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Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for hundreds of years — it's amazing that it survived through language at all. I always wonder how much

Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for hundreds of years — it's amazing that it survived through language at all. I always wonder how much we've actually lost... but we'll never really know. A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.

AStonesThrow 2y ago
Yes, like “slash and burn” land management. And the “buffalo jump” method of chasing them off a steep cliff, falling to their death. And internecine tribal warfare, with constant usurpation of good land for farming and grazing. Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we’ve already renewed?
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  Great example of how people throw out the good with the bad and are seemingly incapable of navigating nuance.
- NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
  Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same fundamental dynamic tho—we just replaced the gods with the economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it. And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas. And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions. Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
    - NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
      Well, sure. But it sure as hell aint't diplomacy and peace that built this society we live in now. Or at least, not a good sort of peace. That's especially true for the US and Canada. What went on before europeans made an appearance doesn't change this observation. I'll leave defending that to the people whose world we destroyed.
      - AStonesThrow 2y ago
        And yet, our borders have been peaceful for the most part, as really no foreign army has invaded the United States in a long, long time. There have been two World Wars in Europe, yet our interior has remained sacrosanct for longer than that. And the United States has established embassies and consulates all over the world. We're founding members of the U.N.; we're on the Security Council. We send humanitarian missions all over the place. Surely you cannot argue, with a straight face, that "peace and diplomacy" have not built the society we enjoy today? Peace and diplomacy are not in a vacuum for us, certainly -- there have been wars; there has been espionage; there have been terrorist attacks. But peace and diplomacy are the primary way, and a more excellent way, and they are avenues that will always be explored and exhausted before violence takes over.
        asacrowflies 2y ago
        The USA has also successfully completed multiple full on genocides rivaling Nazis with their eugenics and "purity" ideals.... You act like all these good Americans blessings came from the upstanding moral character of Americans and not from overwhelming brutality and violence to steal it or have slaves build it. To this very day with prison work and minimum wage indertured servants.
    - EdwardDiego 2y ago
      FYI, Aotearoa New Zealand is also a Polynesian archipelago. Bottom of the Polynesian triangle.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      > the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492 It's a certainty. The tribes were well armed for good reason. The Inca had an army before Pizzaro arrived. Cortez allied with neighboring tribes to go after the Aztecs, as those tribes very much wanted to destroy the Aztecs for their depradations. The warrior culture in N America was very well developed. The Commanche carved out their own empire in the Texas area before the Spanish arrived. They did not learn how to fight from the Spanish, it was the other way around.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  Nobody really knows what North American civic life was like before contact. The cities all depopulated before intensive contact due to disease. What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  Human sacrifice? ¿Que?
engineer_22 2y ago
[flagged]
- roughly 2y ago
  Yes, lucky for all of us that the culture that showed up right before they started mysteriously dying by the millions had writing; truly fortunate that culture arrived on their shores, a thing nobody could possibly disagree with.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The accounts of how the Commanche lived nearly all come from accounts written by white people who lived among them (often taken as slaves by the Commanche). See "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne. A truly fantastic epic. I'm amazed nobody has made this into a miniseries yet. https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060/ https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...
neaden 2y ago
Crop rotation was the standard method of planting throughout Europe in the middle ages, it certainly wasn't lost by the settlers.
- paleotrope 2y ago
  Most of the first colonists weren't farmers. And I believe some tricks were actually picked up in Europe and end up coming back with former enslave natives.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  most of the early european settlers were awful farmers, if they didn't lose it they were too stupid to use it - this carried on for decades
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Why the vitriol? You don't need to rotate crops for decades with virgin soil.
    - micromacrofoot 2y ago
      what vitriol? they were not smart (especially the english), many of them died because they didn't prepare for winter properly... they had winter where they came from this is well documented, lots of settlements failed due to very simple mistakes and infighting at one point an english settlement lead by john smith actually raided natives out of desperation and many starved when they were cut off in response
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I guess it seems like an oversimplification and underestimation of the challenges involved.
        micromacrofoot 2y ago
NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future. Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.
- wahern 2y ago
  Western disbelief in the veracity of oral traditions isn't confined to cultures outside the West. It's as strongly antagonistic, if not more so, to Western traditions. If it's not written down, it didn't happen; and if it contradicts even one scrap of written literature, it absolutely couldn't have happened, no matter how overwhelming the non-written corpus of evidence. Heck, Europe birthed an entire religion, Protestantism, predicted on "sola scriptura". OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Yes, like “slash and burn” land management. And the “buffalo jump” method of chasing them off a steep cliff, falling to their death. And internecine tribal warfare, with constant usurpation of good land for farming and grazing. Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we’ve already renewed?

micromacrofoot 2y ago
Great example of how people throw out the good with the bad and are seemingly incapable of navigating nuance.
NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same fundamental dynamic tho—we just replaced the gods with the economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it. And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas. And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions. Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
  - NoTeslaThrow 2y ago
    Well, sure. But it sure as hell aint't diplomacy and peace that built this society we live in now. Or at least, not a good sort of peace. That's especially true for the US and Canada. What went on before europeans made an appearance doesn't change this observation. I'll leave defending that to the people whose world we destroyed.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      And yet, our borders have been peaceful for the most part, as really no foreign army has invaded the United States in a long, long time. There have been two World Wars in Europe, yet our interior has remained sacrosanct for longer than that. And the United States has established embassies and consulates all over the world. We're founding members of the U.N.; we're on the Security Council. We send humanitarian missions all over the place. Surely you cannot argue, with a straight face, that "peace and diplomacy" have not built the society we enjoy today? Peace and diplomacy are not in a vacuum for us, certainly -- there have been wars; there has been espionage; there have been terrorist attacks. But peace and diplomacy are the primary way, and a more excellent way, and they are avenues that will always be explored and exhausted before violence takes over.
      - asacrowflies 2y ago
        The USA has also successfully completed multiple full on genocides rivaling Nazis with their eugenics and "purity" ideals.... You act like all these good Americans blessings came from the upstanding moral character of Americans and not from overwhelming brutality and violence to steal it or have slaves build it. To this very day with prison work and minimum wage indertured servants.
  - EdwardDiego 2y ago
    FYI, Aotearoa New Zealand is also a Polynesian archipelago. Bottom of the Polynesian triangle.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492 It's a certainty. The tribes were well armed for good reason. The Inca had an army before Pizzaro arrived. Cortez allied with neighboring tribes to go after the Aztecs, as those tribes very much wanted to destroy the Aztecs for their depradations. The warrior culture in N America was very well developed. The Commanche carved out their own empire in the Texas area before the Spanish arrived. They did not learn how to fight from the Spanish, it was the other way around.
bpodgursky 2y ago
Nobody really knows what North American civic life was like before contact. The cities all depopulated before intensive contact due to disease. What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
Human sacrifice? ¿Que?

engineer_22 2y ago

[flagged]

roughly 2y ago
Yes, lucky for all of us that the culture that showed up right before they started mysteriously dying by the millions had writing; truly fortunate that culture arrived on their shores, a thing nobody could possibly disagree with.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The accounts of how the Commanche lived nearly all come from accounts written by white people who lived among them (often taken as slaves by the Commanche). See "Empire of the Summer Moon", by Gwynne. A truly fantastic epic. I'm amazed nobody has made this into a miniseries yet. https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060/ https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

neaden 2y ago

Crop rotation was the standard method of planting throughout Europe in the middle ages, it certainly wasn't lost by the settlers.

paleotrope 2y ago
Most of the first colonists weren't farmers. And I believe some tricks were actually picked up in Europe and end up coming back with former enslave natives.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
most of the early european settlers were awful farmers, if they didn't lose it they were too stupid to use it - this carried on for decades
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Why the vitriol? You don't need to rotate crops for decades with virgin soil.
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    what vitriol? they were not smart (especially the english), many of them died because they didn't prepare for winter properly... they had winter where they came from this is well documented, lots of settlements failed due to very simple mistakes and infighting at one point an english settlement lead by john smith actually raided natives out of desperation and many starved when they were cut off in response
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I guess it seems like an oversimplification and underestimation of the challenges involved.
      - micromacrofoot 2y ago

NoTeslaThrow 2y ago

Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future. Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.

wahern 2y ago
Western disbelief in the veracity of oral traditions isn't confined to cultures outside the West. It's as strongly antagonistic, if not more so, to Western traditions. If it's not written down, it didn't happen; and if it contradicts even one scrap of written literature, it absolutely couldn't have happened, no matter how overwhelming the non-written corpus of evidence. Heck, Europe birthed an entire religion, Protestantism, predicted on "sola scriptura". OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.