Council of war: (n) any conference for discussing or deciding upon a course of action.

I don’t think we’ve ever come up with an adequate term to identify the tribes that inhabited the North American continent before the arrival of the European immigrants (of whom many were rapists, and I’m sure some of them were good…)

Because of this, we have a huge chunk of history which is really nothing more than mystery. I hope you will agree with me that when history remains mystery, we are destined to fall under the spell of its mastery.

Why?

Because we don’t know any more than when we started, even though we have lots of information that’s available, our interest level is stunted.

So we call these tribes “Native Americans,” “Indians,” and of course, in the early days, just savages. It was easier to kill them off in large numbers when you considered them to be rogue beasts.

But from my limited well of understanding, I will tell you that these human beings who were here long before us, would hold their council of war while smoking a peace pipe. Yes—they would pass around some sort of early bong filled with God-knows-what, puff on it and chat before they decided to grab their clubs, tomahawks, or even guns, and traipse off, murdering.

I don’t know how many wars they may have avoided by becoming a bit more rosy in their thinking during one of these interludes of puffing.

But I wonder whether their white—and even tan, yellow and black—brothers and sisters might be better off holding their councils of war in a haze of cigar smoke, or even the whiff of magical plants, before making such a drastic decision—to throw down in conflict with other people, and purposely deplete the population in order to prove that your domain of the Earth is mightier?

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