Hacker News Reader

Comment by t1E9mE7JTRjf | Hacker News Reader

you seem used to issuing commands. best of luck with that approach. your cherry picked data points may be correct, but they are also misleading absent broader historical context. these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period), so your subsequent points about x/y/z impact although valid don't carry weight. imo data driven arguments trump emotional appeals. Trail of tears and similar are powerful and empathy inducing for sure, but don't change the facts around which my comment was based. your presentation skews things to a false dichotomy of one group against another which is inaccurate and unproductive. current politicians (left or right) in the US don't change history (and no I didn't bother reading your nytimes link...).

> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.

sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.

View on HN

> these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period

this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better

I'm not sure what the GP is referencing specifically (the colonization of the Americas took hundreds of years on two continents after all) but we've got enough archaeological evidence to know that many indigenous cultures were in decline by the time the Spaniards first visited, and many entered a second decline after first contact but before they were conquered or fully economically exploited.

For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_shatter_zone

yeah, a fun fact about most locations in the world is that you can find a civilization that used to exist there and doesn't anymore

I’m talking about a specific civilization’s rise and fall and what that looked like relative to the history of colonization.

You can come up with all the juvenile “fun facts” you want but what’s the point if you’re not actually going to say anything to add to the conversation?

> how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there?

is this a serious question? what defines history as a subject is precisely that it is not the present.

Genocide is bad even if the victims are imperfect human beings

For that matter, who can be said to be perfect?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com