“My perspective or understanding is that, in the past here, there were definitely some long-standing conflicts with neighbouring tribes… the Crow, for instance. One of the very famous early contributors to the Beaver Bundles was Aapi’kohkomannim… Round White Robe, who lived for a winter in a beaver lodge, and used what they gave him, when he returned to the humans, to keep the Crow south of the Yellowstone River. He was the one who added the scalp to the Bundle.

And of course, looking at all the old rock art, we can see that there were heavy-shield warriors going back a long time. So definitely there was conflict. Not the idea of wiping out an enemy, removing them from the face of the Earth, nothing like that. But definitely dominating over them, yes… and keeping them out of Blackfoot territory.

This, however, is not the same as “war” as known by Europeans, who committed entire armies to campaigns to seize and control others’ lands and resources. That’s an entirely different thing than what was happening here. Blackfoot tribes had no interest in colonizing others, or gaining control of their territories, etc.

That kind of perspective just doesn’t even make any sense from an indigenous knowledge perspective, because you recognize that your way of life comes from your place, and is adapted for that place. You can’t take knowledge from a grizzly bear and go apply it in the Everglades. It’s not meant for there.

So I associate “war” with colonization and expansion. The Blackfoot concepts that are used to describe war translate, as previously mentioned, as “playing against one another” and “going into water” (aisowoo). These metaphors suggest that there was a very different understanding in the past to what was happening in localized conflicts.

Like many aspects of the language, it’s difficult to fully appreciate because our minds have been tainted by familiarity with English, and all the baggage that goes with it. So people say aatsimoyihkaan = prayer. It doesn’t. It means something totally different. In the same way, neither awahkaootsiiyssin nor aisowoo = war.

They mean something else. The first one is not too difficult to understand, given that there has long been a tradition of counting coup here, by not killing the enemy, but rather stealing his transportation or weapons, or humiliating him by some slight injury and then escaping unharmed. It was more of a game. There was even a points system, lol. True story. But in European war, the intent and understanding has always been very, very different”

— @[736192081:2048:Ryan FirstDiver] in response to my post…