I think the Spaniards (or Iberians), given their religion, were way more accepting of other peoples and readily mixed --which is why you end up with so many meztizos in LAm --whereas initial NA settlers were less likely to reproduce with FN peoples.
Ah, but the official mythology is that they used every part.
Sure. They herded massive groups of buffalo off buffalo jumps, which are essentially small cliffs, so that they'd fall and crush each other when they went off the edge, and they'd use every part of all of the hundreds of full-grown buffalo they killed.
But everyone knows the White Man invented waste. Thus it was, thus it must ever be.
But I'm open to the idea if you have more than just hand-waving to offer.
I, for one, disagree with the idea that the "buffalo jump" was all that prevalent and had a measurable impact, compared to the whites driving the buffalos to what they are now....
I lived next to one. Try again.
So? That doesn't make it "prevalent", and even less makes it important next to white era's extinction of buffalo.
The only thing "I lived next to one" proves is that at least one existed. And we knew that already -- we also knew a lot more than one existed.
I am not.
No, he just took it 3-4 orders of magnitude higher.
(And even as a white man, I see some racism in your comment).
In total over time, maybe. However, it is pretty clear who got the number of bison to less than 600 in the 19th century.
>Truth is that American's ancestors where quite genocidal among other things. To the point of almost exterminating most of North America's population. Just like the Buffalo.
If the point about the buffalo is correct, then how does this post otherwise misrepresent Native Americans? It seems like you latched onto this mention of buffalo to make a completely unrelated point about Native Americans.
Of course they are.
We shouldn't use this to neutralize who did the really horrible things to whom though. They were the victims here.
The disease hypothesis is bullshit. Some retard wrote a silly book about it and nytimes pushed it like it was gospel.
The royal proclamation of 1763 set the border between the colonists and the indians at the appalachian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
Even after disease supposedly wiped out the indians, we could only push the indians past the appalachians in the 1760s.
Settlers were paid for each indian scalp they got. Indian men, women and children were hunted and slaughtered wholesale.
Idiots like Jared Diamond might try to absolve our sins by lying about how the indians died. But the truth of how the west was won is no so convenient. It was brutal and rapacious.
I mean, we didn't even push the natives past the appalachian mountains until the 1760s and that idiot jared diamond wants us to believe the natives essentially died off in the 1500s.
Do you have any sources for that. The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
Yes, it called history and biology. Disease doesn't work that way and history proves it didn't work that way.
> The hypothesis that disease was primarily responsible for wiping out Native Americans is far older than Jared Diamond's book.
Sure, but jared diamond's silly book is what made it mainstream. No serious historian takes that theory serious because science and history says that didn't happen.
> It wouldn't have been possible for white colonists to completely destroy Native American civilization if smallpox hadn't devastated them first--there were just too many of them.
North American civilization didn't get completely destroyed until well after the civil war when mass european migration and the invention of machine guns, the expansion of railroads, etc gave american settlers a huge advantage.
> Just look at the population of white settlers at the time. The number of Native American murders committed per settler you're proposing are simply too high to be plausible.
And like I said, the border that the colonists and the indians drew in 1763 was the appalachian mountains. The colonists were confined to a tiny sliver of land on the eastern seaboard. If disease wiped out the natives, why would the colonists take so little land? Why would the border between "america" and indian lands be divided in such a manner.
The modern day Inuit are descendants of conquerors in exactly the same way that descendants of European settlers are.
Highly doubtful. The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.
Not to mention that these dorset was a tiny population already in significant decline.
There is a world of difference between the inuits and dorsets. Hell the norse and europeans were in contact with dorset long before the inuit. Perhaps it was european "disease" or raids that wipe them out...
Nobody really knows. But what we know is that they were a dying peoples long before the inuits came around.
It's simply not plausible that such a widely dispersed culture would disappear in such a short time due to climate change.
Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N. America, where the Thule were expanding from, rather than the East, where they would have first had contact with the Norse. Competition from an invasive culture, the Thule, is the likely cause.
Absolutely. But lets also not pretend that the natives were racially motivated genocidal maniacs either.
> The Comanche formed a barrier between the Spanish and the French/British Americans through most of the 1800s, and they did this by subjugating the other tribes around them and by maintaining a war-like stance at all times.
Sure. But they need to do so in order to survive. And lets not forget that we hunted the comanche like animals and wiped them out. Settlers were encouraged to hunt indians and bring their scalps in exchange of money.
> There was simply no way that they could co-exist with a European culture.
Even if they were the most peaceful buddhists, they would have been wiped out. We wanted their land and they simply had no choice. It's pretty idiotic to blame the comanches for fighting back.
> It's very easy to sit here with our 21st century morality and say what we did was wrong, but we have no idea the kind of hardship that people on both sides were living through and trying to make a life for themselves.
It was wrong no matter what century you are in.
> We simply don't have the context to judge them.
If you think hunting indian men, women and children and killing them and selling their scalps for money gives you no context for judgment, then there is something wrong with you.
What happened to the natives was the greatest extermination campaign in history. The holocaust was a joke compared to what happened to the natives.
To emphasize this point, there are more jews in the US than there are natives...
All the rest are good points, but this is an emotional non-sequitur. The reason we don't have context to judge is because we live lives of comfort today, we have no idea what it was like to move into the Wild West and the danger and hardship that entailed.
Of course I agree genocide is bad, that doesn't make me equipped to judge people who lived 200 years ago based on hazy historical generalities.