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Comment by MockObject | Hacker News Reader

> It was much more convenient to declare the native Americans as barbarians with little culture & society and the land unused and open to be claimed by European settlers.

Wikipedia says:

"The loss of the population [due to disease] was so high that it was partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as "virgin wilderness". By the time significant European colonization was underway, native populations had already been reduced by 90%. This resulted in settlements vanishing and cultivated fields being abandoned. Since forests were recovering, the colonists had an impression of a land that was an untamed wilderness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

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Wouldnt some of this disease, if not all of it, be due to their introduction to european americans and in some cases, early versions of biological warfare like smallpox blankets?

Yes, though the diseases traveled much faster than the Europeans did, as Americans had their own trade routes. A whole century could have passed between Columbus’s first voyage and European contact with a tribe, but they would have been decimated centuries before contact. That’s plenty of time for forests to reclaim farmland.

This reminds me of Francisco de Orellana, the first European to navigate the Amazon. He returned to Spain with tales of a grand, prosperous civilization along the banks, saying that in weeks of sailing they didn't find a single stretch of shoreline unsettled, and that the people and the region were richer than any in all of Europe. Decades passed before there was another expedition, which found mostly rainforest and hunter-gatherers in a much regressed ("primitive") state, leading people to believe he was full of it. Now that the Amazon is being deforested to cultivate fodder for livestock, we are finding the remains of this indeed grand civilization, which Orellano probably destroyed by crop-dusting virulent disease throughout the interior of the continent.

Even more poignantly for Squanto, he returned to find his tribe decimated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto

Typically, infections traveled faster than Europeans, and most natives died before ever seeing one.

Neither side really understood what was happening.

The smallpox blanket warfare has very little historical evidence. It's also a far fetched thing to do centuries before germ theory.

And yet the phrase "merciless Indian Savages" is literally in the Declaration of Independance.

What exactly does that illustrate about settlements in North America?

Of course the Colonists knew that Native Americans existed. They interacted with them constantly.

That the United States saw Native Americans in the way that altacc described above, an "inferior" race whom Europeans had a God-given right to conquer and subdue.

I don't think anyone was arguing contrary to the idea that settlers had both the means and motive to conquer and subdue the natives.

Thomas Jefferson viewed them as equals and wanted to prevent white settlers from going west of the Mississippi and allow the native Americans to stop warring and enslaving each other, trade and develop schools etc . Perceptions changed later in the 19th century as did policies but the White Americans had been interacting with natives for 250 years by then . It’s not a monolithic attitude and it’s an oversimplification to say they were seen as inferior

How do you explain above reference to Jefferson including the phrase "merciless Indian savages" ... "whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions" into our nation's founding document? A lapse of Jefferson's magnanimity or did he just have a really low opinion of himself?

I'm talking about 1803-1808 Lewis and Clark expedition. He had aged 30 years and experienced new things. There's no need for sarcasm here we can just discuss things you know. It's not reddit.

In that period, Europeans and much of the world felt a God given right to conquer and subdue everyone else.

Europe had some of the nastiest religious wars of conquest they've seen. Christians were fighting each other. Christians and Muslims were fighting each other. Christians and Muslims were enslaving White slavics. African kingdoms were fighting and enslaving each other. African Kingdoms were just starting to export slaves to Europe. It was a nasty time for most of the world, and the treatment that the Native Americans got was no exception. However, they were in a specially poor position to defend themselves.

Many of the Great North American civilizations had just collapsed due to climate change, and shortly thereafter they were ravaged by new diseases that they had no immunity to.

I don't buy this at all. I used to live in Mexico and their native populations are very much alive, well, and fully a part of the national identity. The native populations are much much larger and it's nearly impossible to go anywhere at all without seeing it. As soon as you cross into the US there's no trace to be found unless you go to very specific places. You'd have to believe that disease somehow stopped at the post Mexican American war borders.

> I used to live in Mexico

México is not the US grassland, different geography, different groups, and therefore different consequences as the populations were wiped out by disease, infighting and war

Not to mention, simply because there still are a non trivial amount of indigenous groups, that doesn't mean that there didn't used to be even more variety that is now extinct

Have you heard of the Cocoliztli epidemics? Three massive waves of a still-unidentified disease resulting in 90+% depopulation of Mexica peoples in the 50 years following Spanish arrival. The reason there are native Mexica people (my own mitochondrial haplogroup is of the Aztec vintage, through my Mexican matrilineage) is because the Spaniards married (or, ahem, otherwise impregnated) native women. The chaste and Christian Anglo-Americans were virtuous enough to simply ethnically cleanse their Indigenous peoples.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics#/media/Fi...

One argument for the difference is that the Spanish were much more accustomed to ethno-cultural hybridization as the Reconquista had only ended right before 1492 or so

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