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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

Prior to western colonization of course the native people had conflicts, just not at the scale the colonizers could achieve. During the genocide of the natives some tribes used it as an excuse to kill their enemies, sometimes to curry favor with a technologically superior force, and sometimes just to kill their enemies. Some fought back against the invaders, with varying degrees of success. Most people just died.

None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.

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> None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans

No that's exactly what it makes it, as their conflicts subtract from those with newer arrivals. Different groups fighting each other, and then other different groups from Europe came, and made allegiances with specific local groups, then collaborated in their conflicts.

It's worth understanding that 'western colonization' wasn't a singular coherent force. There were different foreign groups with different interests - who were fighting with each other in North America.

Similarly there were 'Native Americans' (quotes as this is a colonial term) pursuing their own interests, even going to Europe. I'm not sure it's your perspective but there is a popular historic image of native americans being a defenceless people who foreigners came and wiped out which simply isn't correct, and ironically quite colonial.

There were plenty of regional wars among the native Americans. None of them resulted in widespread genocide and construction of concentration camps and reservations. In the initial Spanish 'not western colonization' nearly 8 million people died. By the 1900s there was nearly an 80% reduction in population and western populations were in possession of their resources.

Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory. What else do you call that?

None of what you said refutes my first point. All your points are valid, just missing broader context. 'Native American' history didn't begin when Europeans arrived. Seems to all boil down to, people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B, while ignoring everything else that occurred with people A - who by the way are only viewed as A by people B.

> people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B

In this case, people A are responsible for most of the demise of people B, surely. I don't deny that history education should be improved on these matters, instead of choosing a villain and a victim, but your view is not much better.

no that's simply not correct or backed up by any historical data. as the saying goes "it's easy to fool someone but hard to convince someone they've been fooled"

Perhaps you should qualify your claims, because disease and war by Europeans to the indigenous peoples had a significant death toll and negative impact (e.g. forced migration or cultural reeducation).

> Western nations came, they defeated their enemy, and they took their territory.

The various tribes also engaged in near constant warfare with each other, defeating them, taking their territory, and making the rest slaves. Cortez was only able to defeat the Aztecs because he was able to enlist the aid of the non-Aztec tribes, who hated the Aztecs because of the depredations of Aztecs against them.

The Inca empire was only recently formed before the Spanish arrived.

In North America, the Commanche carved out an empire in the south at the expense of the tribes that had been living there. See "Empire of the Summer Moon":

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful...

Can one not say that both the tribes and the Westerners committed atrocities? I think most people in this thread who agree with the latter group would be willing to include the former group. And you are ignoring the relative scales.

Yes, there was plenty of bad behavior on both sides.

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