It humors me when people speak so confidently about events that happened 400 years ago, and yet if you asked them to explain in detail the events of their own life a year ago would have trouble remembering.<p>I went to an exhibit once with real photographs from a native indian population taken in the late 1800's. The photos showed a population that looked, quite frankly, very savage and violent. These people didn't look like Pocahontus or the friendly blue creatures of Avatar.<p>I'm not going to state an opinion either way about the early colonization of America because frankly I have no clue about it and don't really care.<p>However, I do have an opinion that raw life is a brutal thing. Always has and probably always will be. It was particularly brutal back then, for both the Native Americans and the Europeans. I'd hate to have to live in either time period. The depictions we see in movies are far, far removed from reality.