Native American names extend earthquake history of northeastern North America
phys.org
phys.org
https://www.klamathtribesnews.org/2024/04/01/crater-lake-and...
I wouldn't totally rule it out, but the basis for this claim is very, very thin.
There are several other problems with the story that should make you suspicious:
- There are several "tells" that if this is even a real story it has been heavily edited. Neither of the links provides a reliable narrative from an indigenous source. Also note that the "klamathtribenews" link says there are many stories about how it was formed but only tells us the one that we want to hear.
- One of the articles claims the same people has occupied the area for 13k years. This is extremely unlikely, has little evidence backing it, and suggests the story is being used as part of the political justification for territorial claims.
Meanwhile, we know peoples from other areas were perfectly capable of coming to a new area, then making inferences and drawing conclusions about what they saw geographically - we have lots of examples of the Greeks doing this, for example. The ideas behind geology didn't spring out of a vacuum in the 1800s. Anyone who understands the idea behind "volcano" would have also understood why a crater lake existed, even if they had never seen that eruption.
You believe it based on your own (very mainstream) biases of “primitive” cultures. There is no evidence of your position, it’s a fantasy you have wrapped around something you don’t understand or appreciate.
> You believe it based on your own (very mainstream) biases of “primitive” cultures.
Usually I have been accused of precisely the opposite, particularly in this case, where I commonly assert that people hugely underestimate the technological and social capacity of Native Americans, particularly in North America. If anything, I am suggesting you are underestimating the peoples in the area by suggesting they could not have applied their understanding of natural processes to understand a past event they did not personally witness.
> , it’s a fantasy you have wrapped around something you don’t understand or appreciate.
I understand perfectly well. But when people make absurd claims like "our people have been here for 13k years", this is a religious claim, not a historical claim (it would be an absurd one), and you should understand when I take what you say alongside that with a huge grain of salt.
https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/inui...
Much of the US builds to very high seismic standards by global standards due to lessons paid in blood but there are still unknowns in regions like New England and a lot of construction that is not particularly seismic resistant.
Wood frame houses, even flimsy ones, are less deadly in an earthquake even if they do collapse.
Structurally speaking, concrete and wood clearly have their place, bricks just seem like a worse concrete to me.
If clay bricks are plentiful and cheaper in an area, then clay bricks tend to be used.
If dimensional lumber is plentiful and cheaper, then dimensional lumber tends to be used.
Same with concrete, or steel, or whatever. It varies regionally because the availability and cost of resources also vary regionally.
In my travels to other factories in the Southern parts of the US, we encounter the opposite problem. Brick shops are almost always too hot despite reasonable ventilation and climate control measures. There is definitely something to be said about where the structure in is the world when it comes to choosing appropriate building materials.
Growing up in Connecticut, you think you're relatively safe from earthquakes... until you read about the folklore around Moodus and other seismic hot sites, from Natives and from colonists, and then you get a little bit scared...
Different tribes would call same features by different names, such as the many names for Mt Rainier and Mt Denali. It's not a colonialism thing, it's a people thing.
A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.
Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we’ve already renewed?
And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.
And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions.
Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
And the United States has established embassies and consulates all over the world. We're founding members of the U.N.; we're on the Security Council. We send humanitarian missions all over the place. Surely you cannot argue, with a straight face, that "peace and diplomacy" have not built the society we enjoy today?
Peace and diplomacy are not in a vacuum for us, certainly -- there have been wars; there has been espionage; there have been terrorist attacks. But peace and diplomacy are the primary way, and a more excellent way, and they are avenues that will always be explored and exhausted before violence takes over.
It's a certainty. The tribes were well armed for good reason. The Inca had an army before Pizzaro arrived. Cortez allied with neighboring tribes to go after the Aztecs, as those tribes very much wanted to destroy the Aztecs for their depradations. The warrior culture in N America was very well developed. The Commanche carved out their own empire in the Texas area before the Spanish arrived. They did not learn how to fight from the Spanish, it was the other way around.
What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
this is well documented, lots of settlements failed due to very simple mistakes and infighting
at one point an english settlement lead by john smith actually raided natives out of desperation and many starved when they were cut off in response
Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.
OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.