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Comment by kridsdale1 | Hacker News Reader

This applies to most of the American lore about “Indians” as well. The people that nearly all European descent settlers encountered were many generations on from an utter cataclysm of continental plagues that nearly eradicated them, and certainly destroyed what advanced civilization they had pre-Columbus.

The white people didn’t know they were devastating the native Americans, but they were super off-base to judge them as savages when it’s far more accurate to say that the natives who did contact and conflict with the young USA and Canada were more like post-nuclear-holocaust survivors.

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I've been reading Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen recently, I picked it up now that it is available as a paperback. The history is fascinating and I highly recommend it with the note that I'm ~1/3 of the way through.

Early on in the book he describes the rise of Cahokia and other Mississippian societies in America as tied to the climate in the medieval warm period. And how during the Little Ice age the priestly class could not create good conditions for agriculture, which undermined their power at a time when crops were failing and hunting became a dominant food source.

Fascinating.

Check out https://www.sidis.net/TSContents.htm

I initially came across this book due to a Reddit post about the author being a failed child prodigy. My first thought on seeing the table of contents was "damn, this book sounds racist". But it's actually a series of historical accounts in support of Native Americans and their history.

This looks... dubious. The starting point postulating that America was populated by people from the lost continent of Atlantis does not inspire confidence in this account's historical accuracy:

> An origin as a race in some specific place is more probable―most likely, in some region now under the Atlantic Ocean. ... A red-race civilization certainly developed around the north central Atlantic region on both sides of the ocean, and the geographical center of this was in what is now the Sargasso sea, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, but where tradition on both sides of the ocean places the lost continent of Atlantis.

> super off-base to judge them as savages

If they didn't have the weapons (and immunity) to fight them off, they were going to judge them like that no matter what. I seem to recall the story of the Spanish finding Tenochtitlan at its peak, and then destroying it.

> The white people didn’t know they were devastating the native Americans, but they were super off-base to judge them as savages when it’s far more accurate to say that the natives who did contact and conflict with the young USA and Canada were more like post-nuclear-holocaust survivors.

Odds are good they knew (thanksgiving is literally foundational american history, but the Wampanoag were near ended by the end of the century).

But “they’re just savages” makes it much easier to genocide them and steal their land than “they’re survivors of a civilisational collapse”. The US put significant effort in extirpating the tribes from their homelands and exterminating them, this labor was considered so important even the civil war did not stop it (the Long Walk of the Navajos started around the same time as the Siege of Atlanta and the displacement / forced marchs policy outlasted the civil war, the california genocide was basically an ongoing policy from the mid 1840s to the end of the boarding schools and eugenic policies — though most of the direct killing had been achieved by the turn of the century, …).

> civilisational collapse

This almost implies that their civilisation failed of its own accord, rather than it collapsing because 90% of the population were wiped out by introduced plagues/epidemics.

There was a major collapse in North America before the arrival of the Europeans. Cahokia, for example, was abandoned before Columbus ever set sail.

The diseases hit an already traumatized population.

It's important not to leave out the fact the warfare was two-way. I mean this in an extramoral sense, not taking one "side" or another. It's just too easy to fall into the "settlers exterminating natives because they're in the way" narrative, when that's not what happened.

> It's important not to leave out the fact the warfare was two-way.

I’m pretty sure the Navajos did not send settlers and army on death marches. Nor did the tribes start massive programs of sterilisation, or child removal and cultural destruction. The US did that. The settlers did that. The first governor of California literally stated:

> a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the indian race becomes extinct

Because settlers wanted the place, and natives were in the way. Or could be used for forced labour (see: Act for the Government and Protection of Indians 1850)

> It's just too easy to fall into the "settlers exterminating natives because they're in the way" narrative, when that's not what happened.

Isn’t it? Settlers took over land, and when tribes got inconvenient settlers moved to extermination and called in the army.

The US made a bunch of empty treaties and broke them just as fast, doing nothing or even encouraging the destruction of the lifestyle of numerous tribes.

> The first governor of California literally stated:

Yes, "between the races", not "against the Indians." Because in his eyes, at least some natives were as intent on driving them out as he was them.

> when tribes got inconvenient settlers moved to extermination

To be clear, "inconvenient" usually involved native conducting raids, massacres, rape, and enslavement. Of course, had the settlers not been settling their land, this would not have happened. But I don't think anyone today would see this as an acceptable response to migration. (And it wasn't, solely, the same sorts of low-level clashes were quite normal even before Europeans, who injected themselves into it.)

As a more extreme example, there's great books written about the Comanche empire. Indeed, if people had really seen things this way at the time, there wouldn't have been large numbers of natives assimilating into settler culture, nor would natives have allied with settlers against other natives continually even through the 1800s, when nobody could have argued that how the Americans would behave was unknown. "The settlers broke treaties" is true, but it's also true that natives broke treaties or made treaties that they had no authority to make in the first place, resulting in all sorts of disasters. The story of colonialist expansion in the US is not good vs evil.

Was it just migration or taking/stealing land that? If immigrants (or anyone else) today started building a town on some farmer's land violence would occur one way or another. Maybe the land was purchased from the native Americans and I just don't know it?

> Yes, "between the races", not "against the Indians." Because in his eyes, at least some natives were as intent on driving them out as he was them.

An assertion borne by absolutely nothing at best, and made as the US had just conquered the state and were looking to "pacify" it and fill it with settlers, made by the then holder of ultimate power in the state. Making up "some natives" is clearly equivalent, go off queen.

> To be clear, "inconvenient" usually involved native conducting raids, massacres, rape, and enslavement.

Something the settlers also did routinely and extensively, but hey without an army it apparently doesn't matter.

> But I don't think anyone today would see this as an acceptable response to migration.

People seem to be reacting pretty favourably to Ukraine's response to the current russian "migration".

> The story of colonialist expansion in the US is not good vs evil.

You certainly seem very intent on justifying it through claims that the natives were not innocent so it was OK.

Nowhere did I say or suggest it was OK. I don't find looking at the past through a moralistic lens helps me understand it.

> People seem to be reacting pretty favourably to Ukraine's response to the current russian "migration".

The colonization of America much more closely resembled mass migration and then subsequent cultural conflicts than it did Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It didn't really resemble the latter at all.

> An assertion borne by absolutely nothing at best, and made as the US had just conquered the state and were looking to "pacify" it and fill it with settlers, made by the then holder of ultimate power in the state.

If you mean "conquering" California, you mean taking it from Mexico after the Mexican-American wars, California had already been subject to colonization efforts for almost a hundred years, but even so, I don't think speaking of the US federal government or the state government as "the holder of ultimate power" makes sense. Most people for a long time lived effectively free from any state control.

I mentioned the Comanche - it might be interesting to note that Comanche peaked in power just a decade prior to his term as governor, and they were in every meaningful sense militarily superior to the Americans, Mexicans, and surrounding native groups. They did not have a presence in California, but they're a good counterexample to the idea that natives just couldn't resist settlers - they rapidly acquired guns, horses, and often frankly superior skill in using them, which was frequently exercised. There's no doubt that settler encroachment and fundamentally incompatible ideas of civilization resulted in the pushing out and near-extinction of independent native communities, but it was by no means a sure, given thing. If native groups had united against the settlers and decided to get rid of them, they would have been wiped out.

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