We continue with The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud an American Legend...

[...The first French explorers to make contact with the Sioux in the mid-1600s noted with not a little horror the tribe’s fierce and utter barbarism. The Europeans had long since adapted and reconciled themselves to the New World’s Stone Age cultures. But the Sioux’s vicious raids on their Algonquin neighbors to the north and east—and the sheer joy the Sioux took in tearing their enemies limb from limb with rocks, clubs, sharpened sticks, and flint knives—called to mind nothing so much as Dark Age memories of Norse berserkers or marauding Huns. Watching these battles as spectators, the European newcomers had no idea that the savagery was actually a finely tuned conceit. To the Sioux, war was the reason for living, and though their raids and ambushes were of course made to establish territory and gain booty, more important was the chance for an individual warrior to give vent, in public, to an aggressiveness prized by the tribe’s ethos.

A Sioux brave would wager his last breath against the most courageous adversaries, and no matter the outcome, he won. A good death did honor to an entire life, and thus on the battlefield and afterward he was an exhibitionist with no sense of modesty. When he took a scalp, hacked off a hand, gouged out an eye, or severed a penis, he screamed at the top of his lungs to proclaim his own greatness. Later, when he handed the scalp to his woman, she too sang his glory while dancing with the bloody skull piece suspended from a pole.

Such behavior was alien enough to baffle seventeenth century Europeans. Whites observed a tribe that hunted and grubbed for a living with flint arrows and stone tools and exhibited no artistic tendencies other than painting their bodies and faces with hideous designs in preparation for battle. The Sioux did not weave baskets or fabrics, bake pottery, or make jewelry. They disdained farming and constructed no permanent lodges. And with no pack animals available on the continent—unlike the horse, mule, camel, or ox, the buffalo could not be bred to be harnessed or yoked— Native American animal husbandry had lagged about four millennia behind the rest of the world. Also, as other tribes took their first, tentative steps into modernity, this cultural leap seemed impossible for the hunter-gatherer Sioux. Had some of their historical contemporaries—the imperious Aztecs, the sophisticated Cherokee, the politically savvy Iroquois— been aware of their existence, they would probably have considered the Sioux laughable or subhuman. But the Sioux could fight, and the fires of their blood-feud memories were banked and stoked until the day they died....]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-2-heart-of-everything-that-isguns.html