9 ms·

The Invasion of America: New Visualizations of Native American Dispossession

92 points by samclemens 12y ago

chema 12y ago
Very interesting visualization. It complements the recent release of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an excellent introduction to a consistently ignored aspect of US History. http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1041.aspx http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-U...
- javert 12y ago
  Consistently ignored? Not at all. We are constantly reminded of this topic these days. It's very popular. For instance, all you hear about on Columbus Day is about how (supposedly) horrible Colombus was, and how people are insulted that we still celebrate him.
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    Can you elaborate? Perhaps things have changed since I lived in the US (two years ago) but most people I knew were more or less completely ignorant of pre-colonial American history, and had only a passing familiarity with Columbus' misdeeds. I hope indeed it has changed.
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      Relatively little is known about pre-colonial history in North America, due to the absence of writing from those times. This is pretty much true of all peoples that did not have writing.
      - kylebgorman 12y ago
        The Mayan rulers carefully documented their vicious wars of conquest (among other things). Some believe the Incas, with their "quipu" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu) recording devices, were on their way to a writing system. But that's really it re: pre-Columbian writing.
        WalterBright 12y ago
        There is a fair bit known about the Mayans because of their writing (and a lot of that survived because it was carved into stone). But the N. American peoples did not have writing, and their lifestyle did not leave behind much for archeologists.
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Mounds, burials, artifacts (but mostly ephemeral e.g. bone and skin), some surviving culture.
      - protomyth 12y ago
        Quite a lot of the history has been written from the stories carried down, and I do believe the central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. (Edit: quite a lot of the old stories are written down, downvoters- I cannot help if you don't value the current efforts. I won't be providing links as there is Google and I have to deal with a damn blizzard)
        happyscrappy 12y ago
        >central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. They were almost completely destroyed by Europeans.
        protomyth 12y ago
        "Almost" is not all and given the responses in this thread, I get the feeling that people are not aware of the number of tribes in the Americas.
        CalRobert 12y ago
        Europeans destroyed them. It's a crime against history that can hardly be expressed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
        userulluipeste 12y ago
        I understand that it's simpler to say just "Europeans" instead of "European colonial powers", but before you know it you may cast an unjust collective accuse over an entire continent full of people, many of which had nothing to do with the sins of America's colonization.
        CalRobert 12y ago
        OK, make that "A group of people who came to the Americas from Europe and behaved in a less than polite manner"
        12y ago
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Columbus was awful and we should be ashamed for celebrating him. We also learn way too much about native Americans, in some weird cultural guilt trip for past misdeeds. That isn't new--much of my childhood was wasted on learning native American history in the early 1990's.
    - ashark 12y ago
      Agreed. Maybe it's a regional thing, but I remember tons of time spent covering Native Americans in grades K-12. More than any other topic in history, probably. Meanwhile we barely covered European history outside the Age of Exploration, and the rest of the world received even less consideration. From your "early 1990s" mention I'm thinking we're around the same age, though, so maybe it was different before, or it's changed since. Or, again, maybe it's regional. Mid Westerner, but didn't grow up anywhere near a reservation, for the record.
    - king_jester 12y ago
      I had the exact opposite experience. Learning about native peoples and their history was extremely fascinating for me and I wouldn't like to have missed out on that knowledge. Learning more about other people is never a waste.
    - CalRobert 12y ago
      Wasted? Seriously? If you live in the Americas it's a part of the history of your home. If you think all history is a waste, then sure, but to focus on just the history of the people who lived on a landmass for most of its populated history is a bit inconsistent.
      - javert 12y ago
        No, it is a waste as a schoolchild to spend years and years studying Native Americans at the expense of everything else, when literally everything we know about them can be learned fairly quickly. There simply isn't that much information there. Having also been a schoolchild in the 90s, I assume the same material was simply being repeated over and over and over. The American school system is busted like that.
  - chema 12y ago
    History should be more than being "reminded". Few American could name the three largest Native nations today, much less 100 years ago, or what their systems of government, leaders, or social structures were. I learned a lot in school about the Puritans, and Ancient Europe and even Egypt and Asian history, but little to nothing about the people who lived in California less than 200 years ago.
deleted 12y ago
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golemotron 12y ago
This is another case of 'I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup' http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
deleted 12y ago
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b6 12y ago
> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. What is the author's reason for saying that it was at such-and-such a particular time that things were exactly as they should be, that everyone was occupying their proper piece of land? I mean, it was violent bloodshed before the invaders arrived, and then it was ... more violent bloodshed after they arrived. People were being mean to each other long before the invaders arrived, and also after -- and ever since, everywhere in the world. Does the author think it's particularly bad to be mean to people who are of different ethnicity?
- dharmach 12y ago
  >Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. The scale and the speed were different. When a group of people moves in occupying part of the land, gradually over a long period is very different to one just moves in, kills all and takes everything.
- trextrex 12y ago
  I think what the author is saying is that the history taught in schools and colleges should not omit the part about the how the lands were acquired from the native americans.
  - kghose 12y ago
    And the OPs point is that we should not stop there either, because it is an arbitrary point in history. Also, as the number of immigrants increase in US schools, White guilt and other forms of self flagellation lessens. If you are not European, and your parent immigrated you have less of a complex about where the land came from, and are less likely to want to carry some burden foisted on you by some one with a funny political agenda. It's interesting to me how we finally got rid of Original Sin, but now have replaced this with other, atheistic forms of this, like trying to make our children feel guilty about Native Americans and Slavery. I personally think this is the best way to increase tensions.
flavor8 12y ago
Was "El Norte" (the Spanish settlement of California) only along the coast, or did they never lay full claim to the land? Curious as to why it doesn't really show on this visualization. There's an excellent book about settlement patterns in the US called American Nations, by Colin Woodward. His theory is essentially that we don't pay nearly enough attention to the different influences of the competing original colonies, and that if you examine the history in this light there are all kinds of interesting narratives that you can draw. E.g., tidewater slavery != deep south slavery in fairly significant ways, because of the origin of each of those colonies (british gentry vs progeny of barbados slave owners) - and yet we generally make no distinction at all.
swatow 12y ago
Vaguely reminiscent of maps of Israel and Palestine. Of course in the case of Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for obstinately refusing to accept the very generous division of 1807, in which they had the majority of the land. Instead they attacked the European settlers, leaving them with no choice but to expand for the purpose of self protection.
- dismal2 12y ago
  because obviously the division terms would actually be upheld and followed, hah!
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Of course in the case of Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for obstinately refusing to accept the very generous division of 1807 Why should they accept the "generous division" of invaders? Would you accept the "generous division" of your house or property, to some guy that just arrived and wants it?
protomyth 12y ago
Mentioning President Lincoln in a positive light doesn't jive with his treatment of the Dakota https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie (movie link).
protomyth 12y ago
"Of this self-identified population, only a fraction are visible minorities, subject to the discrimination that shapes identity and forges political movements." Yeah, right. I think the author did very little research into the modern problems. Also, self-identified might cut it for the news media, but each tribe has a list of enrolled members. If you are not on someones list, you are not Native American for a vast majority of purposes.
brooklyndude 12y ago
It hits a lot of Americans at one point in their life, "We're not always the good guys." It's taken me a lifetime to understand that.
kingmanaz 12y ago
> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "someone else's land" stem from a failure to distinguish between United States citizenship and chance birth on the North American continent. The North American Aborigine peoples may have historically been born on the North American landmass, but they were not the founders of the United States nor the people whose interests said nation was designed to further. The disorganized aboriginals variously aided or hindered the expansion of the Republic depending on the particular tribe's short term ends. The European pioneers did not "steal" a pre-existing democratic republic, rather, they struggled, triumphed, and created their own for their progeny. North American Aborigines lived outside the republic until reservations were allotted to them, reservations which they largely continue to live apart in today. Frankly, the tone of the parent article smacks of 1960s-era Baby Boomer coming-of-age politics. Its high time to question this line of thinking.
- afarrell 12y ago
  I don't see how either this quote or the article from which it is drawn conflates those those two categories of people. Indeed, it says that we "conquered" the native lands, a word that usually refers to one polity expanding from lands of its own into lands outside of it. It presupposes that native american lands were outside of the United States. Yes, the European pioneers struggled. Both a military campaign and an agricultural enterprise are very difficult.
- mr_luc 12y ago
  I agree that "someone else's land" is a bit much. Saying that "North American Aborigines lived outside the republic" is a bit misleading, because it insinuates that they weren't interested in assimilating, and becoming a part of that struggling, triumphing mass of people that identified as Americans at that time. More truthfully, leading up to the times when they were forcibly relocated to reservations, they were never allowed in, for the same reasons that black residents of the US had a tough time in those years: the world around them was quite racist and (especially in the case of indians) kleptomaniac. In fact, many Native Americans tried to assimilate; I remember reading about one enterprising native gent in the early 1800s who had made himself quite rich from trade, had a mansion, the whole nine yards ... until the day came when his town wanted his stuff. So they took it, because America was in large part founded on the notion of repeatedly taking stuff that the natives considered their property. Acknowledging the massive wrongs committed by this country against those peoples isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I agree with you that we need to be realistic about what conclusions we draw from it. Yes, the United States stole stuff from the indians. No, we're not going to now consider dispossessing the current owners of that stuff; that's akin to, say, questioning the rightness of the origins of modern-day Israel. There's a state there now, so it's moot.

92 points by samclemens 12y ago

chema 12y ago

Very interesting visualization. It complements the recent release of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an excellent introduction to a consistently ignored aspect of US History. http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-United-States-P1041.aspx http://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-U...

javert 12y ago
Consistently ignored? Not at all. We are constantly reminded of this topic these days. It's very popular. For instance, all you hear about on Columbus Day is about how (supposedly) horrible Colombus was, and how people are insulted that we still celebrate him.
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Can you elaborate? Perhaps things have changed since I lived in the US (two years ago) but most people I knew were more or less completely ignorant of pre-colonial American history, and had only a passing familiarity with Columbus' misdeeds. I hope indeed it has changed.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    Relatively little is known about pre-colonial history in North America, due to the absence of writing from those times. This is pretty much true of all peoples that did not have writing.
    - kylebgorman 12y ago
      The Mayan rulers carefully documented their vicious wars of conquest (among other things). Some believe the Incas, with their "quipu" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu) recording devices, were on their way to a writing system. But that's really it re: pre-Columbian writing.
      - WalterBright 12y ago
        There is a fair bit known about the Mayans because of their writing (and a lot of that survived because it was carved into stone). But the N. American peoples did not have writing, and their lifestyle did not leave behind much for archeologists.
        JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Mounds, burials, artifacts (but mostly ephemeral e.g. bone and skin), some surviving culture.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      Quite a lot of the history has been written from the stories carried down, and I do believe the central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. (Edit: quite a lot of the old stories are written down, downvoters- I cannot help if you don't value the current efforts. I won't be providing links as there is Google and I have to deal with a damn blizzard)
      - happyscrappy 12y ago
        >central and south american tribes had writing which is still largely ignored. They were almost completely destroyed by Europeans.
        protomyth 12y ago
        "Almost" is not all and given the responses in this thread, I get the feeling that people are not aware of the number of tribes in the Americas.
      - CalRobert 12y ago
        Europeans destroyed them. It's a crime against history that can hardly be expressed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
        userulluipeste 12y ago
        I understand that it's simpler to say just "Europeans" instead of "European colonial powers", but before you know it you may cast an unjust collective accuse over an entire continent full of people, many of which had nothing to do with the sins of America's colonization.
        CalRobert 12y ago
        OK, make that "A group of people who came to the Americas from Europe and behaved in a less than polite manner"
        12y ago
- rayiner 12y ago
  Columbus was awful and we should be ashamed for celebrating him. We also learn way too much about native Americans, in some weird cultural guilt trip for past misdeeds. That isn't new--much of my childhood was wasted on learning native American history in the early 1990's.
  - ashark 12y ago
    Agreed. Maybe it's a regional thing, but I remember tons of time spent covering Native Americans in grades K-12. More than any other topic in history, probably. Meanwhile we barely covered European history outside the Age of Exploration, and the rest of the world received even less consideration. From your "early 1990s" mention I'm thinking we're around the same age, though, so maybe it was different before, or it's changed since. Or, again, maybe it's regional. Mid Westerner, but didn't grow up anywhere near a reservation, for the record.
  - king_jester 12y ago
    I had the exact opposite experience. Learning about native peoples and their history was extremely fascinating for me and I wouldn't like to have missed out on that knowledge. Learning more about other people is never a waste.
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    Wasted? Seriously? If you live in the Americas it's a part of the history of your home. If you think all history is a waste, then sure, but to focus on just the history of the people who lived on a landmass for most of its populated history is a bit inconsistent.
    - javert 12y ago
      No, it is a waste as a schoolchild to spend years and years studying Native Americans at the expense of everything else, when literally everything we know about them can be learned fairly quickly. There simply isn't that much information there. Having also been a schoolchild in the 90s, I assume the same material was simply being repeated over and over and over. The American school system is busted like that.
- chema 12y ago
  History should be more than being "reminded". Few American could name the three largest Native nations today, much less 100 years ago, or what their systems of government, leaders, or social structures were. I learned a lot in school about the Puritans, and Ancient Europe and even Egypt and Asian history, but little to nothing about the people who lived in California less than 200 years ago.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

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golemotron 12y ago

This is another case of 'I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup' http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

b6 12y ago

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. What is the author's reason for saying that it was at such-and-such a particular time that things were exactly as they should be, that everyone was occupying their proper piece of land? I mean, it was violent bloodshed before the invaders arrived, and then it was ... more violent bloodshed after they arrived. People were being mean to each other long before the invaders arrived, and also after -- and ever since, everywhere in the world. Does the author think it's particularly bad to be mean to people who are of different ethnicity?

dharmach 12y ago
>Land has been changing hands more or less continuously, forever. Before North America was "seized" by the people who came to be called Americans, parts of it were being seized and re-seized and re-re-seized by various groups of people who lived there at that time. The scale and the speed were different. When a group of people moves in occupying part of the land, gradually over a long period is very different to one just moves in, kills all and takes everything.
trextrex 12y ago
I think what the author is saying is that the history taught in schools and colleges should not omit the part about the how the lands were acquired from the native americans.
- kghose 12y ago
  And the OPs point is that we should not stop there either, because it is an arbitrary point in history. Also, as the number of immigrants increase in US schools, White guilt and other forms of self flagellation lessens. If you are not European, and your parent immigrated you have less of a complex about where the land came from, and are less likely to want to carry some burden foisted on you by some one with a funny political agenda. It's interesting to me how we finally got rid of Original Sin, but now have replaced this with other, atheistic forms of this, like trying to make our children feel guilty about Native Americans and Slavery. I personally think this is the best way to increase tensions.

flavor8 12y ago

Was "El Norte" (the Spanish settlement of California) only along the coast, or did they never lay full claim to the land? Curious as to why it doesn't really show on this visualization. There's an excellent book about settlement patterns in the US called American Nations, by Colin Woodward. His theory is essentially that we don't pay nearly enough attention to the different influences of the competing original colonies, and that if you examine the history in this light there are all kinds of interesting narratives that you can draw. E.g., tidewater slavery != deep south slavery in fairly significant ways, because of the origin of each of those colonies (british gentry vs progeny of barbados slave owners) - and yet we generally make no distinction at all.

swatow 12y ago

Vaguely reminiscent of maps of Israel and Palestine. Of course in the case of Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for obstinately refusing to accept the very generous division of 1807, in which they had the majority of the land. Instead they attacked the European settlers, leaving them with no choice but to expand for the purpose of self protection.

dismal2 12y ago
because obviously the division terms would actually be upheld and followed, hah!
coldtea 12y ago
>Of course in the case of Native Americans, they are primarily to blame for obstinately refusing to accept the very generous division of 1807 Why should they accept the "generous division" of invaders? Would you accept the "generous division" of your house or property, to some guy that just arrived and wants it?

protomyth 12y ago

Mentioning President Lincoln in a positive light doesn't jive with his treatment of the Dakota https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie https://www.facebook.com/dakota38movie (movie link).

protomyth 12y ago

"Of this self-identified population, only a fraction are visible minorities, subject to the discrimination that shapes identity and forges political movements." Yeah, right. I think the author did very little research into the modern problems. Also, self-identified might cut it for the news media, but each tribe has a list of enrolled members. If you are not on someones list, you are not Native American for a vast majority of purposes.

brooklyndude 12y ago

It hits a lot of Americans at one point in their life, "We're not always the good guys." It's taken me a lifetime to understand that.

kingmanaz 12y ago

> It is high time for non-Native Americans to come to terms with the fact that the United States is built on someone else's land. As usual, the concepts of "native United States citizen" and "native North American aborigine" are being conflated. The United States is a "nation of colonists". The Republic did not precede the North-Western European colonists who founded it. Demands for non-Aborigionies to acknowledge "someone else's land" stem from a failure to distinguish between United States citizenship and chance birth on the North American continent. The North American Aborigine peoples may have historically been born on the North American landmass, but they were not the founders of the United States nor the people whose interests said nation was designed to further. The disorganized aboriginals variously aided or hindered the expansion of the Republic depending on the particular tribe's short term ends. The European pioneers did not "steal" a pre-existing democratic republic, rather, they struggled, triumphed, and created their own for their progeny. North American Aborigines lived outside the republic until reservations were allotted to them, reservations which they largely continue to live apart in today. Frankly, the tone of the parent article smacks of 1960s-era Baby Boomer coming-of-age politics. Its high time to question this line of thinking.

afarrell 12y ago
I don't see how either this quote or the article from which it is drawn conflates those those two categories of people. Indeed, it says that we "conquered" the native lands, a word that usually refers to one polity expanding from lands of its own into lands outside of it. It presupposes that native american lands were outside of the United States. Yes, the European pioneers struggled. Both a military campaign and an agricultural enterprise are very difficult.
mr_luc 12y ago
I agree that "someone else's land" is a bit much. Saying that "North American Aborigines lived outside the republic" is a bit misleading, because it insinuates that they weren't interested in assimilating, and becoming a part of that struggling, triumphing mass of people that identified as Americans at that time. More truthfully, leading up to the times when they were forcibly relocated to reservations, they were never allowed in, for the same reasons that black residents of the US had a tough time in those years: the world around them was quite racist and (especially in the case of indians) kleptomaniac. In fact, many Native Americans tried to assimilate; I remember reading about one enterprising native gent in the early 1800s who had made himself quite rich from trade, had a mansion, the whole nine yards ... until the day came when his town wanted his stuff. So they took it, because America was in large part founded on the notion of repeatedly taking stuff that the natives considered their property. Acknowledging the massive wrongs committed by this country against those peoples isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I agree with you that we need to be realistic about what conclusions we draw from it. Yes, the United States stole stuff from the indians. No, we're not going to now consider dispossessing the current owners of that stuff; that's akin to, say, questioning the rightness of the origins of modern-day Israel. There's a state there now, so it's moot.