It’s generally accepted that the treatment of Native Americans by European settlers in the Americas was awful, sometimes genocidal, involving killing and betraying and lying and breaking treaties and on and on, from day 1 up until close to the present.
But something I wonder where there were opportunities for things to go better?
Now, I do NOT want to come off as an apologist here. It would be easy to read this question and interpret it as me saying “eh, it’s just human nature that things worked out that way, no one to blame, yada yada yada”.
That out of the way, let’s take the following as givens:
(1) Human nature is what it is. Zero chance that Europeans are going to show up, find a new continent, and then say “well, those guys got there first… oh well”, and sail back home.
(2) The massive plagues that wiped out 90% of Native Americans were going to happen no matter what.
So, given those two constraints, what branching points are there where we can realistically posit that things might have gone differently, and better? Are there examples of other places in the world where contact between indigenous people and far-more-technologically-advanced cultures went “well”?
Were there specific instances which, historically, very clearly almost went the other way? ie, some vote in congress about whether to hold to the terms of a treaty rather than screwing over the NAs yet again that was super-close? Could the Incas or Aztecs have beaten the conquistadors if the dice had fallen just slightly differently?
(I’m mostly thinking about North America and the British settlements and the early USA, but comments on Central/South America are welcome as well.)
Thoughts?
The only interaction between a native people and a more advanced people that didn’t end AS badly was the interaction between Leif Erickson and the Natives of Greenland. After Erickson it became bloody, but I don’t recall hearing that Erickson himself oppressed the Natives.
In order to have a different result, you’d have to make European-Christian culture be not as oppressive and zealous in general, I’d think.
Sometimes? Can genocide be turned off and on? It was genocidal, let’s not be afraid to say it, own it, and admit it. There was no attempt made to assimilate. Just to take, and kill. It’s the truth.
Pretty much. It was an almost 400 year genocide if you consider that we were still taking land from them as late as the 19th century. Do we start at Jamestown or Columbus’ first voyages?
I’m not completely clear where this is meant to go or why, Max, but I have read that there were actually a large number of European-Native interactions which went very well. It certainly was NOT all genocide and duplicity.
One of the problems we have with knowing what actually happened accurately, is that only one side kept any still existing records, and those were often self-serving (as such things usually are).
But there were, as I said, many interactions that went well. But since those were followed eventually by big problems, the overall story has been pretty bleak.
Both NA’s and E’s were prone to assume wrongly, that the people they made agreements with, actually genuinely represented everyone in the other group, when actually, neither did. It was worse on the Hunter Gatherer side, because their culture wasn’t comprehended by the E’s, often as not. There were (again, so I have read) many instances where BOTH sides thought that they had a firm agreement, and that later BOTH sides thought the other broke the agreement, and that the reason for this was a complete lack of real understanding about what the agreement actually was about.
One such scenario, again which I can only give as hearsay, since there are no NA records to refer to, is that “settlers” would barter for land, thinking that they were BUYING the land permanently from the natives, but the natives thought essentially that the settlers were doing something more like renting the land for a single hunting season. So when the season was over and the natives returned to winter there, the settlers freaked out and attacked them, OR the natives would freak out that the settlers didn’t go back to THEIR homes as expected, and so attacked them. Both would declare that they’d been deceived, when it was more accurate to say that they suffered from incompetent translators.
Given the thrust of European history at that time, I don’t see how things could have turned out any differently, in the long run. Europeans started “owning” land a very long time before they started spreading out to other peoples’ areas. We also established early on, such notions as that possession trumps intellectual legalities, and added in all manner of heroic nonsense to make theft by the very powerful, over into God’s will. That goes back at least to Moses and the tribes of Israel, from which many later European groups took their lead. The only way I could imagine any other outcome, would have been if the NA’s had managed to truly unify against the Europeans early on, and essentially become like the Europeans culturally, enough to deal with us in the manner that we were used to. But since right through the end, the tribes remained divided more often than not, that couldn’t happen.
The problem was colonization. Europeans didn’t show up looking to trade, they came to take the land and it’s resources. Distant cultures have been able to trade fairly and leave each other be but when one group wants more than it’s own local resources provide the result is not going to be pleasant. The Native Americans had no ability to fight back in a significant manner, the Europeans weren’t at war with them, they were trying to enslave and obliterate Native Americans and take all their resources for their own use. So if Europe wasn’t so overcrowded, didn’t have depleted resources, and didn’t need so much money to fight among themselves they might have become fair trading partners with Native Americans. Instead of shipping people to colonize the New World they would have sent ships to stock up on goods purchased from the Native Americans to take back home, dropping off their own goods. The Native Americans could have built up their technology, trading for steel and gunpowder, and mounted a defense against attempts to colonize their land or cheat them on deals. But I think it’s unlikely that any culture seeing such a disparity in power would not have immediately taken advantage of the situation.
Incidentally that was after the big dying off had taken place already, Squanto actually did manage to get back to his village, only to find it abandoned and almost all inhabitants dead because of the plagues.
But getting back to the peace lasting 50 years is that there was a chance for lasting peace early on even with the plague wiping 90% of the Natives.
I was looking for why the peace eventually failed, when I found this article that expresses what I thought when I saw the tittle of the thread: one should not hypothesize it, it took place once.
But I guess the question, and the purpose of this thread, is to ask whether it’s even within the realm of possibility that that 50 year peace, or another similar one, could have lasted indefinitely. Could something like that possibly adapt to the scale of European immigration?
One interesting branching point, as I mentioned in the OP, is the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas. As I understand it, Cortez had a tiny army (albeit one with guns) and beat the Aztecs largely because he allied with a bunch of other disgruntled people who hated the Aztecs. If he shows up and is faced by overwhelming odds, is it even imaginable that he says “whelp, can’t win this war, might as well see if I can trade with these people” and heads back home with a ship full of potatoes, or what have you? Or was just never even possibly in the cards?
Since everyone else is “AFAIK”-ing it, I’ll throw mine in:
My understanding is that the initial encounters were somewhat respectful, especially since the Europeans barely survived the journey. Then, as the native population was reverse-decimated – 90% wiped out – by european disease (and it doesn’t make much difference in the long run whether the infections were deliberately spread or not), europeans seized the opportunity to be evil.
The OP implies we can’t take infectious disease out of the picture. If we could, or if we could imagine Europeans taking back equally devestating diseases then even with gunpowder our ability to squash the NA is taken away, and we can imagine a more equal situation.
Look at Europe’s interactions with every other part of the world. The timing and form might vary, but some attempt at political domination was inevitable, and the growing technological disparity meant that some level of success was likely.
Without muskets and without ships that could make a direct Atlantic crossing from Europe, the Vikings had much less of an advantage- indeed less enough that they actually failed to establish a permanent toehold on the North American mainland.
Let’s say in a counterfactual that one smallpox infected Scandinavian managed to make it to North America while he was still infectious. The plagues do their stuff, giving the Vikings enough breathing room to get established. The Vikings don’t have the technology to make as heavy inroads, giving the native population time to recover. So by the time Portuguese and Spanish start crossing the Atlantic, the natives are far less likely to be steamrolled than in our history.
They still lose ultimately; but North America remains a native-majority region, and European settlement there resembles South Africa, or how Russia gained nominal control of central Asia but with the horse-borne natives of the plains remaining the majority there.
Much of Central Asia wasn’t populated by “horse borne” nomads, it was populated by settled agriculturalists with a long history of civilization. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan specifically were centers of Persianized civilization and learning for a very long time. Kazakhstan further north (and I guess Kyrgyzstan also) were where the horse-borne people lived.
Kazakhstan specifically is majority Kazakh today, but it wasn’t always the case, and between the mid-1930s and mid-1980s there were more Russians there than Kazakhs. In the 1970 census the population was about 58% ethnically European (mostly Russian, with large minorities of Germans and Ukrainians and a small number of Belarussians and Poles). Kazakhs became a majority again due to higher birth rates and to emigration of Russians and Germans after the end of the Soviet Union.
For that matter there are parts of South America that are majority-indigenous today in terms of ethnic identification (I think Bolivia still is, and Peru was until the mid-20th century). Most Peruvians and Ecuadorians today are mixed-race, not indigenous, but I believe (I’ll have to check some studies) that native ancestry is the biggest single genetic component. Indigenous people did better in highland south America because the climate is unfavourable for introduced tropical diseases, and because Europeans had a harder time thriving at very high altitude.
When a technologically more advanced civilization encounters a less technologically advanced civilization, the more advanced civilization “wins”. Outfight, outcompete, whatever (as it doesn’t always involve warfare). We see this even today. (For some reason the BBC is writing a lot of articles about smaller African groups losing their language and even fashion when next to larger African groups, such as the San (“Bushmen”) in South Africa.)
I think a “best case scenario” would involve natives living nearby European Americans, picking up advancements such as writing and various technologies. Even so, with the plagues wiping out large numbers, the natives would retreat to smaller cultural centers. Young natives would face a lot of pressure to lose their culture and pick up that of the neighbors.
Erickson faced overwhelming numbers. The Scandinavians did not bring disease like Columbus and those following Columbus. Whether he would have oppressed given the opportunity is unknown, though that generally wasn’t their way.
European cultures still attempted to dominate outside cultures when they didn’t have disease doing the bulk of the dirty work. They just couldn’t translocate and colonize in those instances.
That’s pretty much the answer. There was no outcome that wouldn’t have been awful for somebody. And due to the fact that the Native Americans were vulnerable to European diseases, the outcome was awful for them.
If the diseases hadn’t been a factor, we would have seen some variation on what happened in Africa and India: the Europeans would have conquered the Americas but they would have only been rulers over a large native population, instead of replacements for that population. And eventually, the native population would have been strong enough to kick out the Europeans.
I have seen the argument that the only reason the Europeans were able to build empires in Africa and Asia were because they had already started empires in the Americas. The Americas were depopulated by diseases, so they were weak enough to be conquered with just the resources Europeans started with. Then when the Europeans had control of the additional resources of the Americas, they were strong enough to conquer Africa and Asia. In this argument, the Europeans wouldn’t have been able to build empires if the Native Americans had been as disease resistant as the Africans and Asians. There wouldn’t have been an easy place to conquer as a necessary first stage.
But I can’t imagine any scenario where the Americans and the Europeans co-exist peacefully side by side.
Muffin’s reply is correct. In fact, it was true not only in Canada but in parts of the U.S. as well. I won’t argue that the French didn’t think of themselves as superior, try to convert the Native Americans to Christianity (though they didn’t use force, as the Spanish did), or establish settlements. But as the French settlements were largely concerned with fur trading, which required a degree of cooperation with indigenous people, the French weren’t interested in displacement. Genocide was not in their own best interests.
You need to go pretty far back. To the Vikings or at least the Hansa.
The fundamental problem is the diseases. Not only did well-established native American nations lose 90, sometime up to 100 % of their population, but they epidemics caused the organization of nations to crash. Europeans encountered more hunter-gatherers in the Americas than there was before the Colombian exchange , because that was what was left after the epidemics wiped out the nations and peripheral groups moved in.
There is a general awareness that agricultural societies have a greater population density than hunter-gatherers but people don’t realize how large the difference is. When Eric the Red colonized Greenland, his seed population probably outnumbered the total population of Newfoundland by 25 - 100 %.
When the Europeans get to establish themselves after the disease crash of the Natives, even if all further interaction is peaceful they will swamp the Natives through sheer numbers over time.
Thats because Leif Erikson WAS a native of Greenland, and he was the firstborn son of the big boss of Greenland. Makes it easy to get along.
I think the Conquistadors in general had some freakish luck. But the Aztecs were probably doomed anyway. They were too hated by too many and the triple alliance were probably going down when the plagues sruck anyway. The population density of that valley would have doomed them.
The Incas I believe could have survived with a little less bad luck. They were a very new empire, still figuring out way to do things, their core territories were exceptionally defensible, and the climate not that good for disease transmission.
The Viking problem was lack of a seed population, not technology. While the Greenlanders had an overwhelming numerical advantage over the population of Newfoundland, only a few families tried to settle Vinland, and they did not realize how sparse the native population was.
There are a few inventions which have said to change the nature of warfare. The tank, the chariot, iron weapons and armor, the horse and the stirrup. The Norse had three of those.
Gunpowder, at the time of Colombus had a good psychological effect in the first few battles, but were at that time inferior to a skilled bowman. Except if you needed to take down fortifications.
The Norse were probably on the brink of a successful colony, a few more ships with colonists could have made the difference.
What you need for the OP is either a successful Vinland effort by the Norse, with resulting tech transfers to the Native Americans. Horses, new crop packages and livestock, and most important of all in my opinion, Norse ship and navigation tech.
That won’t be an easy tech to adopt, because of all the precursor techs you need, but the Natives will be quite motivated I think. And the idea will spread widely.
Or you need Colombus to fail. The thing about Colombus what that his efforts changed the European mindset on faraway lands. He had promised his backers lots of gold, and was expecting Bad Things if he failed to deliver. So he vastly exaggerated the amounts of gold he found. He wrote a letter about how much gold there was, and made so many copies of it that it can still be read. And then he had another stroke of flukey luck, and vast amounts of silver and gold did in fact turn out to be in Mesoamerica.
Spains massive payoff on the Colombus longshot totally changed the European narrative on foreign places.
If Colombus drowns or never gets to go, or learns better geography as a kid, the Americas get explored from the Brazilian coast by the Portugese, and the Newfoundland coast by Basque and Bristolian fishermen trying to outcompete the Hansa. Possibly with the Hansa counting in like an avalanche and establishing themselves. Hansa trading towns down the east coast would be a very different contact.
What that would mean is that the plagues would burn through the populations of the Americas without gold-mad conquistadors following immediately. There will be a breathing space, and the rumor of Europeans may precede them.
Tecumseh’s Confederacy had a solid shot at halting the advance of the settlers. It’s quite possible to imagine a brokered peace happening as a result of it, and since both sides were fairly evenly matched by that time, it could have even lasted.
It’s clear in retrospect that conquering the interior wasn’t ultimately necessary.