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I wonder what things would be like if the European settlers hadn't displaced the indigenous Americans. (If the American Indian way of life evolved and was sti

I wonder what things would be like if the European settlers hadn't displaced the indigenous Americans. (If the American Indian way of life evolved and was still predominant today.) It's an interesting mental exercise.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I really couldn’t fathom why you’re being downvoted.
golemiprague 8y ago
Mexico and south America is more or less that
williamstein 8y ago
There are still millions of native Americans today, some full blood. Go visit the rez. Their culture is beautiful.
- sterlind 8y ago
  Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles. They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
- crumpets 8y ago
  Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence. It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
  - steve76 8y ago
    So there are real world consequences of your beliefs. A growing black market brings very dangerous weapons to people still in the stone ages. We can't teach them about human rights or social mutuality without being labeled colonialists and genocidal madmen. Good people cannot build a telescope on a mountain because of superstitions. Sorry, but that's what they are. I want to be nice and really don't want this fight. I also don't want to die of cancer and Alzheimer's, something that telescope if it gets good data, could help to prevent by providing insights on observed particles. And it's not there because other people believe in something that's absolutely false and irrational. If China did it, it's okay because they are not European, despite their history of Mongols genociding everything in sight? If Americans and Europeans acted like the superstitious old world, we would have gone silent after Nagasaki, and leveled everyone. We didn't because we aim to limit violence and contention. No one else really even tries. You can only push this argument so far before you encroach on real problems, problems that sentence people to horrible deaths from war and disease.
- yonaguska 8y ago
  I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids. My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
protomyth 8y ago
That would require the Columbian Exchange of diseases to have been a non-event. That massive population loss opened up the continent. Also, American Indian tribes are not a monolith so the contrast would be interesting. Given the migration of some tribes, I would expect a lot more tribal wars.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Do you know why disease seemed to almost eradicate indigenous populations in North America vs leave a large portion the indigenous population intact in central and South America? Asking because there is an obvious, massive difference in degree of indigenous genetic representation in, for example, the US vs. Mexico.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Disease was pretty indiscriminate and wiped out the vast majority of the population throughout the Americas. Before European arrival there were a massive number of people living throughout Central America, the Amazon rainforest, etc. Populations didn’t recover until several centuries later (and in some places, still haven’t). The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers. It’s kind of like the difference between bison and cows. The former are economically extraneous so mostly got wiped out, whereas the latter are economically important domesticated slaves and therefore survive. (If this metaphor seems racist, note that throughout the Americas the ideology of ruling whites held that indigenous people were subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.)
    - Doubl 8y ago
      That sounds pretty accurate to me, sadly. But it's not just a white thing, it's a human thing. The indigenous people of the Americas did the same to each other. Ditto everywhere else.
    - 8y ago
toasterlovin 8y ago
A good model would probably be one of the central or South American countries. Mexico would probably be a good model for the northern states and Brazil would probably be a good model for the southern states (due to the large degree of African ancestry in its population). In Mexico there was a high degree of mixture between Europeans and indigenous and current day Mexico has a socio-economic gradient that roughy follows degree of European ancestry. That is, more European ancestry = higher class. Brazil has a similar gradient, just with the added admixture of African slaves. Of course, the specific cultural practices would be different, since the European and indigenous cultures in the US would have been different than they were in Mexico and Brazil.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  In Mexico rural indigenous peasants were treated as subhuman garbage. White landowners pretty much did what they liked: murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forced labor, mass-murder, destruction of whole villages, forced relocation, ... Within living memory, indigenous people would have their property stolen or destroyed by Spanish-speaking thugs with no legal recourse, would be forced into labor, would be murdered or raped on a whim by wealthy landowners. Until recently, indigenous people were not allowed in some Mexican cities after dark and had essentially no political representation. Etc. * * * By contrast, in the USA we just killed all of the indigenous people and took their land. The difference is that in Mexico & Central America the whole economic system was based on a colonial overseer class who used indigenous labor to produce goods for export, whereas in the USA the economic system was originally based on European immigrant settlers farming their own plots of land (or in the US South, based on plantations worked by African slaves), and indigenous people were economically extraneous.
  - codedokode 8y ago
    By the way, why did Southern states import slaves from Africa instead of enslaving local people?
    - yonaguska 8y ago
      It was too difficult, since it was easy for locals that knew the land to just run away and take refuge with other tribes. In Florida, some black slaves notoriously ran away and joined the Seminoles, a tribe that led a pretty notable resistance for sovereignty. This is a simplification, another big factor would have been the fact that many tribes had already established themselves as political entities, expect the five civilized tribes, via trade and intermixing. I would hazard that many white people from the south and southeast would have some native ancestry. Finally, when all blacks we're defacto slaves and free blacks were uncommon, it was easier to identify a run-away. In fact several Southeastern tribes owned slaves themselves and the Cherokee were actually split in their support for the Union vs the Confederacy.
tragomaskhalos 8y ago
There is an alt-history story (whose title I wish I could recall) about an American time traveller who goes back to visit a young Alexander of Macedon and his tutor Aristotle. To disguise the origins of his superior science he pretends to be from a far province of the Persian empire. Upon his return to his own time he is shocked to find a largely agrarian US still populated exclusively with its indigenous peoples - the European invasion has not happened. The conclusion is that Aristotle, and by extension the entire classical intellectual movement, was so intimidated and overwhelmed to discover this visitor's vastly greater scienctific knowledge that their own curiosity was extinguished, and hence Western civilisation was stillborn.
- anvandare 8y ago
  Sounds like "Aristotle and the Gun" by De Camp.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

I really couldn’t fathom why you’re being downvoted.

golemiprague 8y ago

Mexico and south America is more or less that

williamstein 8y ago

There are still millions of native Americans today, some full blood. Go visit the rez. Their culture is beautiful.

sterlind 8y ago
Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles. They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
crumpets 8y ago
Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence. It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
- steve76 8y ago
  So there are real world consequences of your beliefs. A growing black market brings very dangerous weapons to people still in the stone ages. We can't teach them about human rights or social mutuality without being labeled colonialists and genocidal madmen. Good people cannot build a telescope on a mountain because of superstitions. Sorry, but that's what they are. I want to be nice and really don't want this fight. I also don't want to die of cancer and Alzheimer's, something that telescope if it gets good data, could help to prevent by providing insights on observed particles. And it's not there because other people believe in something that's absolutely false and irrational. If China did it, it's okay because they are not European, despite their history of Mongols genociding everything in sight? If Americans and Europeans acted like the superstitious old world, we would have gone silent after Nagasaki, and leveled everyone. We didn't because we aim to limit violence and contention. No one else really even tries. You can only push this argument so far before you encroach on real problems, problems that sentence people to horrible deaths from war and disease.
yonaguska 8y ago
I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids. My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

protomyth 8y ago

That would require the Columbian Exchange of diseases to have been a non-event. That massive population loss opened up the continent. Also, American Indian tribes are not a monolith so the contrast would be interesting. Given the migration of some tribes, I would expect a lot more tribal wars.

toasterlovin 8y ago
Do you know why disease seemed to almost eradicate indigenous populations in North America vs leave a large portion the indigenous population intact in central and South America? Asking because there is an obvious, massive difference in degree of indigenous genetic representation in, for example, the US vs. Mexico.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Disease was pretty indiscriminate and wiped out the vast majority of the population throughout the Americas. Before European arrival there were a massive number of people living throughout Central America, the Amazon rainforest, etc. Populations didn’t recover until several centuries later (and in some places, still haven’t). The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers. It’s kind of like the difference between bison and cows. The former are economically extraneous so mostly got wiped out, whereas the latter are economically important domesticated slaves and therefore survive. (If this metaphor seems racist, note that throughout the Americas the ideology of ruling whites held that indigenous people were subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.)
  - Doubl 8y ago
    That sounds pretty accurate to me, sadly. But it's not just a white thing, it's a human thing. The indigenous people of the Americas did the same to each other. Ditto everywhere else.
  - 8y ago

toasterlovin 8y ago

A good model would probably be one of the central or South American countries. Mexico would probably be a good model for the northern states and Brazil would probably be a good model for the southern states (due to the large degree of African ancestry in its population). In Mexico there was a high degree of mixture between Europeans and indigenous and current day Mexico has a socio-economic gradient that roughy follows degree of European ancestry. That is, more European ancestry = higher class. Brazil has a similar gradient, just with the added admixture of African slaves. Of course, the specific cultural practices would be different, since the European and indigenous cultures in the US would have been different than they were in Mexico and Brazil.

jacobolus 8y ago
In Mexico rural indigenous peasants were treated as subhuman garbage. White landowners pretty much did what they liked: murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forced labor, mass-murder, destruction of whole villages, forced relocation, ... Within living memory, indigenous people would have their property stolen or destroyed by Spanish-speaking thugs with no legal recourse, would be forced into labor, would be murdered or raped on a whim by wealthy landowners. Until recently, indigenous people were not allowed in some Mexican cities after dark and had essentially no political representation. Etc. * * * By contrast, in the USA we just killed all of the indigenous people and took their land. The difference is that in Mexico & Central America the whole economic system was based on a colonial overseer class who used indigenous labor to produce goods for export, whereas in the USA the economic system was originally based on European immigrant settlers farming their own plots of land (or in the US South, based on plantations worked by African slaves), and indigenous people were economically extraneous.
- codedokode 8y ago
  By the way, why did Southern states import slaves from Africa instead of enslaving local people?
  - yonaguska 8y ago
    It was too difficult, since it was easy for locals that knew the land to just run away and take refuge with other tribes. In Florida, some black slaves notoriously ran away and joined the Seminoles, a tribe that led a pretty notable resistance for sovereignty. This is a simplification, another big factor would have been the fact that many tribes had already established themselves as political entities, expect the five civilized tribes, via trade and intermixing. I would hazard that many white people from the south and southeast would have some native ancestry. Finally, when all blacks we're defacto slaves and free blacks were uncommon, it was easier to identify a run-away. In fact several Southeastern tribes owned slaves themselves and the Cherokee were actually split in their support for the Union vs the Confederacy.

tragomaskhalos 8y ago

There is an alt-history story (whose title I wish I could recall) about an American time traveller who goes back to visit a young Alexander of Macedon and his tutor Aristotle. To disguise the origins of his superior science he pretends to be from a far province of the Persian empire. Upon his return to his own time he is shocked to find a largely agrarian US still populated exclusively with its indigenous peoples - the European invasion has not happened. The conclusion is that Aristotle, and by extension the entire classical intellectual movement, was so intimidated and overwhelmed to discover this visitor's vastly greater scienctific knowledge that their own curiosity was extinguished, and hence Western civilisation was stillborn.

anvandare 8y ago
Sounds like "Aristotle and the Gun" by De Camp.