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Maybe I'm showing my ignorance here but isn't the author getting this backwards? I know, of course white people scalped their foes sometimes, but my understanding was that scalping was far more prevalent among native Americans.
Scalping happened world wide, earliest examples tho are Northern Europe.
However, scalping was so prevelant in America, because American colonies paid for Native scalps like animal pelts. Specifically wolve/Coyote pelts.
So while Natives might have taken scalps as a trophy from a mighty warrior they killed, it wasn't exactly common.
Until they started coming across Native villages where everyone (including women and children) were scalped while alive and left to die slowly.
So the Natives started doing it back.
The reason we only heard about Natives doing it, is because America wanted Americans to think of them as violent savages. So a couple generations later, and we started getting people who believed like you do
Yeah, I was scratching my head at that as well.
While its true that some First Nation's practiced scalping of defeated enemies for hundreds or thousands of years, it's also true that some English Colonies had a bounty on dead First Nations to encourage genocide, and one way this was confirmed was with a scalp rather than full dead body or head.
It tended to be that Native Americans would do it in or after battle/fighting an enemy. But in response, colonists, particularly those "settling" the West, started offering standing rewards for every Native Americans scalp people could collect. Many white colonists then ended up scalping every Native Americans they could find, regardless of enmity, and even scalping others as well, such as railroad workers, in order to pass off their scalps as those of Native Americans. All to say that, yes, much like many things, scalping was a tradition of another culture that colonists adopted and took much further.
There were bounties paid for scalps of American Indians in colonial times.
https://theconversation.com/indigenous-peoples-day-offers-a-reminder-of-native-american-history-including-the-scalping-they-endured-at-the-hands-of-colonists-214433