The parts of South Africa where Europeans initially settled more resemble the American case, including disease decimation of the indigenes, initial peace and eventual abrogation of treaties. Europeans only really started meaningfully interacting with the black indigenous peoples one hundred years after they already had a presence here - the other natives, the ones directly impacted by the original colony, are not by any stretch the majority. They’ve effectively been replaced by their mixed-race descendants, I doubt there are more than a handful of pureblood Khoekhoen left in the country.
When talking about different and disparate groups? Yeah, it can be. There isn’t one monolithic group of European settlers, and attitudes can change from generation to generation.
(Granted, most of them sucked most of the time.)
Couple of points.
[ol]
[li]It’s a mistake to focus exclusively on what the Europeans could have done differently. For a variety of reasons - mostly the way it turned out - there’s a tendency to view the indigenous populations as sort-of modern day hippies, peace and nature loving etc., confronted by brutal European conquerors. But that’s not remotely accurate.[/li][li]If I’m not mistaken, one big difference between NA on the one hand and Central & South America on the other, is that the indigenous populations of the latter groups were much bigger at the time of the initial European contact.[/li][/ol]
I think it would probably take some far fetched scenarios to make a meaningful difference. I’ll start with the less outlandish and move up to more outlandish.
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When Europeans first show up they start in what is now Brazil and the United States rather than Mexico and Peru. This would allow the Native Americans that had the more developed societies (Inca and Aztecs) to not be the first ones that were conquered and when Europeans eventually got around to those areas they would have been better prepared.
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Europe has worse devastation during the black plague so the Native Americans have more time to develop technologically by the time Europeans eventually show up.
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Contact is made with Asians before Europeans, perhaps Chinese or Japanese sailing east across the Pacific. Native Americans still suffer from smallpox and all the other old world diseases but have time to recover before Europeans show up.
I think it would take outlandish scenarios like those to really make any meaningful difference in the outcome.
It just occurred to me that another possibility is to have some massive event happen in Europe just after the first landings which diverts attention away from exploration for a while… a big war, or another big plague, or something. A few decades to let the diseases burn out and societies to reform could make a huge difference.
Or a variation on that is that one of the European nations gets into a protracted war with a NA empire/nation, and then one of their European rivals decides that a good way to stick a thumb in their eyes is to help out those NAs via technology transfer. So maybe Spain gets in a protracted war with the Aztecs, albeit one that they will presumably eventually win, but then England (which in this hypothetical is busy doing things other than exploring itself, for whatever reason, but wants to keep Spain’s army busy) sends a few boats full of muskets and musket-making supplies down to Technochtitlan.
(Granted, a technologically advanced Aztec civilization running rampant over the rest of the New World probably isn’t great either, but that’s a subject for another thread.)
A question:
How much did Christianity factor into how poorly the Colonists treated the Natives? What I mean is, say Puritan “Convert them all” Christianity was not in play, might we have seen more humane treatment of the Natives? Would it still have led to torture and slavery nonetheless?
A lot of the interactions weren’t considered awful by those who actually lived them, from the settlements in Florida creating treaties with the local tribes which are still in force nowadays to the behavior of individual leaders such as Balboa or Palafox. And even some which would definitely be considered awful by some of the sides weren’t considered bad by others: Cortés was far from the only one to use pre-existing rivalries.
Brazil was reached before Peru, but exploring the mountains was easier than exploring the jungle. Mountains, we had back home; jungles anywhere like that one, no.
It did happen on a limited basis, which I discovered after visiting Little Bighorn battlefield.
The tour guide (a Crow Indian) was saying that Crow Scouts were guides for Custer. I asked “Were they considered traitors?”
No! The Sioux came from South Dakota and stole the Crow’s land in Montana, as they were stronger. The Crows sided with the US, on the condition they help get their land back. As you know, the US was ultimately victorious against the Sioux.
I expected to hear a sad ending: “Then the white man with forked tongue broke the treaty”.
Our guide concluded: All this land around the battlefield, is Crow reservation to this day.