Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism, Read All About It!!!

Once left-wing and ethnic activists promoted an image of Native American peoples as peaceful folk, living in harmony with each other and the environment in an unspoiled paradise until both the people and their lands were despoiled by white imperialist invaders. This view, which was eagerly embraced by popular culture in the sixties and seventies, runs counter to an enormous body of evidence, and the romantic idealists who promoted it have been forced into grudging retreat.

One particularly sensitive area of dispute has concerned numerous reports of human sacrifice and cannibalism in pre-Columbian meso-America and elsewhere. At first this was denied as an imperialist invention to justify the oppression of native peoples. But as evidence mounted not only of the existence, but also the widespread practice, of mass human sacrifice and cannibalism, activists have had to retreat farther and farther from their earlier assertions.

The current fall-back position seems to be that, although human sacrifices and some ritual cannibalism undisputedly took place, they were far less prevalent than was reported by Spanish imperialists. Even native accounts are said to have been produced at the direction of European conquerors to justify the enslavement of native peoples. The current debate, one scholar says, has bevome "a question of quantity." There is also an attempt to meliorate the horror of the ritual practices by arguing that those who were killed, many of whom were children supposedly chosen because of their "purity," were not victims but honorees who gladly went to their deaths.
And so it goes..., sigh!

Read a popular summary of recent findings here.