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Comment by altacc | Hacker News Reader

I've read a bit around this topic and a rather plausible explanation is that in North America, the European settler mentality was that the north was all empty land. Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of ownership of the land. 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. Inaccurate societal tropes about native Americans still persist today and education about their history is still lacking.

South America was more populated but also the European tactic was of conquest of the natives, not total eradication & displacement (although they did an effective job at those as well).

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> 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...

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.

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 think anyone was arguing contrary to the idea that settlers had both the means and motive to conquer and subdue the natives.

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

>Acknowledging the presence of native American towns, cities, farmlands, etc... would have brought up the inconvenient subject of ownership of the land.

I am highly skeptical of these types of sentiments. They are simply projections of modern sensibilities to the period of European settlement.

At the time, might by right was the default in Europe, with near constant wars of conquest. outside of Europe, entire islands in the Caribbean were enslaved and depopulated.

Given this context, I don't think information about Native American towns was suppressed to protect the delicate sensibilities of the settlers.

Then why in every case did they need to portray locals as barbarians when they knew the opposite was true?

Groups of humans have denigrated others and felt better than outsiders since the dawn of History.

We still do it today to different societies despite the fact that they can build rocket ships and nuclear reactors.

Humans have a inclination too think that their in group is superior to others

> Groups of humans have denigrated others and felt better than outsiders since the dawn of History.

Well yes they have. That doesn't answer my question about the need or motivation for doing this.

> We still do it today to different societies

That's true, but disagrees with the original comment's claim: "They are simply projections of modern sensibilities to the period of European settlement."

> Humans have a inclination too think that their in group is superior to others

Yes, that's the dictionary definition of racism. The result of which is often justification to oppress the "inferior" group.

> 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.

I went to a US public school in the South and also went to a private school. We spent most semesters of history learning about Native American civilizations, construction, and at one point had to build small-scale physical replicas of their cities.

That's to say, I don't really buy your explanation for the broader US. Maybe specific pockets. What I do think is more likely is that people believe that warring kingdoms were still normal back then and view Native American tribes as just that - kingdoms that were conquered. That much I can live with, but the constant lying and taking back promises we made to the Native Americans is absolute trash and should be rectified.

Cities, yeah? Big ones? I know of mesoamerican cities like Tenochtitlan but I am unaware of any north american Indian cities (to be fair, I'm not from the USA), so some pointers would be very welcome indeed.

Here are two:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cahokia-mounds-state-histor...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Histo...

The first is debatable as it's city-ness. But that is an eye-opener! The second, wow! Thanks. I guess the scale both indicate a large social structure.

I heard a podcast about this I forget which one but they said basically that corn was slowly developing and spreading north but it was not developed to support large civilizations like it did in the central and South America. Had Europeans not come for another 100-200 years I think it would have adapted to northern latitudes and the base for large populations and large cities would have been there. Yes the natives had corn in the north but it was a strain with very few kernels compared to what was being grown in central Mexico. I can’t recall the details but that’s the gist . I think they said only one million natives existed in the continental US when colonists first landed too

Someone already mentioned Chaco, but I'd like to point you at the Puebloans more widely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puebloans

I was aware of the people but I thought they just lived in caves and didn't know of their buildings. Great stuff, thanks.

"1491" is a most fantastic book about all of this.

There was an article written by the author of 1491 in the Atlantic that is a great abbreviated version of the book for anyone interested:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/30...

Relevant to this question is the story of Cortez and his pigs. Spain immediately set up shop in South America, giving us plenty of stories of vast civilizations, but Cortez made just one minor expedition across Florida and did report large cities, but only the pigs and their disease stayed behind.

And in the north, nothing can go much earlier than the last time glaciers ground everything to dust.

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