Time Travel for Justice! hypothetical

In My Humble Opinion
1

Background:

In the near future, there’s a revolution in physics and understanding of the nature of the universe. Two major discoveries are relevant to this post – the multiverse hypothesis is verified to be true, and time travel is possible. You can go into the past, but you won’t change the future – you’ll create a new one, and never be able to return to the previous timeline. The old timeline will continue on without you.

This technology is highly restricted, but a group of wealthy philanthropists and scientists gain access to it and create an organization – Time Travel for Justice… righting what once went wrong, but in the very large scale, not for individuals.

You volunteer for the next mission:

Protect the native peoples of the Americas

You have 6 months to prepare. Tech limitations mean that you will go alone plus about 100 lbs of stuff, with a big but not unlimited budget to prepare (say $10 million). You choose where to go, and when, with the goal of preventing/minimizing as much as possible the multiple genocide events following Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas.

What’s the best way to do this? What would you bring? Where would you go? What is your strategy?

I see a few possibilities:

  1. Focus on smallpox and other communicable diseases. Go to the Americas and bring some vaccinations and such, but that won’t be enough for a whole continent – IIRC, 18th and 19th century doctors used inoculations for smallpox by deliberately infecting through a cut in the skin the pus from another patient, and the skin infection was much less deadly than the inhaled infection (or something like that). If this strategy is used, it would have to be in the years very close to first contact (or even shortly afterwards), since that inoculation isn’t passed down generation to generation, unless the community fully accepts it as a common practice. Also, focus on proper sewage engineering and community hygiene, which should mostly eliminate things like dysentery and cholera. I think the biggest difficulty here would be convincing the natives to cooperate. That 6 months might be useful primarily in learning a useful native language and bringing impressive enough technology or skills to convince the native people that you’re worth listening to.

  2. Focus on convincing European explorers and monarchs to treat the natives with decency. I think this is unlikely to succeed, and also ignores the disease problems from the previous strategy.

  3. Focus on preparing the natives militarily for the upcoming invasion. This one intrigues me. A critical part of the military disadvantage of the native peoples was a lack of horses – this might be remedied by starting in Europe with 100 lbs of gold, then chartering a ship and crew and filling the hold with horses to bring to the Americas. But this still ignores the problem of disease, and similarly requires the ability to communicate with and impress native people.

  4. Some combination.

Maybe there are other strategies. Thoughts?

If this thread is a success, maybe the next one will be to prevent the mass enslavement, brutalization, and pillaging of Africa and Africans.

2

I suppose I might reread Pastwatch to refresh my memory, then do that. Although I wouldn’t look forward to the part with the sea urchin spines.

3

How about going back 1000+ years and infecting native Americans with smallpox and other European communicable diseases? There will still be a massive epidemic, but perhaps the population will recover and have some resistance to the diseases before the Europeans get there.

Or perhaps by the time time travel is invented, we could engineer weaker versions of the pathogens that are less fatal but still communicable, acting as live vaccines.

4

By a lovely coincidence, I just wrote a science-fantasy novel with this idea.

The characters had only limited means, but what they did was get Pizarro arrested by the Governor of Panama, before he could launch his attack on the Incas.

5

Teach the natives about compound bows. Or at least recurve bows and the use of an atlatl.

Or to expand on scr4’s idea. Jump far enough back to immunize the entire continent against smallpox and the rest, but also add some modern bugs into the mix that will take out the interlopers instead.

6

Since the word “atlatl” comes from Nahuatl, I kinda think that it was already around in the Americas.

7

Six months of living among a smallish group of people might be enough to learn their language & customs and convince them to trust you to some extent. It would be fairly impressive if you could succeed to the point of them allowing you to do bizarre/repulsive (as it would probably seem to them) things like vaccinations.

But there’s no way you’re going to have any real impact on a substantial number of people in that short a time. The language problem alone would be insurmountable.

Most unlikely. The idea that strangers vastly different from you should be treated non-ruthlessly, as a concept shared by significant numbers of people, is fairly recent. (Note that the native Americans certainly didn’t go in for this in any big way.)

Seems hopeless. Horses aren’t nearly enough. You need guns, steel, a history of military training, and lots more. Many hundreds of years of development (including suitably capable adversaries to practice against) would be needed for any chance of long-term successful defense.
I think the only - very slim - chance of success for this project would be to go back a couple thousand years or so and see if you can somehow seed the idea of a common written language. I’ve no idea how that could possibly be done, but it might lead the the sort of development that would have made the Americas’ encounter with Europe like that of China or Japan.