The Maori of New Zealand were able to hold off outsiders for quite a while until the Europeans weapons were just so much better.
In the US the Apache held off the Mexicans and later the Americans until the late 1800’s when repeating firearms and numbers were just too great for them.
This is a really fantastic book, which among other things addresses the fact that the technological superiority of the European settlers was real but not completely overwhelming until after the Civil War. Bows and arrows may seem like a joke against guns, but among skilled users were not all that much worse than the single-firing black powder weapons in widespread use prior to the mid-19th century. The Comanche managed to actually push the American settlement border back somewhat for several years with their constant raids. But the Comanche couldn’t ever match the United States in numbers or in organization, and suffered from constant disease outbreaks.
We also know that contact between Europe and India is extensive, since many of the languages of India (including the classical Sanskrit) are related to Greek, Latin, and most of the modern languages of Europe (including English). That’s the idea of the Indo-European language family. Since there does not appear to be anything like a Turko-Athabaskan language family, a Sinitic-Algonquian language family, or a Yupo-Elamite language family, we can conclude that there is less evidence to support a recent shared history (that is, within historical times) between the Americas and elsewhere.
In other news, the Third Aztec Republic has been criticized again in the UN for supporting Celtic Druid extremists fighting against the Italo-Polish Alliance’s efforts to resettle Swedish economic migrants in its Occupied Scottish Territories even as an economic embargo continues to be enforced by carriers of the Imperial Wampanoag Navy.
If the natives had united as a single force then the Europeans would have been defeated as their lines of supply and communication were stretched to hell and back. If a ship made it back to Europe and reinforcement organised it would be 6 months before help arrived in that time the natives would have become familiar with European weapons that they had captured. It was the inability of the natives to communicate with one another probably due to petty feuding that allowed the Europeans to gain a foothold in the America’s.
My old History professor told us what he called the Tip of the Iceberg Theory. He said when the first Europeans started heading west, the Indians didn’t think there were enough to be concerned about. Said the Indians could have destroyed them handily, firing off 20 arrows in the time it took the Europeans to load and fire a single shot. They didn’t understand they were seeing just the “tip of the iceberg.” But by the time the danger was fully realized, it was too late, there were too many, and the momentum was gaining. He said a concerted effort early on could have made westward expansion seem undesirable, at least for the foreseeable future.
That’s pretty much the pattern of all European colonization. The Euros were always vastly outnumbered and outgunned but the trick is that they, by definition, were a new and non-zero weight in a delicate and age-old balance. So their simple presence destroyed any status quo, and they had the knack of playing with that fact - basically allying with the underdog(s) so they could murder any overdog, then turn on the now even weaker underdog. That’s how the Brits took India too.
In the case of the Americas, variola wiping out close to 95% of the population helped though ;).
But sometimes the natives figured out what was what. Japan managed to throw them back to the sea for close to two centuries for example, then managed to recover quite quickly from the rude awakening Perry gave them.
There is some support for a Central-Asia, Western American Dene-Yeniseian language family, not to mention the definitely related Yupik languages on either side of the Bering Strait, the latter of which would have diverged beyond recognizability had they not split in historical times.
I thought the natives also thought the Spaniards were returning Gods, with their ships, dogs, armor, riding horses, and of course their thunder-sticks. I’ll try to find it, but there was some legend of a fair-skinned deity returning to the Aztecs by sea, so maybe they could not resist the 1519 landing by Cortez without approval of their leaders.
I think they figured out fairly quickly that these were not gods.
“Since the sixteenth century, it has been widely held that the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II initially believed the landing of Hernán Cortés in 1519 to be Quetzalcoatl’s return. This view has been questioned by ethno-historians who argue that the Quetzalcoatl-Cortés connection is not found in any document that was created independently of post-Conquest Spanish influence, and that there is little proof of a pre-Hispanic belief in Quetzalcoatl’s return”
That’s an old fable we told ourselves to boost our egos, but outsides of the dreams and infatuations of non-contemporary chroniclers there’s not much at all to support it. Then again, since the bastard burned all the codices, we have not much to support anything regarding the natives point of view ;).
But my reckoning is that the natives knew full well Cortez was just a guy - a guy with magitech, admittedly, but still. So I think they used him as much as he would use them, and much like the “sale” of Manhattan both sides thought they were getting the better out of a deal with weird idiots ; as I’m pretty sure the Spaniards’ obsession with gold must have been looked down upon as a weakness, especially by people as savvy and advanced as the Aztecs were. To say nothing of their complete ignorance of how to live in the jungles of central America.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did think the Spaniards were gods at first. But as soon as the first one bled, let alone died, the game would have been up.