7 ms·

I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyb

by api 6y ago

I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.

craigbaker 6y ago
Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.
- sneak 6y ago
  None seem to be for sale on eBay or Amazon.
philwelch 6y ago
The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable. The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than the colonization of America because America was biologically isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics, particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural practices like having the entire extended family of a sick person keep them company and try and comfort them through their illness. One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an older perspective from 2009 [1]: > the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens. Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers. Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms. [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8
  - jariel 6y ago
    This is a wayward argument. You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'. None of this adds up to a coherent argument. If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example. And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
    - Grieving 6y ago
      I agree largely with your response, but > And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
  - philwelch 6y ago
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  No. The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent. This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    > The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents.... By the time a Canadian government even existed, most of the damage had already been done. One might question why this policy was undertaken in Canada but not the African colonies. Perhaps because Canada’s indigenous population was already a minority. But how did that happen?
    - Tiktaalik 6y ago
      If Canada's First Nations had been less susceptible to disease things probably would have played out differently though things would have played out quite a bit differently. Things also would have played out differently if the Canadian government and/or colonial precursors hadn't engaged in active genocide. Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
      - philwelch 6y ago
        > Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice. It was an active policy choice, and an abominable one at that, but it was not the primary cause of the destruction of indigenous cultures. If it weren’t for the residential schools, Canada’s First Nations would still be a marginalized minority in their own homeland, displaced by English and French-speaking settlers. Without the wholesale depopulation of North America via infectious disease, English and French-speaking settlers would have never been able to come here in great numbers at the time they did in the first place.
        6y ago
jariel 6y ago
Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions. The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression). That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards. In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree. Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards available ...
- quiescant_dodo 6y ago
  > Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots. (I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas. The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging. The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems. Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown. Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.
Grieving 6y ago
That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.
- samatman 6y ago
  That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guaraní has official status in Paraguay, half of the population is monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're talking about 6.5 million people. As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
  - jariel 6y ago
    You've basically proved the point of the commenter you are responding to. By your very own evidence - Spanish and Portuguese utterly dominate Central and South America. There are 650M people there, if ~10% of the population speaks another language, that helps prove the case of 'language from more advanced languages win'. Even where there is relative parity, systems definitely favour the language of the more powerful entity. All over Europe there are 'niche languages' dying out, which is sad, but it's materially the case. Go to Nice, France, and the street signs are in 'Nicoise' - not French. In Monaco if you listen carefully you can hear 'Monegasque'. The decline of those languages is hinted at in the fact my spellchecker doesn't even recognize those words, unfortunately.
  - Grieving 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.

by api 6y ago

I can imagine another timeline where the settlement of the Americas was more a blending than a displacement and there exist things like Cherokee and Navajo keyboards.

craigbaker 6y ago

Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.

sneak 6y ago
None seem to be for sale on eBay or Amazon.

philwelch 6y ago

The cultural devastation wrought on the indigenous peoples of the Americas was tragic. But it was also largely inevitable. The colonization of Africa left many more Africans alive than the colonization of America because America was biologically isolated from Eurasia while Africa was not. The epidemics, particularly of smallpox, that depopulated the Americas were so brutal largely because the indigenous Americans had neither the biological nor the cultural adaptation to infectious disease that was common among Eurasians and Africans. Most indigenous causes of illness in the Americas were due to parasites rather than viruses and bacteria, allowing the evolution of cultural practices like having the entire extended family of a sick person keep them company and try and comfort them through their illness. One consequence of this is that the indigenous cultures that we’ve actually had the chance to study don’t really represent the pre-Colombian cultures that well, because by then, there was already substantial disruption from the infectious diseases and wildlife that spread throughout the continent well in advance of explorers and colonists.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
This narrative gets trotted out anytime this subject comes up. It's not reflective of the actual literature. Here's an older perspective from 2009 [1]: > the available evidence clearly indicates that the demographic collapse was not uniform in either timing or magnitude and may have been caused by factors other than epidemic disease. ... Despite the trauma of conquest, Native Americans continued to have their own histories, intertwined with but not entirely determined by Europeans and their pathogens. Since that was written, the evidence has swung even more strongly towards the idea that disease was intimately associated with the close, persistent contacts needed for the "conquest" and missionary activities of colonial powers. Not to mention, similar epidemics were observed among indigenous southern africans and siberians during their respective colonizations. The Americas were unique in the scale and completeness of their disruption, but not in the mechanisms. [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-009-9036-8
- jariel 6y ago
  This is a wayward argument. You're arguing from the quote that 'it's other than disease' and then two sentences later that it was, but due to 'persistent contact needed for conquest'. None of this adds up to a coherent argument. If Aboriginals weren't dying en mass from disease, then what from? Because we have crude records of interaction. There were very few violent fights between Aboriginals and newcomers in Canada, for example. And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? I'm all for more nuanced history, we're learning stuff every day, but I think a lot of it is also speculative, and ideologically driven.
  - Grieving 6y ago
    I agree largely with your response, but > And where is the evidence that Colonialists had 'consistent, closer contact' in hew New World, than in Africa? In Africa, Europeans died off rapidly due to local diseases. Consequently, the early slave trade was centered in the islands off of Africa itself, and mediated by a mulatto class who were less susceptible.
- philwelch 6y ago
Tiktaalik 6y ago
No. The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent. This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.
- philwelch 6y ago
  > The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents.... By the time a Canadian government even existed, most of the damage had already been done. One might question why this policy was undertaken in Canada but not the African colonies. Perhaps because Canada’s indigenous population was already a minority. But how did that happen?
  - Tiktaalik 6y ago
    If Canada's First Nations had been less susceptible to disease things probably would have played out differently though things would have played out quite a bit differently. Things also would have played out differently if the Canadian government and/or colonial precursors hadn't engaged in active genocide. Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
    - philwelch 6y ago
      > Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice. It was an active policy choice, and an abominable one at that, but it was not the primary cause of the destruction of indigenous cultures. If it weren’t for the residential schools, Canada’s First Nations would still be a marginalized minority in their own homeland, displaced by English and French-speaking settlers. Without the wholesale depopulation of North America via infectious disease, English and French-speaking settlers would have never been able to come here in great numbers at the time they did in the first place.
      - 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. That should be a signal as to how 'far apart' colonialists and aboriginals were with respect to development of cultural institutions. The writing you see in this post is invented by a Canadian-English Methodist Priest in the mid 10th (Edit: 19th century obviously!) century for the benefit of the aboriginals. The system, in current terms is itself 'firmly colonialist' (I'm sure someone will cynically characterize it as a form of oppression). That said, it'd be cool to see Cree keyboards. In fact, making a 'Cree Keyboard' might have been a much more practical use of the authors time, and might have actually more materially affected young people's ability to learn Cree. Come to think of it, there really should be such keyboards available ...

quiescant_dodo 6y ago
> Aboriginals had no writing system so there would be no keyboards. The Maya and Aztec had writing in the form of hieroglypics. The Inca had persistent communication via Quipu's rope knots. (I learned this from _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ which is a phenomenal book. I haven't done other research, though, so maybe the book isn't a good source.)
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Charles Mann's 1492 is a better book than Guns, Germs, and Steel for anything pre-Columbian Americas. The Mayans had a complete, complex logosyllabic writing system. (I believe the syllabic components are more common than logographic components, but I'm not certain). Individual syllables (or logograms) could be combined into a single glyph block in a variety of ways. This writing system, I believe, is connected to Zapotec and epi-Olmec writing systems, but disentangling who created what and who borrowed from whom in Mesoamerica is challenging. The Aztecs had what appears to be a proto-writing system, largely capable of only recording proper nouns (predominantly place names); most of the writing would instead be conveyed pictographically. Before the Aztecs, in Classical Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan (which was the major power in the Central Mexico Valley at that time period) appears to have never used any form of writing, despite having conquered Classic Maya city-states which were in full florescence of their writing systems. Quipus originate at least as early as the Wari culture in the Andes, although (again) people only recognize the final Andean civilization, the Inca. Whether or not they are a writing system is debatable--it's known they encode more than just numeric values (such as place names), but whether they can convey enough information to be considered writing is unknown. Post-contact, Sequoya developed a syllabary for the Cherokee language based only on the knowledge of the existence of the Latin alphabet (he couldn't read English or any European language, but he did have access to European-language materials--that's why several Cherokee letterforms look like Latin ones but have completely different meanings). Missionaries in Canada developed a syllabary for several aboriginal languages that remains in use by many Cree, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut speakers.

Grieving 6y ago

That blending largely occurred in Latin America, but languages rarely survive such things both in the Americas and generally throughout history. Communication is important enough that the language of whichever group is technologically superior becomes the lingua franca, and the other slowly disappears.

samatman 6y ago
That undersells the situation in Latin America, to put it mildly. There are almost two million native speakers of Nahuatl languages in Mexico, six million Maya speakers in Central America, 25% of Peru speaks Quechua at home (around ten million in total throughout the Andes). Guaraní has official status in Paraguay, half of the population is monolingual in it, substantial numbers of people of partial or complete European ancestry speak it every day, we're talking about 6.5 million people. As a point of comparison, there are 2.9 million registered Native Americans, and 5.2 million people who check that box, sometimes along with others, on the latest census.
- jariel 6y ago
  You've basically proved the point of the commenter you are responding to. By your very own evidence - Spanish and Portuguese utterly dominate Central and South America. There are 650M people there, if ~10% of the population speaks another language, that helps prove the case of 'language from more advanced languages win'. Even where there is relative parity, systems definitely favour the language of the more powerful entity. All over Europe there are 'niche languages' dying out, which is sad, but it's materially the case. Go to Nice, France, and the street signs are in 'Nicoise' - not French. In Monaco if you listen carefully you can hear 'Monegasque'. The decline of those languages is hinted at in the fact my spellchecker doesn't even recognize those words, unfortunately.
- Grieving 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean? You named a handful of languages that have survived, most of which are still in decline even if they still have substantial numbers of active speakers. The only one that seems possibly positioned to 'win out' in the long run is Guaraní, and even in Paraguay Spanish is steadily making inroads.