papers where German soldiers were said to be fearful knowing that they would be facing Indian soldiers, fears likely provoked from reading those same May novels.

I don't know of any widespread use of scalping by Cherokee soldiers, or indeed by Cherokee warriors. I did find some accounts where the British, in fact, scalped many Cherokees during their colonial era wars with them.

Cherokee Confederate soldiers were also widely accused by northern newspapers of having scalped Union soldiers. But I couldn't find any evidence to corroborate that, so I consider it wartime propaganda or sensationalism.

You're right that Apaches were far more often the victims of scalping than the ones doing it. Sonora, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa all offered bounties for Apache scalps, which were collected not only by white and Mexican bounty hunters, but by a company of Shawnee, Seminole, and Tarahumara mercenaries called Sahuanos. The O'odham also collected Apache scalps, which they kept in baskets.

BTW, I looked up Tarantino's supposed half Cherokee mother. It made me suspicious, since Cherokee (and Indians in general) generally don't refer to themselves half this or quarter that when identifying, but simply as Cherokee, etc. Tarantino's website says "half Cherokee" but many other sites say "part Cherokee." That includes his own Facebook site.

Quentin Tarantino--Film Director, Actor, and Screenwriter

Tarantino also grew up in Tennessee, where seemingly every white claims to be "part Cherokee." It's long been my opinion that most white Southerners with a story of a Cherokee in the family history were actually told that by family trying to explain away a Black ancestor. I don't know if that's the case with Tarantino. I do think that if his mother were actually Cherokee, he'd have been raised to tell people, "I'm Cherokee" rather than the usual white Southerner claim of "I'm part Cherokee."Comment:  In Tarantino's defense, I think it's better to claim he's "part Cherokee" than to claim he's "Cherokee" when he has no real Indian identity.

There have been a lot of Native soldiers in movies, books, and comic books. Usually they're stereotypically good at hunting, tracking, and killing people. Usually they don't scalp their victims.

For more on the issues raised here, see Defining Who's an Indian and Indians in the Military.

Below:  Little Sure Shot from the Sgt. Rock comics.

Scalping on Tonight Show

Quentin Tarantino appeared on The Tonight Show Tuesday (8/25/09) to plug his movie Inglorious Basterds. He talked about how his characters scalped Nazis as a form of psychological warfare. He joked that Conan O'Brien's hair would make an impressive scalp. He showed a clip of Aldo (Brad Pitt) ordering his men to collect 100 scalps from 100 dead Nazis.

But Tarantino and O'Brien didn't say anything about Indians. There was nothing about how the "basterds" were emulating Apaches. Or about Tarantino's childhood Cherokee revenge fantasy. And certainly nothing about how scalping reinforces the worst Indian stereotypes.

I wonder if this omission was intentional. How would it have sounded for Conan to tell millions of Americans that Tarantino's characters were scalping people like savage Indians? I'm guessing that wouldn't have gone over too well, and Conan probably knew it.

For more on The Tonight Show, see Medicine Crow Joke on Tonight Show and "Chief" Joke on Tonight Show.

Tarantino's Apache warfare fiction

'Inglourious Basterds'

Quentin Tarantino's World War II movie has blood, but its heart doesn't beat.

By Kenneth TuranHere are a few of my not-favorite things: scalps graphically removed, throats savagely slashed, heads brutally beaten by baseball bats, necks forcibly strangled, fingers sadistically twisted in open wounds. The ideal person to be reviewing Quentin Tarantino's violent World War II fantasia, "Inglourious Basterds," I am not, but as the Basterds knew all too well, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do.As I noted before, I don't think the Apaches did much scalping. I think their most notorious form of torture was burying people alive to be eaten by ants. Which is horrific, to be sure, but I doubt the Apaches sat for days watching the victim's suffering. When they tortured people, they didn't necessarily take a sadistic pleasure in it.

I'm not even sure the Apaches believed the terrorist's usual excuse for killing and maiming people: to intimidate everyone else. The book Once They Moved Like the Wind suggests they tortured people for other reasons. To test people's courage through pain, to prevent enemy spirits from stalking them, even to "honor" their foes. You may not agree with their thinking, but it's different from torturing people because they enjoyed seeing them suffer.

Inglourious Basterds presumably doesn't show Aldo the "Apache" burying people alive for days. It wouldn't have been cinematic, but it also wouldn't have fit Tarantino's stereotypical notion of Indian warfare. To him, apparently, Indians are nothing but sadistic savages. They revel in killing viciously, brutally, and cruelly because they're not quite human.

What did most Indians do when the US forced them to give up their freedom? They forswore their warring ways, pledged to uphold the treaties they signed, and began working within the system. Far from being typical, Geronimo was notable as one of the tiny minority of Indians who refused to play by the rules.

So Tarantino has taken an extreme case and built his movie around it. It's as if he found one historically accurate story of a greedy Jew and created a "Jews control the world" fantasy. Or one historically accurate story of a black Uncle Tom and created a Song of the South-style fantasy. Apparently Geronimo is his excuse for a multimillion-dollar movie that exploits the worst Indian stereotypes.

Tarantino's childhood fantasyThe plot alternates among a group of bloodthirsty Jewish American GIs under the command of Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt), a fugitive Jewish woman named Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) who owns a movie theater in Paris and a German SS officer, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who specializes in ferreting out Jews. (The Jewish element may sound strong, but it's just a plot construct: The characters might as well be renegade Benedictine monks for all the difference it makes).Some critics have called Inglourious Basterds a "Jewish revenge fantasy," but that seems to be misleading. Tarantino apparently didn't care about making some moral statement about Jews fighting back. He wanted an excuse to reenact his childhood daydream of Apache-like Cherokees vs. Klansmen.

So he made his "heroes" Jews, since you can't argue with the Jews' desire for vengeance. And he made his "villains" Nazis, because you can't argue with executing war criminals. He basically gave himself a pretext for presenting a couple of hours of gory, gratuitous violence. Watch Jews act like Apaches--i.e., homicidal maniacs--and kill everyone as sadistically as possible!Having just as much fun is Pitt, who seems more relaxed and comfortable in these comic character parts than in conventional leading man roles. His Aldo the Apache, a direct descendant of mountain man Jim Bridger, with an accent to match, does not mince words when he gives his squad of eight their behind-the-German-lines marching orders. The Nazis, he says, need to be "dee-stroyed." And the man himself personally requires 100 Nazi scalps from each of his men.I don't think Jim Bridger, who mainly operated in the Rockies, had anything to do with Apaches or Cherokees. But never mind. His descendants could have even if he didn't.

Again, we see Tarantino's falsification of Indian-style thought. Typically Indian warfare was about humiliating the opponents, not "dee-stroying" them. It was probably rare for a tribe to declare its goal was to wipe an enemy off the face of the earth. That kind of genocidal thinking was much more common among Europeans.

And no way would an Indian leader require a scalp quota. Scalping was all about taking a prize to glorify an individual victory. Indians didn't try to kill large numbers of people so they collect as many scalps as possible.

Conclusion

In short, Tarantino's version of Indian-style revenge is almost a pure fantasy. By highlighting the most extreme elements of Indian culture--Apaches! murder! torture!--he's perpetuated the most extreme Indian stereotypes. Inglourious Basterds isn't much different from 1950s-style Westerns in which people go on a rampage because they're "half-breeds." They kill people because the Indian inside them impels them to.

Perhaps Tarantino's next movie will show characters emulating Indians by honoring their pledge of allegiance to the US. You know, by serving in the military, getting college educations, and passing legislation. Maybe, but I doubt it. Tarantino wants audiences to leer and slaver at Indians, not understand and respect them.

For more on the subject, see Tarantino's Indian Revenge Fantasy and The Best Indian Movies.

Below:  Tarantino's idea of a typical Indian.

Tarantino's Indian revenge fantasy

Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' is about what could have happened

He admits he is no historian, so story comes well before fact.

By Rachel Abramowitz[A]ll that occupies his fertile imagination at the moment are his "Basterds," who maraud through Europe killing and scalping Nazis.

The squad is led by a dashing Southerner, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who Tarantino figures cut his teeth on baiting the Klan and who takes pride in his partial Apache heritage, and also includes such idiosyncratic soldiers as Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, a.k.a. "The Bear Jew," who bashes in Nazi heads with his baseball bat and is played by Tarantino buddy and torture-porn director Eli Roth. Ever the equal-opportunity avenger, Tarantino's secondary story line follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish woman who witnessed her family's murder by the Nazis only to reemerge as a movie-theater proprietress with a plan to wreak revenge on the entire German high command.

As it happens, Tarantino isn't Jewish. But why should that make any difference? "I don't think there has to be a reason to have empathy or to live in somebody else's shoes. Don't we all wear the same shoes at one end of the spectrum or the other?"

This said, he infused the Basterds with some old-school Native American fighting tactics, pointing out he is a quarter Cherokee. "I'm actually equating the Jews in this situation, in World War II, with the Indians," he says. "It's not nothing that they're doing Apache resistance. It's not about dying. It's about killing. They ambush their guys. They trick the enemy. It's not a straight-up fight. And then they go and they just completely desecrate the bodies to win a psychological war."Revenge of the Jews, Tarantino StyleNot all of the heroes are Jews, however. Pitt’s character, nicknamed “Aldo the Apache,” is not, and is actually part Cherokee. “He’s been fighting fascism since he got into the war,” Tarantino explained; “Nazis, Kluxers, they’re all the same to him. But he’s a war-history nut, so he knows all about Geronimo’s battle plans and the idea of doing an Apache-style resistance against the Germans. Now he’s using Jewish soldiers for two reasons: One is because he feels that they will turn the mission into a holy war—while Gentiles in the military have the luxury of being soldiers, the basterds are fighting a foe that wants to wipe them off the face of this earth.

“The second reason,” Tarantino said, “is the effect the Jews are going to have in the psychological warfare against the Germans, which is the way the Apaches were able to fight the Mexicans and the Spaniards and the U.S. cavalry for years and years. When you see the boys ambush that German squad, it’s not about the seven guys they kill; it’s about the other guys who are going to see them scalped and ripped apart and degraded and disemboweled. So the Germans are going to know there are killer Jews out there, and it’s the f—-ing American Jews. The basterds are like, ‘Our European relatives could do nothing when the Hun pounded at their door, but we’re the American sons, and we don’t have to endure pain—we can inflict it. We’ve got the right to do that, because we’re f—-ing Americans!’

Nor is Tarantino Jewish. Like Aldo, he is part Cherokee, and he grew up in a born-again milieu in Tennessee where people imagined revenge against the Ku Klux Klan, not the Nazis. He said the film is not a Jewish revenge fantasy, though he admits that “Whether you’re Jewish or just tired of seeing the ‘Holocaust victim’ portrayal in cinema, there is a knee-jerk, fun, fantasy revenge aspect to the movie, all right? But that’s not all there is. I muddied it up.”Quentin Tarantino:  The Kick-Ass DirectorTarantino was born on March 27, 1963 on Knoxville, Tennessee to Italian-American Tony Tarantino and half-Cherokee Native and half-Irish Connie McHugh.Comment:  Let's count how many ways the Inglourious Basterds scenario is wrong:

1) The Basterds employ Indian-style techniques, but there are no Indian characters or actors except the faux Indian Brad Pitt.

2) The Apaches weren't known for scalping people. I believe the practice occurred mainly in the Great Plains and places to the east. The evidence:

Did The Apache Really Scalp Their Enemies?No, not traditionally. It was actually the Mexicans who introduced this practice to the area. As a result of the constant conflicts between Mexico and the Apache nation, the Mexican Sonoran government returned to the old Spanish method of offering scalp bounties. This was not an exclusively Spanish innovation—the British and the French had followed this custom in earlier times.

The Mexicans scalped in order to claim a cash bounty, and it sometimes did not matter whether the scalp was Apache or not. In 1835 a scalp bounty law was passed in Mexico that offered 100 pesos for each warrior's scalp. Two years later the price included 50 pesos for a woman's scalp and 25 for that of a child! "The Apaches themselves did no scalping. However, the Chiricahua did at times take scalps—but not often, because of their fear of death and ghosts. Scalping was done only in retaliation after the Mexicans inaugurated the tactic.ScalpingFor the Indians of the North American Plains and their neighbors to the east, those of the Great Lakes, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Gulf Coast, war was a major social tradition. Combatants in all these areas took scalps in the course of warfare, although how a scalp was taken and handled varied according to local customs. Plains Indians generally took scalps from the center of the victim's head, pulling hair and a silver dollar-sized piece of skin away after a circular incision. There are numerous instances of survival after such treatment, a reflection of the point that Plains Indian warfare was less directed at killing the enemy and more toward touching him, that is, counting "coup." Engaging an enemy hand-to-hand and then touching him while he was down but still alive confirmed a warrior's courage. Only the Teton Dakota regarded killing and scalping as the coup of highest worth. The Chiricahua Apache saw the taking of an enemy's scalp as disgusting, and declined the practice.WW II-era Cherokees = 1880s Apaches?

3) Tarantino modeled Aldo on himself, a part Cherokee who "grew up in a born-again milieu in Tennessee." It's unlikely that a Cherokee growing up in Tennessee in the 1920s and 1930s would know much about Apache fighting techniques used 50 years earlier and a couple thousand miles away.

Tarantino seems to be saying that killing and scalping are innate traits of Indians. It doesn't matter if they're Eastern Cherokees or Apaches because all Indians are the same. They seek bloody revenge because they're killers by nature--because that's what Indians do. Even the vast majority of Apaches who sued for peace and considered Geronimo a criminal would emulate him if they could.

4) Tarantino is perpetuating the worst Indian stereotypes: Killing and scalping! Apaches on the warpath! Death-dealing savages!

Imagine an equivalent movie about Indians. To fight back against the US government, these Indians decide to emulate stereotypical Jews. They begin conniving, manipulating, and scheming to amass wealth and power. They become so avaricious that they'd sell their own grandmothers for a dollar. Eventually their amoral wheeling and dealing lets them take over the banking system, bring the government to its knees, and thus save their people.

Does that sound like a movie Jews would appreciate? Why not? Many Jews have amassed wealth and power. Why shouldn't Indians emulate greedy Jew "bastards" the way Tarantino's Jews emulate savage Indian "basterds"?

Get the point? The stupid "savage" stereotype is wrong even if Tarantino's using it in a "noble" cause: killing Nazis. The scenario may please Jews and people who like revenge fantasies, but it will only perpetuate the worst Indian stereotypes.

For more on the subject, see Warlike Indians and The Best Indian Movies.

P.S. At least Tarantino hasn't claimed that being 1/4 Cherokee makes him an Indian. I'll give him credit for that much.

Below:  "Tarantino infused the Basterds with some old-school Native American fighting tactics, pointing out he is a quarter Cherokee." (Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times)