It's amazing both:
1. How much about the Native American history we still don't know/understand.
2. How little of what we do know is taught in schools in the USA. I don't think I any of my HS classes went into any detail about pre-contact North American history.
I wonder what the largest cause of this is. Two ideas come to mind:
1. We just don't have access to pre-contact North America. We weren't there to write about it, they didn't write about it, and we don't have a lore lineage because we're not part of the culture.
2. Considering what happened, it's more convenient to think that we didn't really destroy anything much and we "brought culture to the savages" and made things better.
Afaik much of Africa suffers from the same sort of problem.
I think it is largely the second, after all many of the different nations did have prolonged contact with America or the 13 colonies and have descendants around right now who can tell us stuff.
In regards to Africa, let's face it, most of us (and I include myself here) are pretty bad with history. I would have a hard time writing more then a cursory paragraph about the 30 years war for instance even though it is an important part of European history and I can't really tell you anything about the Taiping Rebellion except that the guy on one side thoght he was Jesus' brother even though it happened at the same time as the civil war and killed many many more people.
With Native American history though it is the history of where I live. I have spent my whole life living in areas that were previously controlled by the Anishinaabe people but never learned anything about them in class. To me that would be like a German student knowing as little as me about the 30 years war or a Chinese student who can't tell you the basics of the Taiping rebellion.
This is a global issue. History is written by winners. There are a lot of cultures within China or Russia or any other country that have been destroyed over time in the goal of national progress.
History unfortunately does that to nations and peoples. The average European is as ignorant about the Sami as the average American is about the Tonkawa.
At least in Canada, a lot of the cultural lore was destroyed through systematically sending native children to religious schools where they weren't allowed to speak their language or practice their culture.
However, point two is somewhat correct - we did make things better for the indigenous population. Imagine if Western Europe had been subjugated by the Native Americans somehow - our standard of living would have declined, we would have lost the chance of the scientific revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, let alone the 20th. I don't recall there being universities, or metalworking, sea travel, etc. before Europeans brought them to America.
Cultural relativism can also be seen as abuse. Let's leave those stone age islanders alone, who are we to say that our culture is better than theirs? Of course it's better. It's abusive to deny them the hundreds of years of scientific and technical progress. We would see it as abuse if someone had a child and didn't send them to school, instead forcing them to learn how to hunt and fend for themselves...
It's so strange how history touches on Christopher Columbus and then immediately jumps to the Mayflower even if you take honors-level history courses in High School. I incidentally learned more about pre-Colombian NA from an intro art history course and an intro religious studies course I took my senior year of college than I did in my entire education up until that point.
It's kind of crazy that most people I know believe that Europeans showed up to an almost entirely empty content, and were like "Oh hey, free land." I learned about Squanto at some point, but I never learned the reason why he spoke English is because he was kidnapped by an English explorer and brought back to Europe. Or that he managed to work his way back to North America and found his tribe had been wiped out by a plague, and that this plague was a huge part of why North America was so sparsely populated.
It's pretty frustrating, because teaching the land was just empty and unused is so far from the truth that it is basically propaganda.
It's propaganda on both sides. You are correct, there are many people who act like the natives weren't practically exterminated. However, on the flip side, there's a sort of revisionist history that ignores that the vast majority of natives were wiped out unintentionally due to disease. Many new frontiers for Europeans were basically empty due to disease preceding them.
Additionally, we tend to forget who the natives actually were. The Mississippian culture was forgotten, but so are the Comanches - a tribe that in the 1700s and 1800s had an uncontested empire and were described as the best light cavalry in the world. They had a massive striking range and were infamous for raids on European settlements. In these raids they had no compunction about rape and torture (infants included). It wasn't seen as wrong to them - their enemies the Utes would have done the same to them.
History is often much more nuanced than people want to admit.
Note, it's also crazy how empty America really was compared to Europe, China, or India at the time. If you look at maps of world population, you've got tens of dozens of cities larger than 1 million in population throughout Eurasia and virtually none in the Americas prior to 1800.
The view that you're trying to correct generally requires a bit more knowledge than the one pushed by an average person's education.
Simply teaching, by default, that there was an apocalyptic plague among Native Americans unknowingly caused by Europeans would go a long way towards balancing the narrative.
This apocalyptic plague story is well-known in the US if we go by my personal observation. I don't think it even takes much education to have heard this. I found a few links that indicate the idea of a smallpox plague is spun to say that the results or intent of European activity were not genocide.
Every Columbus Day, Americans are buried under an avalanche of articles and social media posts about how diseases brought by the Europeans wiped out the natives. Trust me, we know. This narrative you worry about was more than balanced decades ago.
Can you show me those maps showing dozens of cities with 1 million plus population prior to 1800? Wikipedia's list of largest cities throughout history [1] is pretty well-sourced and while there are a handful of 1 million+ (Rome, Baghdad, Istanbul, Beijing, Ayutthaya) before the Industrial Revolution, they reach that population asynchronously and don't number in the dozens, even by the most optimistic estimates.
Based on what I've read, most of North America was indeed relatively sparsely populated relative to, say, early modern Japan or China, but Mesoamerica and the Andes were comparable to early modern Europe in terms of population density and urbanization. For example, by the time of first contact with Cortes in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200k to 300k, which was roughly three times larger than the estimated population of London at the same time, as well as bigger than any city in Spain or any of the other Hapsburg lands (which is something that the Spanish themselves noted).
Charles Mann's 1491 is a really good read on this general topic by the way, for anyone interested in reading more.
>The city's elites may have led the performance to show their political and spiritual power, much the way their European counterparts of the same era were conducting public executions and crusades.
I wish the article laid out more empirical evidence for this rather than resorting to "well the Europeans were doing it, so this must have been what they were also doing!"
> He and Alt were both very opposed to the idea that Cahokia might have been a trade center and called it a mistake to view the city as an economic entity.
Cities are inherently economic entities... Kind of gives the impression that these archaeologists are imposing a bit of their own belief systems. It might be more reflective of the informal writing style than anything else.
If you are interested in the "mound" people, I strongly suggest books by Charles Whittlesey. He mapped many of the works for the Smithsonian in the 1840s.
His books "Descriptions of ancient works in Ohio" and "Ancient mining on the shores of lake superior" are available for free on google play books. He has others as well.
There is some fascinating history that most dont know about. You can find mounds on google maps as well if you know what to look for and line up the maps etc.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 65.4 ms ] threadNaturally, Satan uses Evil mode
1. We just don't have access to pre-contact North America. We weren't there to write about it, they didn't write about it, and we don't have a lore lineage because we're not part of the culture.
2. Considering what happened, it's more convenient to think that we didn't really destroy anything much and we "brought culture to the savages" and made things better.
Afaik much of Africa suffers from the same sort of problem.
With Native American history though it is the history of where I live. I have spent my whole life living in areas that were previously controlled by the Anishinaabe people but never learned anything about them in class. To me that would be like a German student knowing as little as me about the 30 years war or a Chinese student who can't tell you the basics of the Taiping rebellion.
History unfortunately does that to nations and peoples. The average European is as ignorant about the Sami as the average American is about the Tonkawa.
Cultural relativism can also be seen as abuse. Let's leave those stone age islanders alone, who are we to say that our culture is better than theirs? Of course it's better. It's abusive to deny them the hundreds of years of scientific and technical progress. We would see it as abuse if someone had a child and didn't send them to school, instead forcing them to learn how to hunt and fend for themselves...
Well, that got off-topic quickly. Sorry!
It's kind of crazy that most people I know believe that Europeans showed up to an almost entirely empty content, and were like "Oh hey, free land." I learned about Squanto at some point, but I never learned the reason why he spoke English is because he was kidnapped by an English explorer and brought back to Europe. Or that he managed to work his way back to North America and found his tribe had been wiped out by a plague, and that this plague was a huge part of why North America was so sparsely populated.
It's pretty frustrating, because teaching the land was just empty and unused is so far from the truth that it is basically propaganda.
Additionally, we tend to forget who the natives actually were. The Mississippian culture was forgotten, but so are the Comanches - a tribe that in the 1700s and 1800s had an uncontested empire and were described as the best light cavalry in the world. They had a massive striking range and were infamous for raids on European settlements. In these raids they had no compunction about rape and torture (infants included). It wasn't seen as wrong to them - their enemies the Utes would have done the same to them.
History is often much more nuanced than people want to admit.
Note, it's also crazy how empty America really was compared to Europe, China, or India at the time. If you look at maps of world population, you've got tens of dozens of cities larger than 1 million in population throughout Eurasia and virtually none in the Americas prior to 1800.
Simply teaching, by default, that there was an apocalyptic plague among Native Americans unknowingly caused by Europeans would go a long way towards balancing the narrative.
Based on what I've read, most of North America was indeed relatively sparsely populated relative to, say, early modern Japan or China, but Mesoamerica and the Andes were comparable to early modern Europe in terms of population density and urbanization. For example, by the time of first contact with Cortes in 1519, Tenochtitlan had a population of 200k to 300k, which was roughly three times larger than the estimated population of London at the same time, as well as bigger than any city in Spain or any of the other Hapsburg lands (which is something that the Spanish themselves noted).
Charles Mann's 1491 is a really good read on this general topic by the way, for anyone interested in reading more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
It's apparently not cities with 1 million people, it's population centers of 1 million.
I wish the article laid out more empirical evidence for this rather than resorting to "well the Europeans were doing it, so this must have been what they were also doing!"
> He and Alt were both very opposed to the idea that Cahokia might have been a trade center and called it a mistake to view the city as an economic entity.
Cities are inherently economic entities... Kind of gives the impression that these archaeologists are imposing a bit of their own belief systems. It might be more reflective of the informal writing style than anything else.
His books "Descriptions of ancient works in Ohio" and "Ancient mining on the shores of lake superior" are available for free on google play books. He has others as well.
There is some fascinating history that most dont know about. You can find mounds on google maps as well if you know what to look for and line up the maps etc.