I wonder what things would be like if the European settlers hadn't displaced the indigenous Americans. (If the American Indian way of life evolved and was still predominant today.)
It's an interesting mental exercise.
It's an interesting mental exercise.
They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
Of course, the specific cultural practices would be different, since the European and indigenous cultures in the US would have been different than they were in Mexico and Brazil.
White landowners pretty much did what they liked: murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forced labor, mass-murder, destruction of whole villages, forced relocation, ...
Within living memory, indigenous people would have their property stolen or destroyed by Spanish-speaking thugs with no legal recourse, would be forced into labor, would be murdered or raped on a whim by wealthy landowners. Until recently, indigenous people were not allowed in some Mexican cities after dark and had essentially no political representation. Etc.
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By contrast, in the USA we just killed all of the indigenous people and took their land.
The difference is that in Mexico & Central America the whole economic system was based on a colonial overseer class who used indigenous labor to produce goods for export, whereas in the USA the economic system was originally based on European immigrant settlers farming their own plots of land (or in the US South, based on plantations worked by African slaves), and indigenous people were economically extraneous.
Never hear of that one, but reminds me of the North Carolina "Great Dismal Swamp maroons[0]"
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dismal_Swamp_maroons
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sidenote: They also bought people who knew how to cultivate indigo for dyes. This meant that indigo was the dye most-available for the continental army in 1775.
The eventual presence of large groups of west african laborers, combined with a tradition/economy of chattel slavery among the Carolina natives that predated the settlers to create a very economically effective slavery system that spread across the southern US.
The interesting part is that the gradient is self-sustaining and even self-exacerbating over time because it's based on perceived ancestry, and perceived "European ancestry" becomes a very real signal of privileged status. It's kinda ironic; it shows us that 'structural racism' and 'white privilege' can be very real social mechanisms, and what they actually look like on the ground, in a society where they've been around for many centuries! If you didn't know any better, you'd predict that SR and WP are concepts created by scholars in Latin-American Studies, to explain these societies (much like, say, the Clientelism concept was). The reality is somewhat different!
Also, American Indian tribes are not a monolith so the contrast would be interesting. Given the migration of some tribes, I would expect a lot more tribal wars.
Tenochtitlan alone was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time of the conquest (several hundred thousand people). There wasn't anything remotely similar in present-day US and Canada.
Another reason is that most Spanish colonists were single men whereas most English colonists of North America were families.
The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers.
It’s kind of like the difference between bison and cows. The former are economically extraneous so mostly got wiped out, whereas the latter are economically important domesticated slaves and therefore survive. (If this metaphor seems racist, note that throughout the Americas the ideology of ruling whites held that indigenous people were subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.)
This seems to be at odds with the fact that the US colonies (some of them, at least) imported African slaves. In theory, if they needed slave labor, why not make slaves out of the indigenous? Which leads me to believe that there's another distinction at play. I like umanwizard's explanation that the North America was settled by families whereas Central and South America were settled by single men. This would seem to jive with the genetic evidence from Central and South America that there is a high degree of admixture between Europeans and indigenous people, but that it is heavily skewed toward European males mating with indigenous females.
EDIT: Though now that I think about it, perhaps disease resistance in African slaves was an important factor in why they were preferred over indigenous.
It's a lot harder for an imported slave to run off than a local one. Local slave knows the land, knows where to run to, has a decent expectation that if they run there things will be better... An imported slave who runs doesn't really have that.
And where systems could be put in place to keep slaves from running, like the islands of the Caribbean? Well, those natives were worked to death, and then African slaves were imported to replace them. (And then more replacements came, because they were serious about that "working to death" thing)
South America also had a lot less colonists (Portugal only had 2 million people and tried to restrict emigration) they also received a lot more slaves (North America got <10% of the slave trade) which mixed with with the native population.
2. There is a critical density of population below which the indegenous people's claim on land in relinquished
3. A density of population below this was seen in North America before mass immigration of Europeans.
4. If it were not so the Settlers would have been culpable of genocide of the Natives
5. We know that 4 can't be true hence 3
If a particular group with a narrow territorial claim is wiped out by disease (that is, population density drops to 0), it seems like 2 should apply to that narrow territory.
It's not like each the native of the Americas asserted a territorial claim on all territories of the Americas. There were different groups with different, sometimes competing, claims, and each enforced those claims with military power or lost them. This was true both before and after European arrival.
I think everyone here agrees that genocides did occur, especially in North America and the Carribean, but is pointing out that the overwhelming majority of the native population decline was due to diseases that few people understood and none could effectively control.
I think the argument is that when all the Taino are dead from disease, it's not clear that any of, say, the Algonquins have a better claim to any of the lesser Antilles than the Spanish crown does.