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The 'bison skull mountain' photo that reveals the US's dark history
[BBC] The photo of two men standing on a mountain of bison skulls is well known as a symbol of hunting during the colonisation of the US. But there's a more sinister story behind it – with a surprising modern message.Two men in black suits and bowler hats pose with a gravity-defying mound of bison skulls. The 19th-Century image is disturbing – thousands upon thousands of skulls piled in neat rows, towering towards the sky. But beneath the macabre first impression, the photo holds a darker secret still. These skulls aren't just the product of overzealous hunting in the US – and those men aren't hunters, either. The skulls, experts say, are the evidence of an organised, carefully calculated campaign to eradicate the bison, deprive Native Americans of a vital resource, and drive the few communities that survived onto small reservations where they could be controlled by the newly arrived white settlers. "This image is an example of colonial celebration of destruction," says Tasha Hubbard, a Cree filmmaker who is an associate professor at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Hubbard describes the extermination of the bison as a "strategic" part of colonial expansion. The eradication of the animal "was seen as the taming of the West, of domesticating this wild space that was needed in order for expansion of settlement". The colonial mass slaughter of bison dealt a lasting blow to tribes that relied on the animal for sustenance. In the aftermath, nations reliant on bison fared measurably, permanently worse than nations that were never bison-reliant, for example suffering from higher child mortality than those other nations, according to a comparative study. The study concludes that the loss set the bison nations on a fundamentally different trajectory that continues to this day. Posted by: Skidmark 2024-12-05 |
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