Island of Nightmares: Tomahawks and Diamonds

Contrary to widely held opinion, scalping is by no means an “Indian” invention. The broad practice of this so-called procedure was carried out by the English colonizers. Scalps served as a way to keep strict records and a kind of receipt for money. In 1720, they paid up to a hundred pounds for each scalp. The Englishmen who settled in America saw Native people not as humans, but as beasts—by sheer misunderstanding—inhabiting lands meant for the white man. On this topic, colonial scholars even published several theoretical works depicting Native people as animals that it was a righteous cause to cleanse the land of. They did cleanse… Such are the origins of conservative British morality.