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Comment by curious_cat_163 | Hacker News Reader

>Now, a big portion of the descendants of native Europeans who arrived in the last 400 years are wanting to build a wall in the middle of Americas.

As they should. Ask Native Americans how well "illegal" immigration worked out for them.

I wonder if there were leftist Native Americans back in the day repeating the same lines we hear today:

"Diversity is strength! Bringing in more White men will only make us stronger!"

"Look at all those doctors and lawyers!"

"It'll be great! French food wagons on every corner!"

Native Americans built walls, too. Physical walls, https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/june/wall-maya-trump.html, and complex political geographies (i.e. imaginary walls), https://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0206/aztec1of2.html In both cases colonizers often built their political systems atop these preexisting walls.

Many of the durable political geographies in the continental United States and Canada seemed to have collapsed (physically and figuratively) as a consequence of introduced diseases before colonizers had a chance to co-opt them, or even recognize their existence. AFAIU, this is partly why American (U.S.) culture developed a narrative of Native Americans as wild and free, savage and innocent. (Though we tend to emphasize the latter--free and innocent--these days.) They absolutely did co-opt political and cultural affinities, though, just as colonizers did elsewhere in the Americas (e.g. Mayans vs Aztecs).

We say that disease wiped out the natives in the US, but as soon as you get into Mexico there are native populations integrated into every part of society in every city across Mexico with their cultures alive and well. I lived in Mexico City for a while and everything from the food to the art/crafts, clothing is heavily influenced by the native cultures.

AFAIU, one of the most important differences is that the English were never particularly interested in assimilation, religious conversion, or even "conquering" native societies as such. The process of colonization was relatively decentralized and diffuse, and the colonizers had very little interest in the native peoples beyond figuring out how to push them ever further west. Alot of Native American culture in the U.S. simply evaporated over time as tribes were forcibly dislocated over and over.

By contrast Spanish colonization heavily emphasized integration and assimilation of native societies into the empire. Spanish colonization and Catholicization were two sides of the same coin. This had the effect of directly and indirectly preserving much of the culture, at least of those nations which were assimilated.

I'm less familiar with Portuguese colonization, but I'm guessing it proceeded more like English colonization. That's probably why the vast majority of slaves were brought to the Americas by the English/Americans and the Portuguese. This is true in absolute terms (about 3.5 million and 6 million respectively, out of a total of 12 million, AFAIU), but particularly in relative terms--the Spanish brought over only about 1 million slaves despite having massively more territory. (For the relatively tiny amount of land cultivated by slaves, France brought over 1 million.)

You make it sound very passive, as if the native population in the US just up and died. In California, they were paying a bounty for each native scalp collected: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/-

It is your belief that ancient native Americans were accepting of other tribes moving into their territory?

Walls are nothing new to human history - the first parts of the Great Wall of China were built ~2600 years ago.

Kind of like how walls were used around city states in Mesopotamia? Or how there was a wall created in China? [1] has some discussion on walls being used for defense in each of those areas.

I'm in no way an expert on history, but it seems that walled city states developed in many areas independently. People seem to generalize or abstract ideas, so if you have a city state, why not think bigger and have a nation state? From what I understand, again no expert, modern nation state borders are something that came from Europe [2], but a Sumerian king was the first to use a wall to mark a "national (rather than private) boundary"[1].

Walling off areas is in no way a uniquely European concept.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/wall/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty

You might enjoy this series on the history of city fortifications

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...

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