Jim, I wouldn’t completely disagree, it is just that I think experts frequently overly complicate things, particularly when dealing with “exotic” tribal stuff. After all, the Japanese have plenty “today is a good day to die” sentiment in their culture, but anyone with enough money went in to battle with all the armor they could get. I suspect the culture of European knights had plenty of that sentiment as well, but that didn’t mean they took off their armor either. Remember the point of the battle, for all but the most suicidal, is to defeat the enemy which you do by killing more of them than they kill of you. I may be perfectly willing to die, but I’m going to do it in such a way as to take as many of them with me as possible, so wearing a multi-layer leather shirt and saying I don’t care if I die are not necessarily contradictory things. I read an account of a couple Crow warriors who had vowed to die in battle; they did, but they did so in such a way that allowed the rest of the Crows to overrun their enemies’ position, thereby winning the fight. I’d have to go back and check, but I believe some of the first person accounts of Indians at Little Big Horn have some of that “good day to die” rhetoric, but it wasn’t the Indians that died that day.
Battera, here in Oklahoma that is pretty much the rap on the Cherokees, but I’ll have to tell you it actually is rather unfair. I can assure you that I have been in plenty of Indian gatherings, but the only ones I’ve been in where everybody was speaking the native language were over in Cherokee country. I was at a stomp dance at Rocky Ford a couple of summers ago that was pretty Cherokee. Modern day powwows aren’t exactly the best place to go for tribally specific culture anyway.
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