Comment by gucci-on-fleek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gucci-on-fleek | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm wondering what script the North American Indians

The Cherokee syllabary [0] and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics [1] are both scripts designed for use with North American indigenous languages, and both are still widely used (relative to the usage of indigenous languages in general).

> the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place

Well, history is complicated: it's certainly true that the vast majority of the colonizers were trying to ban the indigenous languages, but there have always been a few people working with the local groups to understand and develop their languages, even hundreds of years ago. And over the last 50 years or so, there's been lots of support for language preservation and education.

> and not been all but exterminated instead

I'm not sure if you're talking about the languages or the people here, but there are some 6 million Indigenous people [2] and 700k speakers of indigenous languages [3] [4] [5] in North America today, so I wouldn't quite call either "all but exterminated".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics

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

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada#/media/Fil...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...

Yes, my comment was a bit over the top. The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable. And I know there are always good people even when the dominant force is bad.

« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".

Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).

So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.

> The moreless catastrophic decline of their languages was perhaps unavoidable.

Yup, this is unfortunately the case. Colonization definitely made things vastly worse than they were before, but the modern world has become so connected that it's challenging for small languages to survive: young people want to read books, watch TV, and get an education, but it's hard to support all that in a language with only 50k speakers. Bilingualism helps a lot here, but if people can only use their languages to speak to their families, then they're less likely to teach it to their children.

For some further background, I took a class in a local indigenous language last year, so I know a tiny bit of one indigenous language [0], but that language has less than 10k speakers in total. Everyone is putting in a lot of work to preserve it, and it's universally taught in all the schools on the reservation, but unfortunately that's not even enough people to sustain a local newspaper. And to make matters worse, there are two other completely distinct indigenous languages spoken in the same city, so the indigenous people can only use English to speak to each other if they're from different tribes.

> I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".

To be fair, there are cases like the Beothuk [1], but that's a rarity.

Actually, before I had looked up the numbers, I had assumed that the populations were far larger than they actually are. It looks like that the US only has twice as many Indigenous people as Canada, yet 10× the overall population. I live in Canada, so I had assumed that the proportions were similar, so you're not the only one here who was surprised by the actual numbers :)

> Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization […] but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Canada has plenty of its own atrocities, but we've thankfully never done anything like that.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beothuk#Extinction

Thanks for your kind comment. When I briefly visited Vancouver (long time ago), my hosts took me to the museum where Indian art like large wooden eagles was exhibited (may have been moa.ubc.ca), and I learnt that they had a feast called Potlatch¹ where they gave away or destroyed everything they had.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

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