When you grow up in the US, you're quite aware of these two competing creation myths. On the one hand, there's the sort of John Wayne myth of the noble innocent Anglo settlers who move West and, something that a lot of Americans fantasize about, this time when the land was open, there were no people there, you moved to the edge of settlement, hacked out a sort of plantation house for yourself, and through hard work and your guts you made a name for yourself and got property. The competing mythology is that the sort of vicious Anglo settler, move into Native American lands, brutally kill off the Native Americans, who are equally seen as noble, philosophically superior, morally superior, spiritually superior - they're these sort of greater beings who are close to the earth compared to the sort of rapacious white folks. The truth is not even in between - the truth is that neither one of those mythologies are accurate. Show less «