Steve Russell: So many myths behind America's long string of wars

Before Columbus got lost, the people now called Indians had no sense of being poor because most of us had all we needed. We like to pretend that there were no empires or aggressive wars or other collective bad conduct and of course that was not the case. Indians are human beings and the Noble Savage is as mythical as the subhuman cannibals the colonists made up to justify theft and rape and murder.

It’s not that we were innocent of evil in the so-called New World. It’s more a matter of proportion. Everybody thinks they are special and so is their tribe. I mean “tribe” the same way our kids mean “posse”---the people we surround ourselves with and therefore identify with, the people like us.

That kind of thinking is adaptive. People who take care of each other are more likely to survive in a dog-eat-dog world and you must survive to have offspring. The impulse to keep your people close and protect them advances your interest in the cosmic sense of which set of humans gets to make the future. That’s so even if you get killed protecting your tribe.

Lots of people are ready to die for a future contribution to the gene pool, but of course they typically don’t stand far enough back to think about it in that way. You protect your child because she’s yours and you protect children because you’ve had a chance to live and they deserve the same.

Sometimes, human choices don’t look terribly noble from the outside, but the smarter human beings make allowances for both mistakes and a different set of influences. Most modern Indians, for example, do not presume to judge the scouts who rode with Custer and gave the famous Indian fighter sound advice he disregarded at the cost of his command and his life.