Without the Gun, We Would Have Been Crushed
The Physiology That Would Have Defeated Europe
The Gun vs Physiology
Europeans colonized North America because they had the gun. It wasn’t because they had superior physiology. Without the gun, they would have been crushed.
The portraits of the Ioway make this plain. They are not metaphor. They are physiology written on the body in paint — survival knowledge encoded in color, gesture, and mark. Europeans couldn’t read them. They catalogued them as decoration, culture, ritual, symbolism. They missed what was in plain sight: instructions for health, strength, and endurance.
Portraits as Physiology
Take George Catlin’s portrait of White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas. A green handprint covers his mouth. To the Western eye it becomes “motif” or “tribal paint.” To the physiological eye, it is instruction: don’t breathe through the mouth. Don’t scatter your breath in constant talk. Use it less.
Tempest Bird shows four dark lines running down both cheeks — the length and spread of fingers, with the thumb pressing beneath the jaw. As if someone has just cupped the lower face and closed the mouth. This too is literal instruction: hold the jaw, keep the mouth shut, preserve strength.
Across the series, the variations multiply.
One painting shows the mouth painted red, danger marked in plain sight, while the eyes are left unpainted but with tears: “grief will come”.
Another reverses it: eyes painted red, mouth bound but unpainted — unused — as if to say, “Maybe you’ll understand it this way.”
Another shows a black handprint clamping the mouth while red radiates around the eyes
They weren’t painting random decoration. They were trying every possible way to make the physiology clear. Each variation was another attempt to translate survival knowledge into a language Europeans could read. They kept trying, shifting tack, creative in their persistence. But the blindness of our perspective meant we read all of this as ornament, identity, symbolism.
Catlin Listens
George Catlin eventually heard the same lessons spoken aloud. In his 1870 book Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life, based on observations from more than 150 tribes, he recorded what he had seen and overheard.
He described Native mothers gently closing their infants’ lips after breastfeeding, establishing the habit of nasal breathing from birth. He noted their health, their endurance, and their freedom from many of the diseases that plagued Europeans.
“All nervousness commences in the mouth.”
For Catlin, an open, trembling mouth betrayed weakness in debate, in combat, in confidence itself. He compared it to a hive of bees — attack triggered by instability.
He also recounted a near-fight between a white fur trader and a Sioux Brave. When asked afterwards if he had feared his much larger white opponent, the Brave replied:
“No, not in the least. I never fear harm from a man who can’t shut his mouth, no matter how large or how strong he may be.”
And when asked about Europeans in London, Wash-ke-mon-ye, the Ioway Fast Dancer, said simply:
“White man — suppose — mouth shut, pretty good. Mouth open, no good. Me no like um, not much.”
Another chief put it bluntly:
“The amount a man shows his teeth is the measure of how much he lies.”
These weren’t metaphors. They were the oral tradition stating what the portraits painted: mouth-breathing, over-speech, and constant leakage of breath were weakness. Nasal discipline was physiology, survival, truth.
Modern Echoes
Catlin’s “hive of bees” was no figure of speech. Modern physiology shows that overbreathing, with its sympathetic dominance, shifts the nervous system into fight-flight. Animals — even insects — detect the chemistry of that state immediately.
I saw this echoed years later in an allergy unit. These weren’t patients with ordinary bee stings, but with full bee-sting anaphylaxis, carrying EpiPens for survival. Many described how bees seemed to target them relentlessly, even through car windows. Their physiology was locked in sympathetic overdrive, broadcasting stress. The same pattern that once meant defeat in combat now meant immune collapse.
Over time, this chronic over-activation drives not only anxiety and “nervousness,” but psychological disease, autoimmune disease, the whole cascade of breakdown that comes when the nervous system forgets how to rest.
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The Blindness of Europe
Without the gun, Europeans would not have prevailed. On the level of physical prowess, sensory regulation, and physiological literacy, Native peoples were far stronger. What was missing was not strength but recognition. Europeans couldn’t read the knowledge in front of them.
And this is the same mistake we keep making. We take what is literal physiology — in Indigenous art, in yoga, in embodied practice — and flatten it into abstraction. We call it metaphor, spirituality, philosophy. In doing so, we disempower it.
My Own Path
I have spent decades in health — intensive care, dialysis, interventional medicine. I was raised by a scientist father who drilled critical thinking into me, rejecting rote learning and dogma. Even with that background, it took years of breathing physiology work, and lucky happenstance across disciplines, before I could glimpse what these portraits and these words were saying.
I’ve known for twenty years that sympathetic overbreathing ties directly into psychological disease, autoimmune disease, and, in fact every other disease. And still, I have had to keep working in the health industry— inside institutions that treat disease at the surface but never touch its root. From what I see of patients my understanding is constantly confirmed: poor breathing patterns- overbreathing that collapses into to mouth breathing - show themselves in crooked, stained or even absent teeth.
The portraits were saying it all along. The physiology was there in color, in gesture, in story. Europe couldn’t see it. And even now, with the science in our hands, we still barely look.
If you’d like to dive in deeper into how breathing governs the nervous system, blood chemistry, oxygen delivery, here’s another piece I wrote:
I-O-Way Fast Dancer and the Physiology of Composure
About the Author:
Catherine Broué works with the body as a whole system, focusing on breath and the nervous system. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Christian Bohr and Konstantin Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.