Context: During a raid on the Island of Maui, King Kamehameha of Hawaii was chasing down some civilians when his leg was caught in coral. Two fishermen, one of them named Kaleleiki, came to the aid of the fleeing civilians.

Unlike most slasher films, Kaleleiki took advantage of the fact that the giant (Kamehameha was 7ft tall) attacker was stuck and struck him in the head with an oar, nearly killing him.

Years later, Kamehameha had the pair of fishermen tracked down and brought before him, where he admitted fault in attacking the innocents and forgave the two

This is in reaction to the previous post where lots of people rushed to the comments claiming that Jeanne d'Arc didn't actually fight or lead armies or made tactical decisions.

This is pure English propaganda that seems to be passed onto Americans as well, for the same reason Anglo Saxon history always talks about Azincourt but never about Patay.

All contemporary sources, as well as historians who researched the subject, agree that Jeanne d'Arc's tactical decisions during the siege of Orléans, particularily her aggressive approach and her use of modern artillery, made the difference.

Furthermore she actually led the army from the frontline and was wounded by English arrows during the fight. The fact that she returned to the battlefield anyways gave a huge moral boost to the fighters.

I think people interested in history should question their own bias more. Letting the propaganda of her killers tarnish the memory of a brillant women is not very nice nor smart.

II Samuel 6:16

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

"Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the 'noble savage', which he didn't really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the 'myth of the stupid savage' even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications - from Darwinian evolutionism to 'scientific' racism - to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo."

Graeber/Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

As an indigenous person I wholeheartedly reject the cartoonish noble savage trope, which, ironically, Europeans came up with and peddled, not indigenous peoples. When I speak of my culture's lack of wars, armies, kings, or any viable form of social subordination whatsoever, or the fact that they were among the world's first copper workers, or the fact that they created a successful large scale agricultural society in a farming-averse ecology without markets or states, I'm describing a highly complex world created and managed by highly intelligent people. I speak of the success, wisdom, and hard work of many generations. We're fully aware that the freedom our ancestors enjoyed wasn't the product of living like mindless animals in some imaginary state of nature. Our ancestors designed their societies the way they did precisely because they knew that every society is subject to countless imperfect human behaviors and tendencies, and they succeeded in preempting many of them.

Nobody's saying there wasn't violence, betrayal, attempts at coercive control, or moral depravity, though even early European visitors familiar with Algonquian peoples routinely noted how these things were far more scarce in those societies than anything they'd seen elsewhere. And yes, we know that the Americas were full of diverse cultures on a scale that non-indigenous minds can hardly imagine today, so there's no pretending that they were all the same, especially when the ethnographic record shows us all that they were wildly different.

Not savages, not noble, just human. Pretty sure that's all we ever wanted to be seen as.

Context: According to Hawaiian Oral tradition, in the 14-15th century, a strange ship drifted onto the shore of the Island of Maui, bringing the captain they referred to as Kaluiki and his crew to Hawaii. The captain gave the Hawaiians an iron sword as a gift and he and his crew integrated into Hawaiian society. Because Hawaiians had never discovered metallurgy, the sword was revered and viewed as unconquerable.

It is theorized that Kaluiki and his crew were actually Japanese or some other Asian sailors, and that the sword was a katana or some form of Asian sword. The sword’s fate is unfortunately unknown (it probably broke at some point and it they couldn’t fix it)

Context: As part of NativeHawaii’s Kapu or taboo system, a commoner’s shadow falling upon a Chief or Royal was considered a major offense worthy of death. The reason behind this is the belief in Mana or a person’s spirit power. Chiefs and Royals were believed to have high amounts of Mana and the shadow was considered an extension of a person, so your shadow falling upon someone was viewed as you attempting to take their power.